What India's Class 9 Students Will Learn — and What They Won't: Inside the NCERT Textbook Controversy That Has Divided Indian Politics
The Book That Is Rewriting What India Teaches Its Children About Itself
A 220-page textbook for Class 9 students across India's Central Board of Secondary Education schools has triggered one of the sharpest political and educational controversies of 2026. The National Council of Educational Research and Training has released a new Social Science textbook titled "Understanding Society: India and Beyond – Part 1" that makes two simultaneously striking editorial choices: it introduces, for the first time in any Class 9 curriculum, a detailed section on the 1975-77 Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, while omitting both the Preamble to the Constitution of India and any reference to the words "secular" or "secularism." The textbook will be introduced in schools from the 2026-27 academic session, replacing the four separate textbooks that previously served Class 9 students in History, Geography, Political Science, and Economics.
These twin decisions — what is added and what is removed — have immediately become a proxy for one of India's most enduring and fundamental arguments about the country's national identity, its constitutional character, and whose version of India its children should learn about in school.
What Was Added: The Emergency Chapter
The 1975-77 Emergency is one of the most consequential and traumatic episodes in modern Indian democratic history. On the night of 25-26 June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, acting on the advice of a small inner circle and citing internal threats to national security and stability — in part a response to the Allahabad High Court's ruling that had found her guilty of electoral malpractice — declared a state of internal Emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution. The Emergency lasted for 21 months, ending only in March 1977 after Gandhi called elections in the apparent belief that she would win them, only to suffer a historic defeat at the hands of a hastily assembled opposition coalition.
During those 21 months, the fundamental rights of Indian citizens were suspended, meaning citizens had no recourse to courts to challenge arbitrary detention. The press was placed under strict censorship, with newspapers required to submit content for pre-publication approval by government censors — a regime so severe that many journalists engaged in deliberate acts of defiance, including leaving editorial columns blank rather than fill them with censored content. Thousands of political leaders and activists were arrested and jailed without trial under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, including virtually the entire leadership of opposition parties and prominent figures from across the political spectrum. The judiciary's independence was curtailed through amendments that effectively brought higher court appointments under greater government control. And a forced mass sterilisation programme — conducted under the leadership of Gandhi's son Sanjay Gandhi and targeting primarily poor and lower-caste populations — resulted in thousands of deaths and has been described by historians as one of the worst human rights abuses of the post-independence period.
The new NCERT textbook introduces a section titled "Challenges to Democratic Practices in India," which discusses this period under the framing of it being "one of the major challenges to democracy," noting that fundamental rights were largely suspended, press censorship was imposed, political leaders and activists were arrested, and democratic institutions faced severe strain.
The decision to include this content was welcomed with notable enthusiasm by the Bharatiya Janata Party government and specifically by Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who said: "This is correct. NCERT has done the right thing. Future generations should know and understand the dark deeds of the Emergency so that such a situation does not arise again. That is why NCERT brought it to the forefront. NCERT did a good job." This framing — "dark deeds" — mirrors the language used by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders who have consistently positioned the Emergency as the defining instance of Congress Party authoritarianism, deploying it as political critique of the opposition rather than purely as historical education.
Congress leader Sachin Pilot criticised the inclusion not in itself — few politicians would argue that students should not learn about the Emergency — but in its context, framing it as part of a pattern of using education policy to advance BJP's political ideology. Congress MP K.C. Venugopal described the move as "divisive politics." The BJP, predictably, dismissed this as Congress's discomfort with having its historical record examined by future generations. Both responses are, in their own way, correct and incomplete simultaneously: it is genuinely important for Indian students to understand the Emergency, and the enthusiasm with which the BJP has championed this specific inclusion, alongside simultaneous omissions that conveniently favour the BJP's ideological position, makes the neutrality of the curriculum revision harder to assert than its defenders suggest.
