Textbook case of media pressure

IN Media Practice | 08/04/2013

The flip-flops of Pakistan’s Punjab government on the revision of the Urdu textbook of class 10 brought contrary reactions from the Pakistan media: the Jang group opposed the removal of ‘Islamic subjects’, the Dawn and the Express groups gently disapproved the restoration of old pro-Islamic chapters while The Nation traced the root of this controversy to business rivalry between two publishers.

In February this year, after the Punjab Textbook Board revised the textbook, Ansar Abbasi, the conservative investigative journalist of The News, which boasts of the largest circulation in Pakistan, gave a matter-of-fact looking, but patently inflammatory chapter-by-chapter account of what was dropped and what was added on March 24. Abbasi’s column in Urdu in the group publication Jang was more aggressive and Geo TV, a group site, reproduced it verbatim. Check out how Abbasi lists the items dropped and added:

• The second chapter in the old edition on ideology of Pakistan endorsed that the country was created in the name of Islam, to make it an Islamic state. This has been replaced.
• A short story ‘Fatima binte (daughter of) Abdullah’ has also disappeared. The story is about a young Muslim girl’s urge to help the Muslim mujahideen in jihad against un-Islamic forces. The girl was martyred.
• A chapter ‘Nam Dev Mali’ was, instead, included. The writer of this short story described the death of the expert Hindu gardener as ‘having embraced Shahadat (martyrdom)’.
• ‘Travelling is the key to success’ has also been removed. It covered adventures, jihad…
• Poetry of an Indian poet Firaq Gorakhpuri has been included in the textbook and the poet is presented as a hero awarded by the Indian and Russian governments.

The Jang  onslaught was enough to panic the Punjab government.  Shabaz Shariff, the then Chief Minister of Punjab who Dawn credits as a proponent of the reformist changes in the textbook, agreed to restore the deleted chapters the very next day!

What was the response of the liberal media?

Dawn condemned the ‘craven electioneering politics’ behind the knee-jerk reaction of the government. Accepting the fact that ‘dominant religion and a jihadist ideology’ have seeped into the textbooks, it charged the ‘political elite’ as lacking the courage and commitment to go against right-wing sentiment. Pervez Hoodboy, the liberal nuclear physicist and columnist, castigated Abbasi in his column in The Express Tribune for stoking religious passions with his ‘Islam in danger’ argument. He read the impugned textbook and found Abbasi’s claims ‘a distortion of reality and wild exaggerations’. He also made another valid point: the book was meant for teaching Urdu; it should not be a supplementary text for teaching Islamic studies.

The Nation brought an altogether different perspective. It rubbished the allegation of ‘removal of Islamic chapters’ and pointed out that the contract, running into millions of rupees for publishing the textbooks, was given to a particular business house by the Punjab Textbook Board; the party that lost the contract chose to ‘cast any and every aspersion, with no sincere grievance behind the move except for financial benefit.’

That successive governments in Pakistan have been viewing education and textbooks as an instruments of furthering Islamic ideology and have hence been regularly revising textbooks is not a new discovery.   ‘The Subtle Subversion’, a study conducted by Abdul Hameed Nayyar and Ahmed Salim on behalf of Sustainable Development Policy Institute of Pakistan identified this practice as early as 2002 when it listed the following problems in the various curricula and textbooks of Pakistan:

• Inaccuracies of fact and omissions that serve to substantially distort the nature and significance of actual events in our history.
• Insensitivity to the existing religious diversity of the nation
•  Incitement to militancy and violence, including encouragement of jihad and Shahadat
• Perspectives that encourage prejudice, bigotry and discrimination towards fellow citizens, especially women and religious minorities, and other towards nations.
• A glorification of war and the use of force
• Omission of concepts, events and material that could encourage critical self-awareness among students.

Later in 2004, KK Aziz’s Murder of History in Pakistan chronicled how students from primary level were fed with distorted versions of history to instill a sense of false pride and hatred for Hindus. Sample these:

• Raja Jaipal tried to enter the country of Mahmud Ghaznavi. Upon this Ghaznavi defeated Raja Jaipal and established an Islamic government. (Class 3)
• Muslims treated the non-Muslims well in India. However the non-Muslims nursed enmity against Muslims. When the British invaded India, non-Muslims sided with them. That is how the British conquered India. (Class 4)
• In the 1965 India-Pakistan war, India was defeated soundly by Pakistan.
• Urdu was the spoken language of the entire South Asia.

Ajam Kamal illustrates Pakistani educationists’ prejudice against Indians further. Premchand, who was included in the Class 11 Urdu textbook of Sindh Government before 2009 was dropped by ‘literary historians and critics who, ashamed or unable to accept a Hindu as the first short story writer of Urdu, have replaced him with a writer of more acceptable beliefs…’

Pakistan’s approach to tampering with textbooks has not changed much since then. As recently as August 2012, the National Commission for Justice & Peace concluded that that there had been a ‘marked increase’ in hate content in the curricula for classes 7 to 10. The Commission studied 22 textbooks of Punjab and Sindh Boards and found that the hate material increased from 12 chapters in 2009-11 to 33 in 2012-13!

The track record of the Indian government and historians is no better in this regard. Arun Shourie presented a compelling case, supported as usual by his characteristic loads of evidence, of how left-leaning historians ‘distorted’ history in our textbooks and how the West Bengal State Board deleted all uncomfortable references to Mughal rule in his book Eminent Historians. The only difference between India and Pakistan in this regard is that while the former has been leaning towards the moderate left wing, the latter towards the extreme right.

However it is the media response in India, of late, to what should or should not be included in textbooks, which is in sharp contrast to that of Pakistan. Last year, when Member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu Thol. Thirumavalan raked up the Ambedkar cartoon controversy, the media was almost unanimous in condemning the move. (It is a different matter that the UPA government, just like the Punjab Provincial government, succumbed to the pressure of Dalit groups and removed the cartoon). The Pakistan media response, on the other hand, to textbook changes has always been divided.

At least there is something that can be learnt from Indian media!