There has been a systematic and selective elimination of chapters and primary sources that trace the existence of Muslim rule, subaltern struggles and disputed contemporary events. Rationalizations were made by NCERT (2023) about the removed, chicanised and truncated chapters on the Mughal Empire and the Delhi Sultanate and cut documentary passages in chronicles, such as the Akbarnama and the Badshah Nama. The Gujarat 2002 violence was downplayed or muted, and more contextual details on the assassination of Gandhi were deleted (Mansoor, 2022; Sharma, 2023; Chakraborty, 2022). According to Chattopadhyay and Sarkar (2005), South Asian cultural politics tends to collapse the popular into the people and to take the history of the people as the same thing as the history of subaltern classes. This confusion has a political result: the dominant forces are able to represent themselves as representing the people and silence or steal the voices of subalterns. The effects of such a move in the Indian context are the ability of the majoritarian projects to make popular legitimacy even as they continue to marginalize the same groups—the Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis, whose experiences are structurally under-represented in institutional accounts, including in school curricula (Chattopadhyay and Sarkar, 2005).

Students have an incomplete exposure to pre-modern and modern plural Indian history; the lack of multi-year study of Mughal history (in Class 7, slightly thereafter, and removed at Class 12) has a cohort effect of historical illiteracy of Indo-Islamic effects (Mansoor, 2022; Sharma, 2023). Formal erasure desensitizes omission into policy and subversion of the historical sense of empathy; erasure is not an act but a process, a series of undergraduations, a gradual defeat of the historical lineage in which students study it, which alters the historical curve. To restore the place of subaltern and under-represented histories, it is integral to re-establish independent textbook review bodies, including historians, sociologists, educationists and regional experts, and not emphasize centrally appointed officials. Curriculum politics can provide some guardrails in the form of multi-perspective curriculum frameworks which demand the representation of caste, religion, gender, and regional diversity in the form of a mandate.

The introduction of devotional, civilisational histories and indigenous assertions into history and science courses and the elimination of evolution and other fundamental courses in science have been the recent changes in Indian curricula. The Darwinian evolution in the NCERT/CBSE textbooks was deleted in some classes in 9 and 10, and there have been claims of ancient technologies of the flying vehicle (Pushpaka Vimana from the Legend of Prince Shri Ram in the epic Ramayana) in Gujarat supplementary books (D. N. Batra and others). The Prime Minister's foreword supporting this view and the acceptance and distribution of such state-made books further validate it (Kumar, 2014; Al Jazeera, 2023). The Scroll and TIME record improved curricular coverage on sacred geography and sites of pilgrimages (Naqvi, 2025; Mansoor, 2022). The world of science and history has been made to overlap: the myth is scientized, and empirical argumentation is supplanted by the epistemic disorientation. Teleological accounts of a continuous, glorious Hindu past are taught to students instead of evidence-based historiography or the scientific method. It is a dire need to place non-negotiable scientific standards that cannot be taken away, which can be overseen by erudite scholars in a particular field.

State and anti-national casting of elites drives dissent and professional criticism to the periphery, excluding secular historians and critical scholars and pluralist institutions. The trend can be illustrated by public attacks on academics (e.g., attacks on Romila Thapar and the removal of A. K. Ramanujan's Three Hundred Ramayanas from some syllabi) and the exclusion of pluralist authors like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad by political science books (Mohammed, 2024; Al Jazeera, 2023). And the statements of the NCERT director stating that the edits were expert-led, not clearly reviewed, or even named procedures also create a top-down assertion of authority (Al Jazeera, 2023). Official texts at the state level get staged as undeniable reality; pluralist voices and primary sources that can be challenged are put to the periphery. According to Chattopadhyay and Sarkar (2005), state and dominant players are attempting to hegemonise the subaltern by incorporating their figures and symbols into a homogenized popular politics. Something of this sort occurs at the level of understanding in the current revisions of textbooks: it continues to produce a rhetorical appeal to the people but at the structural level constrains the revelation of subaltern actors, movements, and conflicts to school history. The autonomy of NCERT and the state textbook board should be restored to somehow shield these institutions against ministerial pressure.