What Was Removed: The Preamble and the Word "Secularism"
The omissions are what have generated the sharpest and most constitutionally significant outrage from critics. The Preamble to the Constitution of India — 85 words that serve as the document's statement of purpose and that generations of Indian students have memorised as the foundational text of the republic — does not appear in the new Class 9 textbook. Previous editions of the Social Science textbook included the Preamble and explained its significance as the foundation of constitutional philosophy, walking students through what each of its terms meant and why the founders had chosen them.
The 1976 Constitutional amendment under the Emergency itself, ironically, added two words to the original Preamble: "socialist" and "secular." Both additions were contested at the time and have continued to be contested by segments of the Hindu nationalist movement, who argue that these words were inserted by a government that had suspended democracy and therefore lacked genuine democratic legitimacy to make such a change. NCERT's decision to omit the Preamble entirely from its new Class 9 textbook removes both words from the curriculum in one editorial decision — sidestepping what would otherwise be a highly visible and politically contentious choice to include or exclude the amended Preamble specifically.
The absence of the words "secular" and "secularism" from the entire 220-page textbook is equally striking. The new textbook does discuss constitutional values — including liberty, equality, justice, and fraternity — but does not define "secular" or "secularism," and a review of the text confirms that neither term appears anywhere in the new volume. This is particularly significant given that secularism — the constitutional guarantee that the Indian state does not privilege or discriminate on the basis of religion — is arguably the most contested and most politically charged element of India's constitutional design in the current political moment, with the BJP-led government having overseen the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, having presided over the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, and having consistently challenged what it characterises as the excessive accommodation of religious minorities under Congress-era "pseudo-secularism."
In this context, the erasure of secularism as a term from the Class 9 Social Science curriculum is not an educational decision that can be plausibly separated from a political position. Secularism is not merely a political preference. It is a foundational constitutional principle embedded in the document that governs the Indian republic — a principle made explicit in the very Preamble that this same textbook has chosen to omit.
The Broader Pattern: NCERT Revisions Under the Modi Era
This controversy does not exist in isolation. It is the latest and in some ways most visible chapter in a systematic pattern of NCERT curriculum revision that has been documented and criticised by educators, historians, and civil society organisations across more than a decade of BJP-led government.
The pattern is well-documented: in 2022, the NCERT's post-pandemic "rationalisation" exercise removed from various grade levels content including chapters on federalism, secularism, citizenship, and nationalism from Class 11 Political Science; chapters on Democracy and Diversity, Caste, Religion and Gender, Popular Struggles and Movements, and Challenges to Democracy from Class 10; and democratic rights and the structure of the Indian Constitution from Class 9 Political Science. Significant portions of Islamic history in India were removed, including content related to the Mughal Empire. References to the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi's role was extensively examined in subsequent court proceedings, were curtailed. Content about the Babri Masjid demolition and its political context was reduced. Mahatma Gandhi's assassination — and specifically the ideological background of his assassin Nathuram Godse, who had links to the RSS that is the parent organisation of the BJP — was handled more carefully. Darwin's theory of evolution was removed from certain curricula. Dalit literature, tribal movement history, and Muslim literary contributions were among the categories that saw significant reductions.
In their place, content on the achievements of NDA governments led by the BJP was added to Class 11 and 12 Political Science textbooks, with a section explicitly titled "Decline of Congress system and rise of NDA led by BJP." Chandrayaan-3 educational modules were released that mixed scientific content with Hindu mythology. Vote-bank politics was associated in the curriculum with "minority appeasement" in a way that critics argued presented a BJP political frame as established academic fact.
The NCERT and the government have consistently maintained that curriculum revisions are educationally motivated — aimed at reducing content load, aligning with the NEP 2020 framework, and correcting what they characterise as the ideological biases of earlier, Congress-era curricula that they describe as reflecting "Macaulay's ideology" (a reference to Thomas Macaulay, the British colonial administrator whose 1835 Minute on Indian Education has been used as shorthand for Westernised or de-Indianised education) or as dominated by left-wing historians. Dharmendra Pradhan, responding to criticism of the Preamble's omission, has argued that the NEP framework gives due importance to various aspects of the Constitution including the Preamble, Fundamental Duties, Fundamental Rights, and the National Anthem, and has dismissed criticism as "petty politics."
