Equity, Caste and the Politics of Dilution:A Critical Reading of the UGC’s Promotion of Equity Regulations, 2026

-Ramphal Kataria

From Mandal to Management: Caste Politics and the UGC’s Equity Regulations, 2026

Abstract

The University Grants Commission’s Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026 mark a shift from advisory norms to enforceable institutional obligations in Indian higher education. While framed as a progressive intervention against discrimination, the regulations have generated intense controversy, culminating in their stay by the Supreme Court in January 2026. This article critically examines the regulations through the lenses of constitutional equality, caste politics, and historical experience with affirmative action. It argues that the inclusion of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) within an institutional equity framework—absent any substantive educational or employment entitlements—amounts to symbolic recognition rather than material justice. Drawing on National Crime Records Bureau data on atrocities against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the article demonstrates that the central crisis lies not in over-protection but in chronic under-enforcement and low conviction rates. By blurring the historical and legal specificity of SC/ST protections through executive regulation, the 2026 framework risks diluting social justice while reigniting caste antagonisms. Situating the regulations within the longer trajectory of Mandal politics and the strategic mobilisation of caste identities by the BJP–RSS combine, the article contends that the regulations function less as an instrument of equity and more as a form of political signalling in a period of electoral realignment.

 

On 13 January 2026, the University Grants Commission (UGC) notified the Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026, replacing the 2012 anti-discrimination framework. The stated objective was to move from advisory guidelines to binding institutional obligations for universities and affiliated colleges. In form, the regulations appear progressive: they mandate Equal Opportunity Centers (EOCs), Equity Committees, 24×7 helplines, equity squads, and time-bound grievance redressal.

Yet, almost immediately, the regulations triggered widespread controversy, legal challenge, and student protests—primarily from sections of the general category. By late January 2026, the Supreme Court of India stayed the operation of the 2026 Regulations, describing them as “vague, sweeping and capable of misuse”, and directed that the 2012 Regulations would continue to operate pending final adjudication.¹

The controversy is not merely about procedure or drafting. At its core lies a deep political and constitutional question: Does the inclusion of OBCs within an institutional “equity” and “caste discrimination” framework strengthen social justice, or does it dilute the hard-won protections available to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes?

From Advisory Norms to Enforceable Duties

The 2026 Regulations significantly expand the compliance burden on Higher Education Institutions (HEIs):

Mandatory Equal Opportunity Centers tasked with counselling and inclusion;

Equity Committees, chaired by the Head of the Institution, with representation from SC, ST, OBC, women and persons with disabilities;

Equity Squads and Ambassadors for campus surveillance;

A 24-hour acknowledgement and 15-day resolution timeline for complaints;

Personal responsibility of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, with penalties including withdrawal of UGC grants and recognition.

On paper, this marks a decisive shift from moral persuasion to regulatory coercion. However, two structural problems immediately stand out.

First, the regulations apply only to UGC-regulated universities and colleges, leaving out centrally established institutions such as IITs, IIMs, AIIMS and similar bodies, thereby creating a fragmented equity regime. Second, the regulations fail to define “discrimination” with analytical clarity, focusing instead on the perception of discrimination—an approach that obscures historical power asymmetries in Indian society.

The OBC Inclusion Question: Symbolism Without Substance

The most contentious feature of the 2026 Regulations is the explicit inclusion of OBCs within the equity charter, alongside SCs and STs. This inclusion is not accompanied by:

any new educational entitlements,

any employment guarantees,

any remedial academic support mechanisms, or

any addressing of the massive backlog in SC/ST/OBC faculty recruitment, which exceeds 60 per cent in several central universities.

Instead, OBC inclusion operates almost entirely at the level of grievance redressal and symbolic parity.

Unlike the Mandal Commission (1990 and 2006)—which extended material benefits such as reservation in jobs and educational institutions—this framework offers procedural recognition without redistribution. There was no sustained demand from OBC organisations for inclusion in such an institutional discrimination framework. Many dominant OBC castes—Yadavs, Jats, Gujjars, Kurmis—are numerically strong and politically influential in northern India, often controlling local administrations and campus politics.

