My truth is better...

All societies have trouble with their history. It is therefore commonplace to see friendly versions being peddled while the less savoury aspects are either deleted completely or glossed over. It is not just totalitarian regimes that attempt to re-write history.

In different degrees the democracies are also guilty. The British teach virtually nothing about their Empire to school students, the Americans gloss over their treatment of African slaves, the Japanese never mention the massacres in Manchuria during the mid-1930s, and so on.

One of the few exceptions is Germany, which makes it a point to tell it like it was during the Nazi era.

India is not an exception to this general rule. The last five years saw a concerted attempt by the BJP to re-tell Indian history in the manner it thought fit. When people protested it countered, not inaccurately, by saying that the CPI(M) in West Bengal was doing much the same thing.

Others pointed out that the Congress during its long rule since 1947 had been similarly guilty. This too is not completely off the mark. But the manner in which the BJP sought to re-write history stands out, not just for the substance but also, more importantly, for the purpose.

Now that a Congress-led coalition is in power, it is likely that an attempt will be made at further revision. Arjun Singh, the new minister for human resource development, has already indicated as much.

While some of this may be justified as a corrective, it seems pretty obvious that the re-writing and re-re-writing of history is a pernicious practice that political parties will inevitably exploit. They need to be stopped.

In order to do so it is necessary to get rid of three governing notions that underlie state-sponsored history. One, that history provides a justification for current policies; two, that the state is the best judge of what should be taught; and three, that the state should also produce textbooks.

None of these driving principles stands up to scrutiny. Using history as an excuse or reason for current policy can be divisive and corrosive, as we have seen. The state should not decide what needs to be taught because it inevitably leads to the doctoring of textbooks. And the state should not produce them because that is what leads to politicisation.

What should be done instead? The answer lies in allowing a hundred history textbooks to bloom so that teachers can decide which one they would like to teach from.

As long as the book covers the syllabus that individual boards can prescribe, there should be no "guidelines" on the treatment of the subject and topics. The ISC Board follows this principle and it is none the worse for it; so do the business schools, for instance.

The trick, therefore, lies in reverting to the pre-1969 practice when there were no centralised textbooks and when scores of publishers used to compete to have their textbooks prescribed.

Usually, the reason why a textbook was mostly widely followed was that it was simple, free of bias and helped students understand the subject and do well in the exams.

Mr Singh would do well to discard the current practice and restore the old one. Then education ministers will not have to bother about the correctness of history. The academic search for truth and the market's search for excellence should take care of the problem.