NCERT is operating under the deep, paralytic anxiety of the institutional bureaucrat

NCERT's curriculum is now dictated by a fragile equilibrium—wedged between the terror of judicial contempt and the immediate threat of viral social media outrage.

NCERT director Dinesh Saklani | Twitter | @NCERT

The 24-hour reversal over the 4,500-year-old Dancing Girl figurine—from covering it up to uncovering it after an angry public backlash—laid bare NCERT’s bureaucratic entropy. Most commentators have eagerly laughed this off as a superficial victory against a sudden wave of Victorian prudery. But the truth is darker and needs more deciphering. This was not a random act of moral policing or conservative prudishness. It is a structural symptom of profound bureaucratic fear and radical, dangerous institutional insularity.

Today, the debates in the public sphere surrounding school curricula in India are trapped in a predictable, exhausted binary. Media analysts and political commentators reflexively filter every single revision through the lens of “saffronisation”. They view textbook updates as purely ideological projects driven by a triumphant cultural right-wing. Yet this narrative entirely misses the engine room of the modern Indian state—the deep, paralytic anxiety of the institutional bureaucrat.

What happened to the Mohenjo-daro figurine in the Class 9 Arts textbook, Madhurima, was not a mere act of aggressive cultural assertion. It was a classic, defensive administrative response, designed to mitigate a disaster before it even started. Understanding why a state bureaucrat would try to shade a world-renowned, four-inch-tall ancient bronze figurine requires looking back to February.

The fear that changed NCERT

In an unprecedented move, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of criminal contempt against the director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) Dinesh Prasad Saklani and officials of the Ministry of Education. The trigger was a controversial section in the revised Class 8 Social Science textbook, Exploring Society: India and Beyond. The chapter, titled “The Role of the Judiciary in Our Society,” directly addressed the menace of corruption at various levels of the legal system alongside the massive backlog of pending cases.

A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant took extreme offence to a single line: “People do experience corruption at various levels of the judiciary.” The court didn’t stop at merely criticising the text. It also issued a sweeping, immediate blanket ban on the text’s physical printing and digital dissemination. It ordered a nationwide seizure of these deemed “offensive textbooks,” effectively barring the academic members responsible from future publicly funded curricular work. It issued show-cause notices for criminal contempt. The judges termed this particular text a “deep-rooted, well-orchestrated conspiracy” to malign the dignity of the country’s judicial system. Stripped of institutional protection, the NCERT was forced to issue an unconditional public apology to escape severe judicial penalties.

This historic judicial clampdown sent shivers through the council’s administrative hierarchy. In its wake, NCERT quietly birthed an internal shadow mechanism. It is  commonly referred to as the “Project Office.” This body was not created to enrich pedagogy, foster independent thinking, or encourage historical inquiry among school children. It was created purely as an engine for defensive pre-censorship. Its sole, unwritten mandate is to systematically audit and scrub any phrase, concept, illustration, or historical artefact that could invite public interest litigation, a viral tweet, or another catastrophic warning from the top court.

In such a climate governed by absolute fear, anything outside a dry, sterile script is viewed as a high-risk, career-ending liability. Even a 10.5-centimetre Harappan statuette becomes a threat to a bureaucrat’s existence.

The cost of intellectual insularity

This structural panic feeds into, and is furthered by, NCERT’s long-standing institutional insularity. For decades, the council has progressively severed its ties with broader, independent academic networks, choosing instead to lock itself inside an echo chamber of compliant state committees and defensive bureaucrats. When an institution isolates itself from rigorous, peer-reviewed global scholarship, it often loses the intellectual confidence required to stand its ground.

Without the weight of external academic consensus, NCERT’s default reaction under external pressure is two-fold: either to domesticate or to sanitise history. It treats the past not as an empirical reality to be studied but as an administrative minefield to be cleared. By attempting to drape or shade the figurine, the council sought a preventive moral cover-up to shield its fragile, isolated hierarchy from the outside world. It was a preemptive defence mechanism born of an institution that has forgotten how to engage with historical complexity, choosing to hide behind an inward-looking, protective shell.

If NCERT keeps treading down this road, it leaves us with a pretty ridiculous question: Are we going to ban schoolkids from walking into the National Museum in New Delhi next, where the actual bronze figurine of the Indus Valley Civilisation has been standing out in the open for decades? A confident educational system would use these textbooks to teach real critical thinking. It would challenge students to examine the historical context and the incredible metallurgy of the ancient world. Instead, an increasingly isolated NCERT is doing the opposite of what is required, trading academic honesty for pure administrative panic and choosing the safety of a digital airbrush over historical truth.

From textbooks to crisis management

The ultimate institutional casualty here is the complete abandonment of critical pedagogical permanence. When the public caught the digital edit, the council panicked once more, deleting the revision overnight and offering the hollow defence that there was “no specific reason” for the change. This rapid rollback exposes a dangerous institutional shift: NCERT is no longer designing textbook content intended to educate and ground generations of Indian students. Instead, it is being edited in real time through PR crisis management. Its curriculum is now dictated by a fragile equilibrium—wedged between the terror of judicial contempt on one side and the immediate threat of viral social media outrage on the other.

When educational policy is driven entirely by institutional survival rather than academic freedom, the system loses its anchor. The standard political rhetoric surrounding the “saffronisation” of textbooks fails to capture this nuanced administrative rot. This is a story of total structural collapse, where the premier custodian of school education functions as a reactive corporate public relations desk.

When India’s apex educational body is too terrified to print a historic bronze figurine exactly as it was unearthed in 1926, it has forfeited its intellectual authority. An institution operating under a climate of bureaucratic fear and intellectual insularity can no longer be trusted to teach the past.

Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule is a lawyer, a Senior Scholar at IIT-Delhi, a Creighton Peden scholar in the USA and an alumnus of TISS. He tweets @ Surajya_Raje_. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant Dixit)