The question, therefore, is unavoidable: Who does this inclusion actually benefit?

Historical Context: Mandal, Anti-Reservation Violence and Political Capital

The present moment cannot be understood without recalling the Mandal Commission implementation in 1990, when Prime Minister V. P. Singh extended 27 per cent reservation to OBCs in central services. The response was a violent, upper-caste-led anti-reservation movement, particularly in north India.

Crucially, while the reservation was for OBCs, the primary victims of the violence were SC and ST communities, who were already beneficiaries of reservation and bore the brunt of retaliatory caste assertion. Dalit hostels, settlements and students were targeted, revealing how caste violence operates irrespective of formal policy intent.

The RSS-BJP combine strategically mobilised this churn, converting Mandal into a tool for political polarisation—soon supplemented by Kamandal (religious mobilisation). This twin strategy allowed the BJP to expand from two Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to forming governments under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and later achieving dominance under Narendra Modi in 2014.

The current UGC framework echoes this history: no real redistribution, but renewed caste antagonism, now transposed onto campuses.

Atrocities Against SC/ST: What the Data Actually Shows

To evaluate claims of “misuse” or “excess”, one must turn to empirical evidence, not political rhetoric. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 was enacted precisely because ordinary criminal law proved incapable of addressing caste-based violence.

Table: Atrocities and Prosecution under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act

Period	Cases Registered	Conviction Rate	Key Trend
Pre-1990	No consolidated data	—	Atrocities widespread, legally invisible
1990–1999	~20–25k annually (est.)	<20%	Weak enforcement, low awareness
2000–2014	40,208 (2014)	~28–29%	Reporting rises, convictions stagnate
2015–2018	49,064 (2018)	~34–39%	Post-2018 dilution attempt triggers protests
2019–2020	53,515 (2019); 58,538 (2020)	~33–35%	Highest registrations; pendency remains
2021–2023	~57,000 annually	~32%	Conviction rate declines
ST-specific (2023)	~12,960	<30%	Sharp rise; severe under-conviction

(Compiled from NCRB “Crime in India” reports, PIB releases, and Parliamentary replies.)²

What This Reveals

Three points are unmistakable:

1. Rising registrations reflect reporting, not fabrication. Every phase of legal clarity has increased reporting without improving convictions.

2. Conviction rates remain abysmally low, rarely exceeding one-third—pointing to institutional failure, not excess protection.

3. Dilution narratives ignore enforcement realities. The real crisis lies in investigation, prosecution, and special courts.

Against this backdrop, administratively expanding “caste discrimination” categories without strengthening SC/ST enforcement risks normalising equivalence between unequal social positions.

Dilution by Design? Committees, Power and Institutional Bias

The 2026 Regulations vest decisive authority in Equity Committees chaired by Heads of Institutions—who, in over 90 per cent of cases, belong to the general category. Committee membership is drawn from EBC, OBC and general category faculty, while SC/ST representation remains tokenistic.

This matters because institutional bias is not hypothetical. Practices such as declaring SC/ST candidates “Not Found Suitable” (NFS) in faculty recruitment have been repeatedly documented, contributing to massive backlog vacancies.³

Instead of addressing these structural exclusions, the regulations introduce a procedural framework that may symbolically include OBCs while leaving SC/ST marginalisation intact.

Judicial Stay and Federal Concerns

The Supreme Court’s stay is significant not merely procedurally but constitutionally. It has raised concerns about:

Vagueness and over-breadth;

Lack of safeguards for the accused;

Potential misuse of executive regulations to encroach upon areas governed by parliamentary statutes.

Equally problematic is the UGC’s decision to appoint ombudspersons centrally, even though many universities are creatures of state legislation—a move that undermines India’s federal structure.

