NCERT Textbooks Row: Should Courts Need To Step In To Save The Day?

The Supreme Court recently took suo moto cognisance of a chapter on “The Role of the Judiciary in our Society” in the social science textbook for Grade 8, Part 2, titled “Exploring Society: India and Beyond”, published in February 2026, by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The chapter contained a section on “Corruption in the Judiciary” and, all in all, presented a very lopsided perspective on the Indian judiciary, mentioning nothing of its role in safeguarding and operationalising the Constitution of India, protecting fundamental rights, constitutional morality and basic structure and facilitating access to justice to citizens, and instead focusing exclusively on the ills plaguing the justice system and the challenges faced by it. The chapter made prominent reference to hundreds of complaints received against the judiciary, but said nothing of action taken on those complaints, suggesting by innuendo that no action was taken. The chapter also quoted a few words from the statement of a former Chief Justice of India (CJI) suggesting that the judiciary itself has acknowledged the lack of transparency, accountability and institutional corruption. The bench of the Supreme Court led by the CJI, which is hearing this case, did not find the failure to mention the contributions of the Indian judiciary and the exaggeration of its failings to be innocent or genuine, and saw in it a ‘discernible underlying agenda’.

Some observations in the court’s order are very relevant in the context of this article. The order notes that the necessity for judicial intervention arose from “the imperative to safeguard the pedagogical integrity of the national curriculum. Young students in their formative years are only beginning to navigate the nuances of public life... It is fundamentally improper to expose them to a biased narrative that may engender permanent misconceptions...” “Embedding such decontextualized text within a nationwide middle school curriculum”, the court found, “is to bypass the safeguards of balanced education”. By its orders passed on February 26 and March 11, 2026, the court imposed a ban on further dissemination of the textbook, and has constituted a committee of domain experts to oversee and approve the rewriting of the chapter on the judiciary in this textbook.

While Part 2 of the said textbook has been withdrawn from publication pursuant to orders of the Court, a closer look at Part 1 of the same textbook as well as the social science textbook for Grade 7 in the previous edition, which covered the same topics in previous years, reveals that the lopsided perspective motivated by an underlying agenda, at which the court took umbrage, extends to other chapters as well. A comparison with the previous edition of the social science textbook shows a marked departure in the new edition from previous years. The narrative now focuses attention and exaggerates the importance of communal conflict. Historical incidents are deliberately painted in a communal colour, with repeated emphasis on the religion of individual rulers, of the victor and the vanquished in wars, and of particular dynasties.

The chapter on medieval Indian history, defined in the textbook as the history of the period from the 11th to the 17th century AD, begins with “A note on history’s darker periods” that talks about how during certain periods of history, corrupt or cruel rulers inflicted suffering and misery on the whole society through war, abuse, fanaticism and bloodshed. While the previous edition focused on revenue administration, taxation and military organisation introduced under the Khiljis and Tughlaqs, the new edition deals with the entire 300 years of the Delhi Sultanate through a cursory note on plunder, forced conversions, attacks on ‘Hindu centres’, destruction of Hindu temples and iconoclasm by ‘invaders from beyond the Hindu Kush’. The chapter then moves on to the resilience and bravery of native rulers who put up a stiff resistance to the Delhi Sultanate.

A comparison between the history of the Mughals given in the previous edition and the new edition shows a similar trend. A balanced, neutral account of the Mughal rulers, their military campaigns and their alliances with the Rajputs has been replaced by an account of the loot, plunder, forced conversions to Islam, destruction of Hindu temples, killing of Hindu men and enslavement of women and children by the Mughal kings. Emphasis is placed on the brutality and ruthlessness of Babur, where he is described to 13-year-old readers as “slaughtering entire populations of cities, enslaving women and children, and taking pride in erecting ‘towers of skulls’ made from the slaughtered people of plundered cities”. Akbar, who was described in earlier textbooks as a secular ruler who abolished jaziya (religious tax on non-Muslims) and promoted religious exchange and synthesis, is now described as having ordered the massacre of 30,000 civilians, and having enslaved the surviving women and children with the object of defeating ‘the infidels’ and establishing Islam. His message of victory is reproduced, where he is stated to have proclaimed that he has “erased the signs of infidelity from their [the infidel’s] minds and have destroyed temples in those places and also all over Hindustan” “with the help of our bloodthirsty sword”. The practice of jauhar (ritual mass suicide by self-immolation) by Rajput women is glorified as being “a heroic act of final resistance and a means of preserving one’s honour”. Aurangzeb is recorded as having ordered governors of all his provinces “to demolish schools and temples of the infidels and put down their teachings and religious practices”. It is said that during his reign, “temples at Banaras, Mathura, Somnath, among many others, were destroyed, as well as Jain temples and Sikh gurudwaras”.

Two special modules have been introduced titled, “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day.” It is stated that a large number of families were forced to convert to Islam during the Partition. The textbook goes on to say that the “long term losses of the Partition are still ongoing as even though a separate country has been created for Muslims, about 3.5 crore Muslims did not shift to Pakistan and continued to stay here”. The textbook further tells the young readers that Pakistan was demanded and created for all Indian Muslims and the entire calculation, political and territorial, was based on that assumption, but since that did not materialise because crores of Muslims remained in India, communal politics did not end and India continues to face both external aggression and internal fragmentation.

Another chapter of the new Grade 7 social science textbook introduces the concept of “sacredness” in connection with geography and sets out the religious practices and legends of Hindu mythology associated with certain sites, rivers and hills that render these places sacred to the Hindus, such as the char dhams, 51 shakti pithas and the 12 jyotirlingas. Even more problematically, the chapter focuses on Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism, informing the 12-year-old reader that these are religions that originated in India and whose sacred places are in India, and cursorily distinguishes Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Judaism as religions that originated outside India.

The Supreme Court has already taken cognisance of the fact that omission to mention the positives and exclusively highlighting the negatives, focusing on a small part to give the impression that it is the whole, taking a stray incident or statement out of context to create a narrative, and failure to present a balanced and complete picture can, and does suggest, a discernible underlying agenda, and the pedagogical suitability of textbooks prepared in this manner can be examined by the Court “to safeguard the pedagogical integrity of the national curriculum”.

It is clear that the other chapters of this textbook and other social science textbooks prepared and prescribed by the NCERT recently are similarly motivated and agenda-driven, undermining constitutional values such as fraternity, pluralism and secularism, and run contrary to the directive principles of promoting progressive thinking and development of scientific temperament. The path has already been marked by the court: withdrawing the new/proposed textbooks from further publication and distribution, and constituting committees of domain experts to rewrite these textbooks under the supervision of a court-appointed overseer. There is a pressing need to apply the same model across the board to the new NCERT textbooks of all subjects for all grades. This was, in fact, suggested during the hearing, and given that the matter is still pending, there is a possibility that the court may consider expanding the scope of the proceedings as the hearing progresses.

While traditionally, the court does not sit in judicial review of the finer issues of pedagogy and academic policy, when the politics of the day seeks to bring its divisive agenda to the classroom and poison the minds of future generations with propaganda, only the court can intervene to preserve our constitutional values. It is with this hope that we now look towards the Supreme Court.

(Views expressed are personal)

Saiyyad Mohammad Nizamuddin Pasha is a Delhi-based lawyer