Pedagogy Of Power: How NCERT's 'Rationalisation' Fails Constitutional Test
Pawni Singh and Prikshit Rathore | 23 May 2026 | Live Law
In S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981), the Supreme Court held that every authority exercising a public function is accountable to the citizens it serves. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) discharges precisely such a function: it authors the textbooks through which the Indian State formally transmits its account of the nation's past to every public-school student. Between 2022 and 2023, NCERT conducted what it termed a 'rationalisation' exercise, deleting substantial portions of its history curriculum under the stated objective of reducing student cognitive load in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The deleted content includes chapters on Mughal administration from Class VII and XII syllabi, sections on the 2002 Gujarat riots, material on caste-based discrimination and social movements, and the chapter examining the Emergency of 1975-77.
The political scientists who authored those chapters were not consulted before the deletions. In June 2023, Professor Suhas Palshikar and Professor Yogendra Yadav, chief advisors for NCERT's political science textbooks for Classes 9 to 12, publicly wrote to NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani asking that their names be removed from the revised editions, describing the textbooks as 'mutilated beyond recognition' and 'academically dysfunctional'. Separately, a group, including Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Mridula Mukherjee, and Jayati Ghosh, issued a statement demanding an explanation for not being consulted. Their collective disavowal is significant not merely as an academic protest, but it is evidence that the process was not academically driven at all…