Conclusion: Equity or Electoral Engineering?

The UGC’s Promotion of Equity Regulations, 2026, arrive at a moment of political flux. Their design suggests symbolic outreach to OBCs without substantive empowerment, procedural expansion without enforcement, and administrative regulation without constitutional clarity.

Far from strengthening social justice, the framework risks diluting the moral and legal specificity of SC/ST protections, reopening caste antagonisms, and converting campuses into sites of political signalling rather than genuine inclusion.

History shows us where such strategies lead. Mandal without justice, Kamandal without accountability, and now Equity without equality—all serve power far better than they serve the oppressed.

References

1. Supreme Court of India, Interim Order staying the UGC Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026, January 2026.

2. National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India (various years); Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment, Parliamentary Replies; Press Information Bureau releases, 2018–2024.

3. Thorat, Sukhadeo and Newman, Katherine (2010), Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India, Oxford University Press.

4. Government of India (1980), Report of the Backward Classes Commission (Mandal Commission).

5. Deshpande, Satish (2013), Contemporary India: A Sociological View, Penguin.

6. Supreme Court of India (2018), Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v. State of Maharashtra; subsequent Parliamentary amendment restoring the Act.

 

Joseph Stalin and the Consolidation of the Soviet Revolution: A Marxist Reappraisal

-Ramphal Kataria

Stalin Reconsidered: Revolution, State, and History

Abstract

The figure of Joseph Stalin occupies a uniquely polarised position in twentieth-century historiography. Dominant liberal and Cold War narratives portray him primarily as a tyrant whose rule negated the emancipatory promise of the October Revolution. This paper advances a historically grounded and theoretically informed reassessment of Stalin as a revolutionary consolidator of the first socialist state. Situating Stalin within the unresolved dilemmas of Leninism—state power, economic backwardness, imperialist encirclement, and party discipline—the paper argues that Stalin’s political practice, while marked by coercion and excess, was fundamentally shaped by the imperatives of revolutionary survival. Drawing on Marxist theory and revisionist scholarship, the paper examines Stalin’s role in state-building, industrialisation, collectivisation, wartime leadership, nationalities policy, and international communism, while critically interrogating the charge of “dictatorship” in its historical and ideological context.

1. Introduction: Revolution After Seizure of Power

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 inaugurated a new epoch in world history but left unresolved the central Marxist problem of how a proletarian revolution survives in conditions of economic backwardness and international hostility. Vladimir I. Lenin, the principal architect of the revolution, died prematurely on 21 January 1924, before the socialist transition could be institutionally stabilised. As Lenin himself acknowledged, the seizure of power did not equate to the construction of socialism, which required sustained state power, economic transformation, and ideological struggle (Lenin 1917).

It was within this historical vacuum that Joseph Stalin emerged as the principal agent of revolutionary consolidation. Any serious evaluation of Stalin must therefore move beyond moral abstractions and examine the material conditions within which his policies were formulated and executed.

2. Stalin as a Professional Revolutionary and Leninist Organiser

Stalin’s revolutionary formation differed markedly from that of Lenin or Trotsky. Emerging from the underground networks of Tsarist Russia, Stalin functioned primarily as a professional organiser, shaped by exile, repression, and clandestine work. Lenin’s trust in Stalin was neither accidental nor merely tactical; it reflected a shared understanding of revolution as an organisational and disciplinary process rather than a spontaneous upheaval.

Lenin’s writings consistently emphasised that without a centralised and disciplined party, the working class would succumb to bourgeois ideology (Lenin 1902). Stalin’s political style—often dismissed as bureaucratic—was in fact rooted in this Leninist conception of organisation as a weapon of class struggle.

3. The State, Dictatorship, and the Leninist Inheritance

In The State and Revolution, Lenin defined the state as “a special organisation of force” for class domination (Lenin 1917). Crucially, Lenin argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not a deviation from democracy but its revolutionary fulfilment. The proletarian state would not immediately wither away; it had first to suppress counter-revolutionary resistance.

