Imagine opening your kid's Class 12 history book…
and finding that the man who shot Mahatma Gandhi has quietly lost his identity.
No Brahmin. No Pune. No editor of a Hindu extremist newspaper.
Just… "Nathuram Godse."
That's the storm Tushar Gandhi — Bapu's own great-grandson — is calling out. And it's bigger than one line in one textbook.
The NCERT calls it a "rationalisation process." A 30% syllabus cut to help post-Covid kids breathe.
Critics call it something else: a quiet edit of India's uncomfortable memories.
The deletions in question:
The old textbook said Gandhi's death had an "almost magical effect" — partition violence subsided, hate-spreading organisations were cracked down on, the RSS was banned.
That entire passage?
Silently deleted. Not even listed in the official "rationalised content" note from last June.
NCERT's director shrugged it off as a possible "oversight."
Tushar Gandhi wasn't buying it.
👉 "It's not at all surprising that NCERT has specifically deleted references where the Sangh could be implicated in Bapu's murder."
This isn't a one-party sin.
🔸 In the 1960s, Congress-era ministers commissioned a new "secular, anti-colonial" history — critics say it tilted Marxist.
🔸 In 2008, UPA quietly swapped a book on Gautam Buddha for Nehru's Discovery of India in the Class 8 Hindi syllabus.
🔸 Under Vajpayee, books by Romila Thapar and R.S. Sharma were gutted for alleged "anti-Hindu bias."
🔸 Under Modi, "Anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat" became just… "Gujarat riots."
Every government edits the mirror. Only the reflection changes.
Because textbooks aren't just books.
They're the first draft of what an entire generation believes is true.
Former NCERT director Krishna Kumar warned that some remaining chapters are now "incomprehensible" — kids learning about the Constitution without understanding India's federal structure.
250 historians signed a joint protest. The Indian History Congress called it "antithetical to a modern progressive society."
And somewhere in a classroom right now, a 17-year-old is reading that Gandhi was shot by "a young man."
Just a young man.
No motive. No ideology. No context.
That blank space is the whole story.
That's all for now!
