The Students Islamic Organisation of India (SIO) have strongly condemned the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) decision to completely drop references to Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate from the newly revised Class 7 textbooks.

In a statement released on April 29, the student group stated that the removal of important moments that were critical in shaping India’s history, culture, and political demographics is an “unprecedented assault on historical truth.”

“This is not academic revision; this is saffronisation, a deliberate attempt to communalise education, distort history, and mould young minds to serve the ideological interests of the ruling right-wing,” the statement read.

The new revised NCERT textbooks of Class 7 have no references to the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate, while chapters on Indian dynasties, ‘sacred geography,’ references to Maha Kumbh, and the NDA government initiatives like Make in India and Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao are among the new additions.

The new textbooks released this week have been designed in line with the new National Education Policy (NEP) and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCFSE) 2023, which emphasise incorporating Indian traditions, philosophies, knowledge systems, and local context into school education.

“Instead of presenting a balanced view of India’s diverse past, the textbooks now disproportionately glorify religious pilgrimages. Simultaneously, a sanitised narrative of the varna-jati system is being pushed, falsely portraying it as a source of “social stability,” subtly legitimising caste hierarchies and ignoring the centuries of oppression it engendered much before and beyond the British colonisation,” the statement read.

The SIO urged students, teachers, historians, and concerned citizens to unite and resist what it described as the “systematic vandalism of education.”