Indian government accused of rewriting history through schoolbook changes

In India, schoolteachers and pupils alike are grappling with the Hindu nationalist government’s rewriting and sanitising of textbooks. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has extensively revised secondary school curricula, removing all mention of the country’s Mughal and Muslim history, which spanned some six centuries, as well as the identity of the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi and even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Officially, the aim of the changes was to lighten the workload for pupils after the two-year closure of schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the reform has been criticised by a number of Indian historians and scientists. Our correspondents report.