Stalin inherited this unresolved contradiction. The Soviet state confronted:

remnants of the old ruling classes,

peasant resistance,

factionalism within the party,

anarchist and opportunist currents,

and an openly hostile capitalist world system.

To evaluate Stalin’s use of coercive state power without reference to these conditions is to abandon historical materialism in favour of liberal moralism.

4. Industrialisation and the Material Foundations of Socialism

Marx and Engels repeatedly insisted that socialism presupposes a developed productive base (Marx 1859; Engels 1878). Russia in 1917 possessed no such foundation. Stalin’s programme of rapid industrialisation through the Five-Year Plans sought to resolve this contradiction.

While the social costs were immense, the historical outcome is difficult to dispute: within two decades, the USSR was transformed from a semi-feudal agrarian society into an industrial power capable of defeating Nazi Germany. As E.H. Carr observed, industrialisation was not merely an economic policy but a condition of national survival (Carr 1952).

5. The Peasant Question and Collectivisation

The peasant question represented the most intractable problem of socialist transition. Marxism had long viewed small peasant property as structurally incompatible with socialism. Stalin’s collectivisation drive aimed to:

eliminate kulak dominance,

ensure food security for urban workers,

integrate agriculture into socialist planning.

Revisionist historians such as J. Arch Getty caution against reducing collectivisation to sheer terror, emphasising administrative chaos and local dynamics (Getty 1985). Domenico Losurdo further argues that collectivisation must be contextualised within the broader history of capitalist agrarian transformations, which were themselves marked by violence and dispossession (Losurdo 2014).

6. Party, Purges, and the Question of Political Repression

Stalin’s struggle against “opportunism” within the Communist Party has been central to the image of him as a dictator. Yet Lenin himself had warned that bourgeois ideology re-enters the workers’ movement through wavering cadres (Lenin 1920).

While the purges of the 1930s involved grave injustices, later archival research complicates the narrative of a monolithic terror directed solely from above. Getty and others demonstrate that institutional fragmentation, local vendettas, and bureaucratic dysfunction played a significant role (Getty 1985).

This does not absolve Stalin of responsibility but situates repression within the structural vulnerabilities of a revolutionary state under siege.

7. World War II: Existential Threat and Historical Vindication

World War II posed the gravest challenge to the Soviet experiment. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the broader capitalist world viewed the USSR as an existential ideological enemy. Stalin’s earlier industrialisation proved decisive.

Despite catastrophic early losses, Stalin:

mobilised the entire economy for war,

relocated Soviet industry eastward,

enforced ruthless discipline,

eventually delegated military strategy to capable generals.

The Red Army’s victory was not merely defensive. Under Stalin’s leadership, it liberated or defeated Axis control in at least eleven territories, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, parts of Austria and Germany, the Baltic region, Northern Norway, Bornholm, and North Korea. Whether termed “liberation” or “occupation,” these actions permanently altered the global balance of power and broke the myth of capitalist invincibility.

The capture of Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s son, by Nazi Germany remains a poignant episode. Stalin refused to exchange him for German prisoners, reportedly stating that he would not privilege blood ties over revolutionary principle. Whether mythologised or factual in detail, the episode symbolises Stalin’s self-conception: the revolution stood above personal sentiment. This decision, while morally unsettling, aligned with his understanding of revolutionary ethics.

8. Stalin as Marxist Theorist and Political Writer

Joseph Stalin was not only a revolutionary practitioner and state-builder but also one of the most prolific Marxist political writers among twentieth-century heads of state. Unlike many contemporaries whose authority rested primarily on charisma or military success, Stalin consistently sought to legitimate political practice through theory, grounding policy decisions in what he regarded as Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy.