The empirical question — which specific content has been removed across the full body of NCERT revisions over this period, and what the pattern of those removals reveals about ideological direction — has been documented in detail by journalists, academics, and historians whose analysis consistently finds that the removals cluster around content that challenges Hindu nationalist historiography, reduces positive coverage of Muslim cultural contributions to Indian civilisation, and diminishes the records of the Congress Party and secular constitutional principles while expanding coverage favourable to BJP governance and Hindu nationalist perspectives on Indian history.
The National Education Policy 2020 Framework: Reform or Vehicle?
The government has consistently presented these curriculum changes as the implementation of the National Education Policy 2020 — a sweeping education reform document that has its own legitimate intellectual credentials and that has received genuine international recognition for some of its structural aspirations, including its emphasis on moving away from rote learning toward conceptual understanding, its ambition to integrate knowledge across disciplines, and its commitment to mother-tongue based instruction at the early childhood level.
The new Class 9 textbook "Understanding Society: India and Beyond" is a direct product of the NEP 2020 implementation: it consolidates what were previously four separate textbooks into an interdisciplinary single volume, containing two chapters from each of the four subject areas that previously had independent books. The NEP 2020 design principle of interdisciplinary, holistic education is real, and NCERT has legitimate pedagogical reasons for the structural format of this new book.
The content decisions — what goes in and what comes out — are where the NEP framework provides cover for choices that are ideological rather than pedagogical. The NEP 2020 does not specify whether the Preamble should or should not be taught. It does not specify whether secularism should be explained or excluded. It does not specify that the Emergency should be included in Class 9. These are content choices made within the framework, not requirements of the framework itself. Using "we are implementing NEP 2020" as a complete answer to questions about specific content omissions elides the distinction between structural reform and ideological curation — a distinction that critics argue is being deliberately blurred.
Who Controls Curriculum, Controls Memory
The stakes of this controversy extend beyond partisan politics, though they are certainly political. What a country's children are taught about their own history, their own constitution, and the foundational principles of their republic shapes, across generations, what citizens know, what they value, and what they can critically evaluate. A student who never learns what secularism means cannot engage with debates about whether her country is adhering to its secular constitutional commitments. A student who learns about the Emergency only as "dark deeds" of Congress, without the full constitutional and historical context of how such abuses become possible and what structural safeguards exist against them, has been given a political talking point rather than an education. A student who never reads the Preamble has been denied the 85 words that the framers of the Constitution chose, with great deliberation and through fierce debate, as the document's own statement of the kind of country India was choosing to be.
This is not, ultimately, a controversy about whether Narendra Modi or Indira Gandhi should receive more favourable historical treatment in a Class 9 textbook. It is a controversy about whether India's public education system is performing its foundational civic function — equipping the next generation of citizens with accurate, complete, and honest knowledge about their country's past and present so that they can participate in its democratic future — or whether it is being shaped to produce citizens whose historical knowledge has been pre-filtered to align with the ideological preferences of whoever holds power at the moment the textbooks are written.
That question is not unique to India. It is asked in every country where public education policy intersects with contested national identity. But India's specific circumstances — a constitutional democracy with explicit secular commitments, governed by a party that has been consistently accused of using state institutions to advance an opposing Hindu nationalist vision of national identity — give the question particular urgency, and the Class 9 Social Science textbook controversy of 2026 particular significance.
Sources
- Pragativadi — NCERT Class 9 Textbook Adds Emergency Chapter, Omits Preamble and 'Secularism'
- Scroll.in — NCERT Adds Section on Emergency in Class 9 Textbook for First Time
- Asianet Newsable — NCERT Emergency Chapter: Congress Slams 'Divisive Politics', BJP Lauds
- The News Minute — Omissions and Revisions in Modi Years: How NCERT Textbooks Are Being Rewritten
- Wikipedia — NCERT Textbook Controversies
- Webindia123 — Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan Refutes Allegations on Removal of Preamble from NCERT Textbooks