We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
You don’t understand what the government is doing wrong because you don’t know history.
Did the Mughals commit atrocities ? Yes. Were they motivated by religion? More often than not - no. They were motivated by power and empire building. They had just as many instances where they had happy alliances with Hindu kings as wars with Hindu kings. They had just as many instances of building temples and punishing soldiers who rampaged villages as they did instance of destroying temples. History is complicated. The Mughals built an empire not just through conquest but also - treaty and friendships.
Should we be teaching the history of the southern / eastern India more ? Yeah likely. But adding that does not need to mean reducing the Mughal history.
The reason Gandhi and Nehru are taught far more than Bose or whoever - is because Gandhi and Nehru were simply more popular than any one else. It’s incontestable. Subhash chandra Bose wouldn’t have been able to win elections in india for decades after independence. Most people in large parts pof the country felt no affinity for him. Maybe many people didn’t feel affinity for Nehru or Gandhi either. But Nehru and Gandhi made political friends and allies with regional leaders, something Bose didn’t. Big things like independence are achieved through collaboration between many kinds of actors. Besides it’s probably just as true that England couldn’t afford the colonies as big as India in the aftermath of world war 2. And if you teach Bose you have to teach the Nazi stuff.
The school history curriculum isn’t great - it has been cannibalised over the years to accommodate political interests. Our students don’t learn how to think historically or understand historical information meaningfully. This latest attempt to skew it even more is a difference in kind not in degree.