His early theoretical intervention, Marxism and the National Question (1913), written under Lenin’s guidance, remains one of the most systematic Marxist treatments of nationality and self-determination. In this work, Stalin conceptualised the nation as a historically constituted community based on common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up—an analysis that decisively shaped Bolshevik policy toward oppressed nationalities and later informed the federal structure of the USSR.

Following Lenin’s death, Stalin assumed the role of systematiser of Leninism. His lectures published as Foundations of Leninism (1924) sought to codify Lenin’s theoretical legacy into a coherent doctrine applicable to governance. The text addressed key questions of proletarian dictatorship, party leadership, imperialism, the peasant alliance, and revolutionary strategy. While critics have described this as a “vulgarisation” of Marxism, it also represented a necessary attempt to translate revolutionary theory into state practice under conditions of siege (McLellan 1979).

Stalin’s philosophical interventions continued with Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), which attempted to formalise Marxist philosophy as a scientific worldview. Though often criticised for dogmatism, the text played a significant role in disseminating Marxist concepts among cadres and educators across the socialist world.

His later works, particularly Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1952), reflected Stalin’s engagement with unresolved questions of socialist political economy, including commodity production, value, and the persistence of bourgeois categories under socialism. These writings demonstrate that Stalin did not consider socialism a finished project but a process marked by contradictions, requiring continuous theoretical reflection.

Stalin also intervened in debates beyond economics and philosophy. In Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950), he rejected mechanistic applications of class analysis to language, arguing instead for its relative autonomy—a position that surprised many critics and revealed a degree of theoretical flexibility often absent from portrayals of him as purely dogmatic.

Taken together, Stalin’s writings illustrate a sustained effort to extend Marxism-Leninism beyond insurrection into long-term governance, an endeavour unprecedented in scale. While the political uses of these texts are inseparable from Stalin’s authority, their influence on global communist movements—from China to Eastern Europe and the anti-colonial world—was substantial. Major Works of Joseph Stalin:

1. Marxism and the National Question (1913)

2. Anarchism or Socialism? (1906–1907)

3. Foundations of Leninism (1924)

4. Trotskyism or Leninism? (1924)

5. On the Opposition (1927)

6. Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938)

7. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (editorial leadership) (1938)

8. On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (1942–1945 speeches)

9. Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (1950)

10. Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1952)

9. Dictatorship, Historiography, and Ideological Power

The portrayal of Stalin as uniquely tyrannical must be examined against the backdrop of imperialist historiography. Capitalist violence—colonial famines, world wars, and imperial repression—rarely attracts equivalent moral outrage. Losurdo argues that Stalin’s demonisation serves a political function, delegitimising socialism by personalising its contradictions (Losurdo 2014).

Conclusion

Stalin’s historical role cannot be reduced to repression or administrative control alone. He was simultaneously a revolutionary organiser, state-builder, wartime leader, and Marxist writer who sought to theorise the unprecedented task of constructing socialism under hostile global conditions. His extensive body of writings—spanning nationality, philosophy, political economy, and party organisation—constitutes a distinctive corpus of twentieth-century Marxist thought. To dismiss these works as mere instruments of power is to ignore the historical reality that no socialist state before or since has attempted to govern so explicitly through theory.

References

1. Carr, E.H. (1952): The Bolshevik Revolution. London.

2. Engels, F. (1878): Anti-Dühring.

3. Getty, J.A. (1985): Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge.

4. Lenin, V.I. (1902): What Is To Be Done?

5. Lenin, V.I. (1917): The State and Revolution.

6. Lenin, V.I. (1920): Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

7. Losurdo, D. (2014): Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend.

8. Marx, K. (1859): A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

9. McLellan, D. (1979): Marxism After Marx.

10. Deutscher, I. (1967): Stalin: A Political Biography.

 

 

History in Fragments: The Politics of Erasure and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary India

Romila Thapar’s Warning and the Crisis of Continuity

-Ramphal Kataria

Manufacturing the Past: State Power, Myth, and the Politics of History in Contemporary India

History, as Romila Thapar has consistently argued, is not a catalogue of isolated events but a continuous process—an evolving record of social relations, political institutions, cultural exchanges, and intellectual traditions. To excise entire periods or dynasties from the curriculum is not merely a pedagogical error; it is an epistemic rupture that undermines the very possibility of historical understanding. Speaking at the Kerala Literature Festival (2026), Thapar described the removal of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal period from school textbooks as “nonsense,” cautioning that such deletions fracture continuity and render India’s past unintelligible.

