Propaganda masquerading as history

The Partition of India in 1947 remains one of the most cataclysmic ruptures in South Asian history. It displaced between 10–20 million people, claimed anywhere between 200,000 and two million lives, and left scars that still haunt India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Since 2021, India has officially been observing 14 August as ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’. On 13 August this year, the NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) released two supplementary modules — for Classes 6–8 and 9–12 — under the same rubric (‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’).

The stated intent is to ensure that future generations remember the magnitude of the horrors of Partition and draw the right lessons. To quote from the special module for ‘middle stage’: ‘Ignorance of history keeps difficult problems alive in the same form. As a result, the new generation is not prepared to face them. Therefore, knowing history is absolutely necessary.’ Hard to argue with that.

But the modules reduce causality to a triad of villains — Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Indian National Congress and Lord Mountbatten — while absolving figures such as V.D. Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha, who played critical roles in theorising and deepening communal divides.

Instead of providing students with complexity, the modules fall into the trap Karl Marx once warned against: ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’ In its attempt to reduce the history of Partition to an (alternative) morality tale, the NCERT risks turning historical tragedy into a political farce.

The triad of blame

To quote from the so-called ‘special module’: ‘There were three elements responsible for the Partition of India: Jinnah, who demanded it; the Congress, which accepted it; and Mountbatten, who implemented it.’

Undeniably, Jinnah’s trajectory — from the ‘ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’ to the architect of Pakistan — was decisive. The Lahore Resolution of 1940 enshrined the ‘two-nation theory’, declaring Hindus and Muslims incompatible as one nation.

The Congress, faced with escalating communal strife and British intransigence, ultimately conceded Partition as a pragmatic way to avert civil war. In his autobiographical work India Wins Freedom, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad described this as a ‘tragic compromise’ rather than endorsement. Mountbatten’s hasty timetable — advancing Independence to August 1947 and delegating boundary-making to Cyril Radcliffe, a man unfamiliar with India — fuelled chaos and carnage.

So, presenting this triad as ‘Culprits of the Partition’ is to amputate and distort history. It erases decades of colonial divide-and-rule policies, ignores the ideological scaffolding of Hindu majoritarianism, and oversimplifies the interplay of economic, social and political anxieties that shaped the catastrophe.

The missing history

Perhaps the most glaring omission in these new modules is the role of V.D. Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha. Long before Jinnah, Savarkar had articulated a vision of Hindus and Muslims as distinct nations. In his 1923 treatise Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, he argued that India was fundamentally a Hindu nation, relegating Muslims and Christians to the status of ‘outsiders’ who must accept the idea of Hindu primacy.

In 1937, as president of the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar declared in Ahmedabad: “India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogeneous nation, but on the contrary, there are two nations in the main — the Hindus and the Muslims.” This was three years before Jinnah’s Lahore Resolution.

Besides, the Mahasabha’s political stride flies in the face of claims that it was opposed to Partition. It entered coalition governments with the Muslim League in Bengal, Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province — even as the League pressed for Pakistan.

Syama Prasad Mookerjee, later founder of the Jana Sangh, served as finance minister in a Muslim League-led government in Bengal. Such alliances revealed a willingness to trade principle for power, which the selective NCERT reading of this slice of history seeks to misrepresent.

By omitting this history, the modules exonerate Hindu communalism and treat Partition as a Muslim League conspiracy. This is not the kind of scholarship our children need or deserve.

The role of the RSS

The NCERT also overlooks the role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological kin of the Hindu Mahasabha. During the freedom struggle, the RSS under M.S. Golwalkar was conspicuously absent from mass movements, including the Quit India movement of 1942. It chose not to confront the colonial powers and disbanded its military wing to comply with British restrictions.

We should remember that the RSS did not even fly the national flag at its headquarters until 2002. For its successors to now pose as the guardians of national unity is a bit rich. Its silence and aloofness during Partition-era convulsions deserve inclusion in any honest educational narrative.

Colonial cynicism, administrative haste

Another critical strand of the Partition story the NCERT suppresses is the role of British colonialism. From the 1905 partition of Bengal to the 1909 Morley–Minto reforms introducing separate electorates, and the 1932 Communal Award institutionalising divisions, colonial policy rewarded separatism and sidelined moderates.

By 1946, when the Cabinet Mission Plan offered a last-ditch federal formula to preserve unity, distrust and exhaustion had set in. Jinnah rejected the grouping provisions of the plan, and the Congress feared Hindu-majority provinces would lose autonomy.

With Britain reeling from war fatigue, Prime Minister Clement Attlee sent Mountbatten with instructions to exit quickly. The transfer of power, originally scheduled for June 1948, was brought forward to August 1947, leaving administrative vacuums and weak safeguards.

The Radcliffe Award, which was kept secret until two days after Independence, drew arbitrary, hastily determined lines to split Punjab and Bengal, unleashing mass migrations and massacres. To then pin the blame on Mountbatten on the British side, as the NCERT does, is to understate the cynical drift of British policy over decades.

The Congress’ reluctance

The NCERT faults the Congress for ‘accepting’ Partition. This, too, requires nuance. Congress leaders, particularly Gandhi and Azad, resisted Partition till the very end. Gandhi went so far as to suggest that Jinnah be offered leadership of a united government to preserve unity. Nehru and Patel eventually accepted the division, as the only way to avert endless bloodshed.

Azad lamented the Congress’s impatience, while Ambedkar, in Pakistan or Partition of India, argued separation was inevitable given communal polarisation. Rammanohar Lohia, in Guilty Men of India’s Partition, held all elites — Jinnah, the British, the Congress and Hindu communalists — responsible, calling for future reunification through democratic socialism.

To present the Congress leaders’ reluctant acceptance of Partition as authorship, as the NCERT modules imply, is historically inaccurate and morally suspect.

Serious scholarship — from Bipan Chandra and Sumit Sarkar to Mushirul Hasan, Gyanendra Pandey and Urvashi Butalia — has seen many interlocking factors leading to Partition:

• Colonial policies that entrenched divisions

• Competing communal nationalisms that fed off one another

• Leadership failures across communities

• Structural anxieties of minorities, caste groups and provinces

• Administrative haste that turned political separation into mass slaughter

Pandey’s Remembering Partition underscores how violence shaped national identities and silenced subaltern voices — particularly the women who were abducted, raped or displaced. Hasan’s Legacy of a Divided Nation highlights how Hindu majoritarianism and Muslim separatism mirrored each other, sustaining cycles of suspicion long after 1947.

The truth is complex, multi-layered — and our students must be exposed to the story in all its messy, confounding complexity. What the NCERT is offering them is a prosecutorial cheat-sheet.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former history faculty member of St Xavier’s College, Mumbai