NEW DELHI, Aug. 14 — Quietly, a great upheaval is taking place inside Indian high schools.
For the first time, the messy brawl that is modern Indian politics, including some of its ugliest and most controversial episodes, is being taught in political science class. It is part of a broader revision of the school curriculum, with potentially long-lasting implications for how Indian children grasp the workings of their nation and its place in the world.
Using cartoons, newspaper clippings and questions that invite classroom debate on thorny contemporary issues, the new curriculum comes at a time when democracy has firmly rooted itself in Indian soil and is indeed one of the nation’s principal selling points as it tries to assert itself in the world. India marks the 60th anniversary of its independence from Britain on Wednesday.
“Sixty years after independence, it’s a statement of maturity of Indian democracy,” said Yogendra Yadav, one of the two chief advisers to the political science textbook committee. “This couldn’t have been written 30 years after independence. This probably couldn’t have been written 15 years ago.”
Shikha Chhabra, 16, offered an example from her new 12th-grade textbook, “Contemporary World Politics.”
She said she had always been taught that the nonaligned movement, in which India played a leading role during the cold war years and countries carved out at least a rhetorical policy of independence from both the Soviet Union and the United States, was “a wonderful thing.” The new textbook, she noticed, treats it differently. “Now they raise the question — does the nonaligned movement really apply in the world today? Was it just fence-sitting?”
She decided that it no longer applied, joining a contemporary hue and cry among politicians and political observers in this country about the merits of India’s new friendship with the United States. The class had a rich debate about the pros and cons of aligning with the Americans. It came during a chapter called “U.S. Hegemony in World Politics.”
“You do question what India’s strategy should be,” Ms. Chhabra said.
Her teacher, Abha Malik, head of the political science department at the Sanskriti School here, pounded on the textbook, which the National Council of Educational Research and Training, a government agency, rolled out four months ago for both public and private schools. “You can’t have a regular, regular class with this,” she said, beaming. “This book won’t let you sit still.”
In a country where rote learning has prevailed even at the most elite schools, the new emphasis on critical thinking signals a major shift in pedagogy. More striking is the substance of the new curriculum. Before, the emphasis in political science was on political theory. “This is realpolitik,” Ms. Malik said.
The Indian politics textbook, for instance, mentions several highly controversial political events of the recent past, from emergency rule under former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s to the attacks on Muslims in Gujarat just five years ago.
Chapter Four asks students to “identify two aspects of India’s foreign policy that you would like to retain and two you would like to change,” with supporting reasons.
The last chapter asks the class to trace the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which is the country’s principal opposition party today, since the emergency era.
“Basically political science taught you everything except politics; it was considered too risky,” Mr. Yadav said. “I thought my task is to get students to think critically, to begin to question everything, to develop a healthy respect for democracy, not by worshiping it but looking at it squarely.”
In contemporary India, revising school curriculums is a political ritual in which ideologies of left and right compete. The closest analogy may be the debate over creationism in American education. Governments of the day, whether left or right, have sought to change them to suit their beliefs. The B.J.P., which led a coalition government until 2004, sought to revise Indian history texts to remove what it called leftist bias. It drew howls of protest from critics. Not surprisingly, its successor, led by the Congress Party, initiated its own changes.
Its new textbooks have drawn remarkably little protest since they were introduced into classrooms, probably because Delhi’s most influential political players have not yet read them. But the very notion of teaching contemporary politics makes some uncomfortable. Recent events are simply too “surcharged” to be taught dispassionately, said Swapan Dasgupta, a conservative columnist and the father of an 11th grader. That is especially true, he argued, considering that post-1947 history was, until recently, rarely broached in class.
“Out of the blue you teach not only something that happened 50 years ago but you teach something that happened five years ago,” Mr. Dasgupta said, adding, “It is going to be politicized.”
The architects of the new textbook insist that this is not a politicized curriculum. For the first time in a politics textbook, they point out, there is mention of emergency rule, the handiwork of Mrs. Gandhi, then prime minister and Congress Party leader. Her party is in power today; her daughter-in-law is the party chief.
Kanti Bajpai, an adviser to the world politics text, described the new curriculum as “forcing” students “to look at what’s going on and why.” Mr. Bajpai, the headmaster of an exclusive boarding school in northern Dehradun town, said, “If you’re serious about active citizenship, you’ve got to do that.”
In Ms. Malik’s classroom on Tuesday, the topic was India’s security strategy. A student presented a brief history of the wars between India and Pakistan. There was discussion of Kashmir, the disputed territory that has led to two wars between the countries.
She quizzed the class on what military capacity India needed with hostile neighbors on its flank. “Nuclear capability,” the class offered. The nonaligned movement came up again. Harkeerat Singh Randhawa, 17, who prefers to be called Harry and aspires to be a diplomat, argued that it was more vital than ever before, with the United States in one corner and China in the other. “You have a new bipolar world,” he told his teacher.
Ms. Malik said she could glean what she called “a new thrust” in education. “This book announces India’s arrival,” she said. “I feel good teaching it.”
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