This intervention must be read against the backdrop of post-2014 curricular and institutional changes that have reoriented history writing and teaching in India. These changes are neither incidental nor value-neutral. They form part of a longer ideological project that treats history as an instrument of political mobilisation rather than a discipline grounded in evidence, debate, and methodological rigour.

Textbook Revisions after 2014: Selective Erasure as Policy

Since 2014, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has undertaken multiple rounds of textbook “rationalisation” (2017, 2019, 2022–23, and 2025–26). While officially justified as measures to reduce academic burden, the pattern of deletions reveals clear ideological selectivity.

Entire chapters and substantial references to the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire have been removed from middle- and secondary-school textbooks. Discussions of Mahatma Gandhi’s opposition by Hindu extremists, including the ideological location of Nathuram Godse and the brief ban on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after Gandhi’s assassination, have been excised. Detailed treatments of caste hierarchies, social protest movements, and episodes such as the 2002 Gujarat riots have been diluted or deleted, even as other instances of communal violence remain.

What is at stake here is not a difference of interpretation but the removal of structural episodes essential to understanding state formation, administrative evolution, agrarian relations, and the longue durée of communal politics in South Asia. Erasure, unlike revision, forecloses debate.

Why Continuity Matters: The Mughal Period and Indian Modernity

The Mughal period is not a detachable appendix to Indian history. It constitutes a crucial phase in the subcontinent’s transition to early modernity. Systems of revenue assessment, land rights, urbanisation, architecture, literary cultures, and composite languages such as Hindustani evolved through complex interactions among diverse social groups during this era. British colonial governance itself cannot be understood without reference to the administrative and fiscal practices it inherited and reconfigured.

To remove the Mughals from the curriculum is to create a civilisational gap that students cannot bridge analytically. It reduces history to a moralised binary—ancient glory followed by medieval darkness—thereby reproducing a colonial-period framework that serious historians have long rejected.

From History to “Mythistory”: Collapsing the Boundary between Evidence and Faith

A defining feature of recent interventions is the growing conflation of mythology with history. Epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are increasingly presented as empirical historical records, while well-established scholarly frameworks—such as the Aryan migration theory—are dismissed as ideological conspiracies. The Indus Valley Civilisation is rebranded as the “Saraswati Civilisation” to align archaeological interpretation with a Vedic-Hindu origin narrative.

This turn towards what historians have described as “mythistory” replaces peer-reviewed scholarship with faith-based assertion. As Thapar, Irfan Habib, and D N Jha have repeatedly emphasised, civilisations are products of migration, exchange, conflict, and synthesis. To deny this is to deny history as a discipline.

Popular Culture and Visual Nationalism

The rewriting of history now extends well beyond textbooks. Cinema, television, and OTT platforms have emerged as powerful sites of popular pedagogy. Films such as Padmaavat, The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, and Chhaava deploy selective narratives that foreground Muslim aggression and Hindu victimhood while marginalising complexity, context, and countervailing evidence.

Visual media operates affectively rather than analytically. Its impact on collective memory is therefore deeper and more durable than that of written text. When such representations circulate alongside curricular erasure, they produce a mutually reinforcing ecosystem of historical simplification and communal polarisation.

Social Media and the Collapse of Scholarly Authority

Digital platforms have become parallel classrooms, disseminating short-form content that claims to reveal the “history you were never taught.” These narratives often rely on fabricated quotations, exaggerated claims of temple destruction, and unverified archaeological assertions. Algorithms amplify outrage, not accuracy.

