The Broken Guard at School.
(Chapter 15)
In the last chapter on Modern Jihad, Chapter 14, we had read about the behaviour of a Secular Empress. She arrived at her wedding without mehndi, without turmeric, without chooda. Her mother complained. The priest crowned her Samragyee anyway. She reported to the bank on Monday, completely free of Hindu markers.
The reader who has followed this series from Chapter 1 will have one remaining question. How does a Hindu woman arrive at her own wedding already emptied of every ritual that marks it as Hindu? The corporate guidelines banning bindi and sindoor documented in Chapter 14 are not the beginning of that emptying. They are the completion of a process that began in her classroom.
The guard was not broken at the workplace. It was never built.
Purification of History
On 28 April 1989, the West Bengal Secondary Education Board issued circular number Syl/89/1 to all recognised secondary school headmasters across the state. It was written in Bengali, and it identified certain passages in Class IX history textbooks as aushuddho (impure or erroneous), mandating their deletion or replacement with shuddho (pure or correct) versions.
The circular was not about factual errors. Every passage it marked aushuddho was historically documented. Every deletion it mandated removed a fact that contemporary Islamic court historians had themselves celebrated. What the circular called impure was politically inconvenient today. It placed history of Mughals in bad light. The same history we dealt with in Chapter 12.
A sample of what was deleted across multiple textbooks tells the complete story.
From one book, the sentence “Sultan Mahmud used force for widespread murder, loot, destruction and conversion” was replaced with “There was widespread loot and destruction by Mahmud.” Murder disappeared. Conversion disappeared.
From another, “forcibly marrying Hindu women and converting them to Islam before marriage was another way to propagate the fundamentalism of the ulema” was deleted entirely.
From a third, “The non‑believers had to embrace Islam or death” and “According to Islamic law non‑Muslims will have to choose between death and Islam” were both deleted and replaced with the reassuring line: “By paying jaziya to Alauddin Khalji, Hindus could lead normal lives.”
The Shivling used as a step at the mosque in Ghazni. Deleted. Hindu women directed to remain indoors to prevent being seen by Muslims. Deleted. The early Sultans eagerly converting Hindus by force. Deleted. Alauddin’s Chittor expedition to seize Padmini. Deleted. The options of conversion, jaziya or death facing non-Muslims. Deleted.
The ruins of Nalanda appear in one textbook illustration but the book is studiously silent on who destroyed them. After all, alluding to that would violate the circular.
This was not one rogue textbook. It was a state government circular covering eight separate textbooks, mandating identical deletions across all of them, with replacement passages specified and a requirement that already printed books carry a corrigendum pasted inside the cover.
This example circular was from West Bengal but similar effect can be seen in textbooks all over India. The strategy of glossing over uncomfortable truths is universal.
The Algorithm
The reader who has reached Chapter 15 will recognise this mechanism immediately. It is the content‑moderation algorithm familiar from artificial intelligence, as documented in Chapter 5, implemented in ink rather than code. It happened decades before Silicon Valley discovered the technique.
The West Bengal Board of 1989 did precisely what AI “safety trainers” did later. It identified which facts triggered discomfort, classified them as impure, and mandated their removal from the training data. The children passing through those classrooms were being trained on a curated dataset. Forcible conversion, temple destruction, the choice between Islam and death, all of it filtered out before the child’s worldview was formed.
Arun Shourie, who documented this circular in his book Eminent Historians, also recorded what happened when one of the architects of this filtering, historian K.M. Shrimali, was asked on national television to name a single text supporting his claims about ancient India. He could not name one. He refused to look at the Vedas placed in front of him. When pressed, he called the request for evidence a highly personalised attack and an uncivilised attack.
The mechanism is the one documented across this series: when evidence cannot be produced, immediately pivot to victimhood. Here, the Islamophobia shield wears the clothes of academic respectability.
Distortion of Hindu Faith
The circular did not merely delete. It also specified what must replace the deleted passages. The replacements follow a consistent pattern across all eight textbooks. This is the jihad-e-itihas.
Hindu faith is presented as the source of caste oppression, exploitation and social division. Islam is presented as the great emancipatory force that arose to liberate the oppressed. The oppressed Hindus embraced Islam freely because Islam offered equality. One textbook specified the replacement passage with precision: “There was no place for casteism in Islam. Understandably, the influence of Islam created an awakening among Hindus against caste discrimination. Lower caste oppressed Hindus embraced Islam.”
The reader of Chapter 13 on the Ashraf hierarchy will recognise the precise irony. The textbook presenting Islam as caste-free was written for classrooms in a state where Pasmanda Muslims at the bottom of the Ashraf pyramid had no more mobility than the Shudras they had supposedly escaped. The Ajlaf and Arjal classifications documented in Chapter 13 are the Islamic caste system that the West Bengal circular was simultaneously erasing from children’s awareness.
