Pedagogy Of Power: How NCERT's 'Rationalisation' Fails Constitutional Test
In S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981)[1], 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.
What 'Rationalisation' Legally Means and Where It Ends
The National Education Policy 2020[2], which provides the stated justification for the exercise, does call for a reduction in curriculum load and a shift toward conceptual understanding over rote memorisation. These are legitimate pedagogical objectives, and NCERT's institutional autonomy to pursue them is not in dispute. The question is not whether rationalisation is a valid policy goal, but whether the specific deletions carried out in its name qualify as rationalisation in any meaningful sense.
Genuine rationalisation removes genuinely redundant content duplicated across grades, already subsumed by retained material, or pedagogically superseded. It does not remove entire thematic categories. The NCERT deletions do not reduce the volume of Mughal history by trimming repetition; they eliminate it as a subject of study. They do not condense the Emergency chapter by removing redundant passages; they remove the chapter entirely. This is not a reduction; it is excision. The administrative label attached to the exercise does not alter its substantive character.
The Constitutional Floor: Articles 21A and 29(1)
The right to education under Article 21A is not merely a right of physical access to a school. The Supreme Court in Mohini Jain v. State of Karnataka (1992)[3] held that the right to education flows directly from the right to life and dignity guaranteed by Article 21, making the quality and character of education constitutionally relevant, not just its availability. This was reinforced in Unni Krishnan v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1993)[4], where the Court made explicit that education must serve the full development of the human personality. A history curriculum that systematically omits three centuries of administrative and cultural contribution of the Mughal era does not merely create an incomplete education. It produces citizens who cannot understand the composite origins of the legal, architectural, and linguistic systems they inhabit daily.
Article 29(1) guarantees every citizen the right to conserve their distinct language, script, or culture. Read with the secular obligations of Articles 25-28, this creates an affirmative duty on State-run educational institutions to ensure that the cultural heritage of all communities, including Muslim, Dalit, and other historically marginalised groups, is represented with integrity in the public curriculum. The selective removal of Mughal administrative history, of material on caste-based atrocities, and of the political analysis of the Emergency does not affect all communities equally. It systematically diminishes the historical presence of communities whose narratives are already underrepresented in public life. This asymmetric impact does not constitute 'rationalisation'; it constitutes a constitutional breach of the pluralism that secularism demands.
The Doctrine of Colourable Action
Indian constitutional jurisprudence has long recognised that what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The doctrine of colourable legislation, articulated in K.C. Gajapati Narayan Deo v. State of Orissa (1953)[5], holds that the substance of an action, not its label, determines its constitutional validity. The principle applies with equal force to executive action. Parliament cannot constitutionally mandate a sectarian or ideologically curated history curriculum for public schools; such a mandate would immediately attract Article 28 scrutiny and would plainly contradict the secular character of the Preamble. But an executive body operating without legislative oversight, using administrative discretion without published criteria, achieves the same result through selective omission.
The NCERT has not published the terms of reference for its review committee, the composition of that committee, or the criteria used to classify content as non-essential. There are no publicly available expert reports. The original authors were not consulted. What the process has produced is an outcome, a curriculum in which certain communities and certain periods of national history are structurally absent, that would have faced a serious constitutional challenge if enacted through legislation. The administrative route does not sanitise that outcome. It merely obscures accountability for it.
The Collapse of Institutional Autonomy
NCERT's statutory mandate is to serve as an academically independent body that sets educational standards free from political interference. That mandate is undermined not by the fact of revision, but by the process through which these revisions occurred. Institutional autonomy has meaning only when the institution exercises its discretion through its own expert processes, not when it implements political preferences through the language of administrative necessity.
The public disavowal by Professor Palshikar and Professor Yadav, and the collective statement by over 200 historians and academics, are not merely expressions of scholarly disagreement. They are evidence that the peer-review and expert-consultation mechanisms that legitimise NCERT's authority to determine curriculum content were bypassed entirely. When the authors of a textbook publicly state that the revision does not reflect their work or their academic judgment, the State cannot continue to market the revised text as an academically vetted document. It is, at that point, a political document wearing academic clothes. Notably, NCERT's response that the committee's 'terms have ended' and that individual authorship is not claimed does not address the absence of process. It merely confirms it.
What International Law Requires
India's obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), specifically General Comment 13[6] of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, require that education be directed toward the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. The European Court of Human Rights, in Kjeldsen, Busk Madsen and Pedersen v. Denmark (1976)[7], held that States must convey educational information in an 'objective, critical, and pluralistic' manner. While this ruling is not binding on Indian courts, it carries significant persuasive weight and reflects a global consensus about minimum standards of State-sponsored education in democratic societies. A curriculum that systematically removes the administrative history of the largest minority community in the country does not meet the standard of objectivity or pluralism that either Indian constitutional law or India's international obligations require.
The Remedy: A Judicially Mandated Neutrality Audit
The structural solution to this problem is procedural rather than substantive. Courts should not and need not determine which historical content belongs in a textbook; that is legitimately a matter for academic judgment. What courts can and must do is ensure that the process by which such determinations are made meets the constitutional standard of accountability that S.P. Gupta demands of all public functions. The model for such an intervention already exists. In Vishakha v. State of Rajasthan (1997)[8], the Supreme Court mandated institutional guidelines to fill a legislative vacuum in a matter of constitutional importance. No legislation governs the procedural standards for NCERT curriculum revision. That vacuum creates precisely the kind of constitutional risk that Vishakha addressed.
A judicially supervised Neutrality Audit for curriculum revisions would require NCERT to satisfy four procedural conditions before any revision affecting substantive historical content is finalised: first, the terms of reference and expert composition of every review committee must be published; second, NCERT must provide a written rationale for each content deletion, distinguishing genuine pedagogical redundancy from substantive narrative reduction; third, original textbook authors must be formally consulted and their responses placed on public record before finalisation; and fourth, all revisions to history, civics, and social science content must be placed before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education for scrutiny before adoption.
This is not judicial overreach into curriculum policy. It is the application of the most basic principles of administrative law transparency, reasoned decision-making, and accountability to an exercise that has enormous consequences for how an entire generation of citizens understands the nation they are being asked to participate in.
The NCERT rationalisation exercise raises a question that goes beyond textbook content: it asks what constitutional obligations the State accepts when it uses public education to define the national past. Those obligations are substantive; they require pluralism, objectivity, and respect for the cultural heritage of all communities, and they are procedural; they require transparency, expert oversight, and accountability to those whose work and whose history are being revised.
The current exercise satisfies neither standard. The deletions are not academically justified, the process was not institutionally legitimate, and the outcome, a public-school history that progressively reduces the presence of communities whose narratives are already contested, is constitutionally suspect. An education system that edits its own memory does not lighten the load on students. It shifts the burden of ignorance onto democracy itself.
1981 INSC 222 ↑
Ministry of Education, Government of India, 'National Education Policy 2020' (2020). ↑
1992 INSC 186 ↑
1993 INSC 40 ↑
1953 INSC 52 ↑
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 'General Comment No 13: The Right to Education (Article 13)' (8 December 1999) ↑
(1976) 1 EHRR 711 ↑
1997 INSC 604 ↑
Views are personal.