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Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
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23 Mar, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Finally, a course correction. All the criticism means they are doing something right.

"Works by several prominent historians have been dropped from the reading lists, such as R.S. Sharma's book on ancient India and Irfan Habib's book on medieval India."

telegraphindia.com/india/ugc-draf…
The 3rd paper, "From Earliest Times to 550 CE", includes features of the "Indus-Saraswati Civilisation" and its continuity, fall and survival.

The 12th paper, on "Cultural Heritage of India", includes topics such as "Ramayana and Mahabharat: Tradition of cultural heritage".
The existing DU syllabus has three papers, taught over three semesters, devoted to the period from the 13th century to the 18th.

But the new syllabus has just one paper, the seventh, covering this period, reducing the importance of Muslim rule.
The new syllabus uses the word "invasion" in connection with several Muslim rulers such as Babar - a term the current DU syllabus shuns.

The syllabus describes the 1857 uprising against the British as the "First War of Independence", a term coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
Leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Bhim Rao Ambedkar receive less attention compared with the current syllabuses.

"There is little content on the spread of communalism in the early 20th century."

Yes, genius, it's not Pakistan Studies. 🤡

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More from @ruchirsharma_1

Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
25 Mar
"25 March [is] the 200th anniversary of The Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman empire. The war, waged by Greek revolutionaries between 1821 and 1830, is a struggle of the highest historical, national and social significance in Greece’s history"

brusselstimes.com/opinion/161729…
"The Greek Revolution showed the strength of an organised and determined people fighting for freedom and independence."

"It inspired the astonishing mass popular heroism that marked the struggle, but also entire Greek history."

parikiaki.com/2021/03/200-ye…
"It confronted the Ottoman Empire, on whose side stood a section of local feudalism, the church hierarchy [and] the notorious Holy Alliance."

"It bequeathed to the popular consciousness legendary figures who are still symbols of genuine patriotism, self-sacrifice, and struggle."
Read 6 tweets
Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
11 Mar
Not so fun when it happens to you, is it?

"The threat comes not from traditional espionage - undercover agents stealing secrets from governments - but from people who wield influence to serve the agenda of foreign governments without being open about it"

bbc.com/news/uk-563489…
"He said the US, unlike the UK, had the tools in the form of legislation to go after those secretly working on behalf of foreign nations."

"There's a lack of transparency in Britain about the way in which foreign actors...are exerting influence over our policies," said Mr Steele
"Mr Steele argued that individuals working on behalf of foreign states should be required to register.

This included PR companies, lobbyists, law firms and even, Steele acknowledged, private intelligence companies ... if they carried out work on behalf of foreign governments."
Read 6 tweets
Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
5 Mar
"Asking whether or not the census should continue to count ethnic groups is one way into the difficult conversation about how to reckon with the legacies of colonial weaponisation of ethnicity."
theelephant.info/features/2021/…
"Even though every census after 1948 has changed the list, it always builds on that first list made by British administrators, some of whom had very little understanding of the communities they were counting and classifying."
"Terence Ranger, a keen scholar of Kenya but also a former colonial official, coined the term “invention of tradition” to explain how the British came, saw, and invented ethnicity or – more specifically – “tribe”."
Read 5 tweets
Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
5 Mar
Bold and refreshing, @surajbrf!

"The BJP is not a parochial right-wing “fundamentalist” party...The Anglophone west struggles to describe the BJP for the same reason it doesn’t really know or understand the continental European Christian Democrats well."

swarajyamag.com/politics/why-b…
"Maternity rights, children’s rights, environmental protection, mental health, transgender rights, employee compensation, occupational health and safety, consumer rights, human rights — these are the subject of already passed bills or acts from this BJP administration."
"In India, while the Congress calls themselves the ‘liberals’ they are fundamentally conservative elites trying to conserve their privileged position in society.

The BJP are the [ones] trying to change the existing power structure to a more egalitarian broad-based one."
Read 4 tweets
Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
4 Mar
Oh no, the regime change propagandists (exposed by Noam Chomsky as a Pentagon front even back in the 1980s) gave us fewer good boy points! 🤡

Embrace the reputation, it is a sign we are acting as a sovereign state for a change, instead of a semi-colony or aspiring client state.
To some delusional people, such imaginary points are more valuable than hard power, and think collecting enough will magically unlock a seat at the UNSC and a red carpet welcome as a Great Power.

To be accepted as "honorary whites", while keeping the rest of society in poverty.
In Asian values, social constructs like "individual freedoms and rights" only have meaning when:

- people have basic material needs fulfilled, and thus the ability to demand such rights; and
- their state has the sovereignty and capacity to recognise, grant, enforce such rights.
Read 4 tweets
Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
3 Mar
"To turn its wary populace into eager participants in this imperial project, American intellectual and foreign policy elites framed global expansion as the establishment of a universal liberal-democratic order, guided and protected rather than ruled by Washington."
"America’s leaders believe the victory of liberal democracy is predestined, purely through its own perceived moral virtue: as if the victories of the Second World War and the Cold War were won by holding the correct ideology, and not...stronger industrial bases/amoral alliances."
"Without the idealistic universalism that has justified America’s global mission since the Second World War, the US empire would be an empire like any other: self-interested, amoral, and hostage to the cycle of rise and fall that has seen every other empire pass into history."
Read 4 tweets

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