The Class III child, seven, or eight years old, was being programmed to be secular. Not educated. As we saw a fully programmed Secular Empress appearing for her marriage stripped of all ‘impure’ markers.
Karl Marx and Vivekananda
Shourie’s documentation of the Bengal textbooks reveals one more interesting detail: quantitative weightage. In the most widely used textbook of the period, Karl Marx received forty‑two lines. Swami Vivekananda appeared only once.
This is the Pact of Umar operating inside a classroom without a single Arabic word. The cultural and spiritual inheritance of the Hindu child is subordinated. The dominant ideology is privileged. The child learns the hierarchy of what deserves attention before she learns anything else.
By the time she encounters a corporate grooming manual that bans her bindi and permits the hijab, the asymmetry feels familiar. It has felt familiar since Class III when the jihad-e-itihas commenced.
The Romantic Face
The West Bengal circular deleted the violence. Cinema romanticises the beauty. Both serve the same function.
Gustaakh Ishq, produced by fashion designer Manish Malhotra in 2025, is a period romance set in the tehzeeb-world of Muslim aristocracy. It presents the Ashraf world of courtly elegance, Urdu poetry and refined sensibility as the pinnacle of Indian civilisation. Its target audience is teenagers, the same age group whose history textbooks had already been curated by the circular.
The producer, Manish Malhotra is a tailor. In the Ashraf hierarchy documented in Chapter 13, a tailor is Ajlaf, the lower converted class. The world the film romanticises would have placed its own producer beneath the threshold of respectability. The aristocracy being celebrated would have dismissed him with quiet contempt. The irony is invisible to its audience.
The title carries a second irony that the teenage viewer may not catch. Gustaakh means impertinent or insolent. Gustaakh-e-Rasool is the blasphemy charge that preceded the three beheading-method murders documented in Chapter 10. The same word carries romantic audacity in the film’s title and a death sentence in the slogan chanted outside a tailor’s shop in Udaipur. Kanhaiya Lal Teli was also a tailor.
This is called desensitization of a toxic word. The same term that triggers a death chant in the public square becomes a badge of romantic rebellion in the multiplex, and the child hardly notices the violence it carries.
The film restored the glamour of the civilisation built on the Pact of Umar. The teenage viewer leaves the cinema with the Ashraf world installed as aspiration, having never been told in her history class what that world actually did to people like her, the kafirs.
The Guard
The seven Dhurandhar women who walked into TCS Nashik in Chapter 1 were not just fighting a grooming network. They were fighting the accumulated effect of thirty five years of manufactured epistemological blindness, from the West Bengal circular of 1989 to the Lenskart uniform guide of 2026.
The Secular Empress was not born without her rituals. She was taught, deletion by deletion, replacement by replacement, from the age of seven, that her inheritance was impure, her history was oppression, and the symbols of her faith were obstacles to becoming ‘modern’.
The corporate office did not break her guard. The classroom never built it.
The Censors Who Posed as the Censored
Arun Shourie observed that the eminent historians who controlled journals, university departments and history congresses became the very establishment they claimed to oppose. They were not speaking truth to power. They were the power. They blackballed careers, destroyed reputations, and enforced mediocrity as the norm while writing fiery essays about the oppressed.
The inheritors of that tradition are the NGOs documented in Chapter 9, the Citizens for Justice and Peace, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, the United Against Hate, the foreign-linked bodies from New York, Washington DC and London who funded crores of rupees in legal defence for a local murder accused in Kasganj. They pose as defenders of the marginalised. They are the institutional machinery that classified documented FIRs, court records, undercover police operations and NIA chargesheets as garbage unworthy of examination.
The recycler’s wisdom applies here. For them there is no such thing as garbage. The term only denotes relative use of the material.
These institutions treated irrefutable Mughal Court chronicles as garbage while incorporating vile stories about Hindu practices as evidence. They presided over a thousand year old legal framework that reinstalled itself inside modern corporations and classrooms, and chose to call it Islamophobia.
This series of articles has exposed the entire architecture of Modern Jihad. Many examples are visible in many countries in the world. But this socio-economic jihad can not be fought by police alone. The common people, the ordinary human beings would have to stand up and push back at every private place. No matter if it is the School, the College, or the Office.
References:
- The circular number Syl/89/1 dated 28 April 1989 of Government of West Bengal
- Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud by Arun Shourie (1998).
- Shourie has demonstrated that this “eminent” fraternity, mostly aligned with Marxist thought, frames Indian history through class‑struggle and anti‑imperialist templates, exalting communism and certain Muslim‑separatist politics while marginalising or belittling Hindu cultural and nationalist figures