The standardized and disseminated texts are revised and implemented by the apex bodies (NCERT, CBSE) in a national system of schools and state boards and lessen local curricular autonomy. NCERT textbooks are popular both in CBSE schools and in state boards; the process of synchronous rationalization adopted by CBSE enforced numerous NCERT edits on the whole country (India Today Web Desk, 2022; Mansoor, 2022; Sharma, 2023). It is reported that it was distributed even to CBSE-related schools in other countries (Al Jazeera, 2023). Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), via its 50,000 shakhas and affiliated schools, spreads so-called saffronized curricula by which Hindu domination is naturalized and hostility against Muslims is reproduced (Mohammed, 2024). The digital media further enhances this informal schooling ecosystem as online creators spread their videos about forgotten history and mythicalized history and change populist narratives into viral knowing (Mohammed, 2024). This closed process of epistemology is one in which state texts offer selective silences of information, and these silences are filled in by civil society and online networks through the application of ideological affect, creating an uninterrupted pedagogy of conviction. To battle this problem, it is necessary to install a robust mechanism of dual-layered curriculum governance: an independent expert review board and a federal curriculum board. Having these bodies publish minutes, justification documents for changes, reconsideration documents, and all the reasons for dissenting a particular inclusion or exclusion must be inculcated in the process of ratifying a curriculum.

Provocative public statements, moral rhetoric, and media spectacles amplify revisions, converting controversy into performative legitimacy (Apoorvanand, 2023) and recruiting emotional loyalties. Political leaders framed revisions as a moral correction (e.g., Amit Shah's “rewrite slave mentality” rhetoric); high-profile events such as the Ram temple inauguration were narrated as civilisational closure, reinforcing the curriculum's affective messages (The Guardian, 2023; Mohammed, 2024). Ethics takes the place of deliberative pedagogy; civic criticism is made to sound like disloyalty. High-volume media environments and social platforms intensify the confirmation bias and selective exposure, and corrective and evidence-based narratives become more difficult to scale; thus, subjects such as media literacy need to be taught in classes 6 to 12. Also, teacher-training courses on how to detect propaganda, sensationalism and polarizing stories.

The standardized and disseminated texts are revised and implemented by the apex bodies (NCERT, CBSE) in a national system of schools and state boards and lessen local curricular autonomy. NCERT textbooks are popular both in CBSE schools and in state boards; the process of synchronous rationalization adopted by CBSE enforced numerous NCERT edits on the whole country (India Today Web Desk, 2022; Mansoor, 2022; Sharma, 2023). It is reported that it was distributed even to CBSE-related schools in other countries (Al Jazeera, 2023). An institutional space has been eroded as a homogenized and modified national narrative dominates through various schooling systems, regional curricular experiments and plural pedagogies. Centralization undermines federalism and reduces civic imagination. To avert this, curricular audits have to be made periodically in order to evaluate ideological bias in the curriculum, omissions and conformity to constitutional values.

Attempts to have remedial or alternative (non-mainstream) education include student groups, historian groups, and digital archives, which create alternative materials and forums for the wider public. The Karwaan and webinars run by historians establish remedial archives and social dialogues (Mansoor, 2022). These sources are valuable counter-narratives but are not institutionally penetrated; their influence is confined to digitally literate urban readers, and they are not yet able to reach state-wide readership paralleled by state textbooks. Developing funding structures of non-partisan public history projects that would enhance textbooks with easily accessible material. The open access repositories should be constructed in areas whereby the materials undergo peer review by experts of all fields. What will be beneficial is to establish effective freedom-of-information specifications in such a way that curricular reforms are no longer done at a low profile or beyond the radar of other pre-existing norms.