The debate over cartoons in NCERT textbooks may appear, at first glance, to be a minor pedagogical controversy. Yet beneath it lies a larger and more consequential national question: What kind of democracy does India wish to nurture through its classrooms?
The recent direction of the Supreme Court to constitute a committee under former judge Justice Indu Malhotra to review the appropriateness of cartoons and satire in school textbooks has triggered a wider national debate extending far beyond caricatures themselves. The issue is no longer merely whether political satire belongs in classrooms, but whether Indian education is gradually becoming uncomfortable with criticism, ambiguity, dissent, and plural interpretations of history. Coming amid extensive textbook revisions across NCERT and several states, including the dilution of historical periods, selective cultural emphasis, and the shrinking space for democratic questioning, the controversy has raised deeper concerns about freedom of expression, intellectual inquiry, and the future of constitutional values within Indian education.
This is not merely about cartoons. It is about whether India’s classrooms will remain spaces of questioning or become spaces of carefully managed conformity.
The Shrinking Space for Satire and Critique
For decades, NCERT textbooks were respected for encouraging analytical thinking rather than rote obedience. Particularly after the National Curriculum Framework (2005), they incorporated political cartoons, constitutional debates, newspaper excerpts, dissenting viewpoints, and reflective exercises to cultivate democratic literacy. A cartoon can often teach power, contradiction, and accountability more effectively than official prose, and democracies worldwide have long used satire as a tool of civic education.
The famous Shankar cartoon depicting Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar during the Constitution-making process, though controversial, was included not to insult Ambedkar but to provoke discussion about democratic delays and public expectations.
The larger concern today is not merely whether controversial cartoons should be contextualised, but whether satire itself is becoming unwelcome in public education. If textbooks begin avoiding criticism, irony, caricature, or institutional scrutiny for fear of controversy, education risks becoming sanitised instruction rather than democratic learning.
The concern deepens because the cartoon controversy coincides with a broader pattern of curricular revisions involving the removal, dilution, or reframing of politically and communally sensitive subjects. References to the Gujarat riots, caste violence, democratic dissent, and institutional failures have been reduced or omitted, while portions relating to the Mughal period and Indo-Islamic contributions have been substantially curtailed.
The danger of selective memory is not merely academic. Nations are shaped as much by what they forget as by what they remember.
When History Becomes Identity Politics
The most serious concerns arise not from isolated edits, but from the cumulative direction of textbook changes.
In July 2025, revised NCERT Class 8 Social Science textbooks drew criticism after introducing a section titled “Note on Some Darker Periods in History.” Medieval Muslim rulers, particularly Babur and Aurangzeb, were described primarily through violence, temple destruction, and religious intolerance. Babur was characterised as a ‘brutal and ruthless conqueror’, while discussions of Mughal rule foregrounded massacres and demolitions.
No serious historian denies that political violence occurred during the medieval rule. However, critics argued that the selective framing reduced centuries of Indo-Islamic civilisation into a civilisational conflict narrative. Missing or substantially weakened were discussions on the contribution to architecture, literature, music, administration, linguistic synthesis, urban culture, artistic exchange, composite traditions.
The issue, critics argued, was not the acknowledgement of historical violence, but its selective framing. By foregrounding medieval Muslim rulers primarily through conquest, temple destruction, and intolerance – while substantially reducing discussions on Indo-Islamic contributions to architecture, language, music, administration, literature, and urban culture – revised textbooks risk reducing centuries of complex history into a civilisational conflict narrative.
Historians warned that the simultaneous shrinking of material relating to the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire in recent NCERT revisions could gradually portray Muslims less as participants in India’s civilisational journey and more as historical outsiders. Alongside the dilution of discussions on caste oppression, communal violence, and democratic dissent, such selective representation risks narrowing pluralism and weakening the constitutional imagination of India’s composite heritage.
Another controversial shift appeared in lessons emphasising ‘sacred geography’ and civilisational symbolism. A chapter titled “How the Land Becomes Sacred” foregrounded pilgrimage and sacred landscapes rooted predominantly in majoritarian traditions. The concern was not the inclusion of religion in cultural discussion, but disproportionate representation. If textbooks gradually foreground one civilisation while reducing the visibility of others, students may unconsciously internalise the idea that one community represents the ‘natural’ identity of the nation while minorities remain peripheral.
The ideological shift is no longer confined to history or civics. In Uttar Pradesh’s revised 2026–27 Class 4 mathematics textbook, Ganit Mela, an illustration of a Jain temple from Karnataka was replaced with an illustration of the Ayodhya Ram Temple. South Indian names were reportedly replaced with North Indian names, while coconut trees gave way to aonla(amla) trees in the name of ‘local relevance’.