Thapar’s distinction between professional history and “popular history” is critical here. When opinion is repeatedly presented as scholarship, the authority of evidence itself is eroded. This has profound implications for democratic reasoning and public debate.

Institutional Capture and the Marginalisation of Dissent

Curricular changes have been accompanied by appointments of ideologically aligned individuals to key academic bodies, including the Indian Council of Historical Research. University syllabi have seen the removal of texts that foreground pluralism, subaltern perspectives, or critical theory, while dissenting historians are routinely branded as “anti-national.”

Such developments narrow the space for intellectual disagreement and replace scholarly pluralism with epistemic conformity.

Correction versus Erasure

No serious historian denies the need for revision. Historical knowledge advances through new evidence, fresh questions, and critical re-evaluation. But revision requires citation, peer review, and continuity. Erasure, by contrast, forecloses inquiry and substitutes political convenience for scholarly responsibility.

If aspects of Mughal or medieval history require reinterpretation, this must be achieved by expanding sources and incorporating diverse historiographical perspectives—not by deleting the period altogether.

A Republic’s Stake in Its Past

Romila Thapar’s anguish reflects a larger civilisational concern. A society that amputates its past weakens its capacity to understand the present and imagine a shared future. History taught in fragments cannot produce citizens capable of plural coexistence, constitutional morality, or critical thought.

Erasing inconvenient histories may serve immediate political ends, but it impoverishes the nation’s intellectual commons. India does not require a sanitised or sanctified past. It requires an honest, continuous, and contested history—one that recognises conflict and coexistence as equally constitutive of its making.

Conclusion: Recovering Historical Reason and Democratic Pluralism

The contemporary struggle over history in India is not merely a contest over the past but a decisive battle over the normative foundations of the republic. What is at stake is the distinction between history as a critical, evidence-based discipline and history as an instrument of political mobilization. The systematic privileging of myth over method, faith over archival scrutiny, and identity over inquiry risks hollowing out historical consciousness itself, reducing it to a legitimising device for present-day power. This process does not simply marginalise professional historians; it undermines the democratic ethic that depends upon disagreement, plural memories, and the capacity to confront uncomfortable pasts.

For scholars, this moment demands a renewed defence of historiography as a public good. Future research must move beyond reactive critique to examine how state power, curriculum design, popular media, and digital platforms together produce a hegemonic historical commonsense. Comparative work—across regions within India and with other societies that have witnessed politicised pasts—can illuminate both the limits and possibilities of resistance. Equally urgent is an engagement with pedagogy: how history can be taught not as a closed narrative of civilisational pride, but as an open-ended inquiry that trains citizens to question sources, interrogate silences, and recognise plurality.

Ultimately, the recovery of historical reason is inseparable from the defence of constitutional democracy. A society that abandons critical history in favour of selective remembrance risks mistaking unanimity for unity and obedience for cohesion. The challenge before historians, educators, and public intellectuals is therefore not only to preserve the integrity of the past, but to insist that the future of Indian democracy remains anchored in reasoned debate, evidentiary rigour, and an ethic of pluralism.

References

1.     Thapar, Romila. The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History. Aleph Book Company, 2014.

2.     Thapar, Romila. History and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2000.

3.     Habib, Irfan. The National Movement: Studies in Ideology and History. Tulika Books, 2005.

4.     Habib, Irfan. “History and Politics.” Social Scientist, Vol. 26, Nos. 1–4, 1998.

5.     Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. HarperCollins, 2007.

6.     Guha, Ramachandra. The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India. Permanent Black, 2013.

7.     Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics. Penguin India, 1996.

8.     Jaffrelot, Christophe. Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2021.

9.     NCERT. Rationalisation of Content in School Textbooks. National Council of Educational Research and Training, 2022–2023 notifications.

10.  Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton University Press, 1993.

11.  Sarkar, Sumit. Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History. Permanent Black, 2002.