Individually, such edits may appear minor. Collectively, however, they reveal a growing tendency toward cultural homogenisation. A mathematics exercise does not inherently require religious symbolism. Replacing one religious image with another therefore carries unmistakable cultural implications, reflecting how education begins shaping identity long before ideology becomes explicit.
State Textbooks and the Politics of Memory
While NCERT controversies attract national attention, several state-level textbooks present even more troubling examples of communal and ideological distortion.
Across states and political dispensations, textbooks have at various times contained material criticised as communal, casteist, hyper-nationalistic, or historically misleading.
In Karnataka, textbook revisions generated intense debate after accusations of saffronisation. Critics objected to the dilution of material relating to social reformers, reduction of discussions around Tipu Sultan, the removal of progressive literary content, and the ideological reinterpretation of regional history. Historians argued that Muslim rulers were increasingly represented mainly as aggressors, while Hindu nationalist figures received disproportionate glorification.
In Gujarat, educational observers have repeatedly criticised textbooks for stereotypical depictions of Muslims and simplified communal narratives, alongside inadequate treatment of communal violence and social segregation.
Debates in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh have similarly involved attempts to frame medieval history primarily through invasion, warfare, and religious conflict while weakening discussions of syncretic culture and shared heritage.The cumulative effect of such narratives is deeply concerning.
When children repeatedly encounterone civilisation glorified,another associated mainly with aggression,dissent reduced, and complexity erased,education gradually transforms into identity conditioning.
The Quiet Removal of Democratic Questioning
Equally significant is the shrinking space for criticism of institutions.Earlier NCERT political science textbooks included cartoons and exercises encouraging students to critically examinebureaucracy,corruption,coalition instability,democratic delays, and governance failures.Several such materials were later softened, revised, or removed.This reflects a broader transformation from encouraging democratic questioning to encouraging blind institutional reverence.Yet constitutional patriotism does not mean blind admiration of power. Democracies survive because citizens can respectfully critique institutions while remaining committed to the republic itself.
The Constitution of India guarantees freedom of speech and expression precisely because democratic societies depend upon criticism, debate, satire, literature, and artistic interpretation. Political cartoons have historically criticised prime ministers, Parliament, bureaucracy, colonial powers, and even icons of the freedom movement. That tradition is not anti-national. It is democratic in essence.
The result is often not direct censorship, but a subtler culture of self-censorship in which textbook writers, artists, teachers, and publishers begin avoiding any material that may invite controversy or political displeasure. And self-censorship frequently succeeds where official censorship fails.
Constitutional Patriotism or Cultural Conditioning?
The controversy over cartoons in textbooks is not an isolated pedagogical dispute. It reflects a larger struggle over how India chooses to educate its future citizens: through critical inquiry or cultural conditioning, through plural history or selective memory, through constitutional confidence or ideological conformity.
At the heart of the debate lies a democratic question: should education encourage students to think, question, interpret, and critically engage with institutions and history or merely absorb officially approved narratives? Democracies do not become stronger by shielding young minds from satire, disagreement, irony, or uncomfortable truths. They become stronger when citizens learn to engage with complexity maturely.
The Constitution of India envisioned a republic bound not by uniformity, but by shared constitutional ethics like liberty,equality,fraternity,secular citizenship,freedom of conscience, and dignity of dissent
Textbooks therefore shape far more than examination outcomes. They influence how children understand identity, citizenship, history, and the idea of the other.This is why selective representation becomes dangerous. When one community repeatedly appears associated with aggression while another is framed as the natural civilisational owner of the nation, education quietly ceases to be neutral. When discussions of caste oppression, communal violence, institutional failures, and democratic dissent are softened or erased, students inherit curated memory rather than balanced history.
Likewise, when cartoons, satire, and critical pedagogical tools gradually become suspect, the loss is not merely artistic. The deeper casualty is democratic temperament itself. A classroom uncomfortable with questioning eventually produces a society uncomfortable with criticism.
India’s diversity cannot survive through homogenised narratives or sanitised education. A civilisation as plural as India requires classrooms capable of accommodating debate, layered histories, and multiple inheritances. The purpose of education is not to manufacture ideological certainty, but to cultivate informed and thinking citizens.
Democracies rarely decline in a single dramatic moment. They erode gradually – when inquiry gives way to conformity, when memory becomes selective, and when classrooms stop nurturing independent minds. And that decline often begins quietly, in the pages of school textbooks.