White-washing history: British school book claims Hindus justify terrorism

A textbook in the UK has attacked Hinduism and India. The book claims that Hindus turn to terrorism to defend faith and that apparently Hinduism justifies self-defence andthat is the reason why India has nuclear weapons.

If this sounds too much, wait till you read ahead.

Terror is an understatement when describing British colonialism.

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In the year 1943, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill starved four million Indians to death which was termed as "the bengal famine". Then, in 1919, in the Jalianwala Bagh massacre, over 1,000 Indians were killed in cold blood by one British general, Reginald Dyer

In the years 1951 to 1960, during the Mau Mau uprising, Kenyans were raped and tortured in concentration camps. At least 100,000 of them are estimated to have died.

If these aren't instances of terror, what are they? The British students will not be able to answer this question because their textbooks do not get the meaning of terror. How else do you explain one British schoolbook linking Hinduism to terrorism?

A book on religious studies claims that Hinduism justifies self-defence. It says Hindus will take up arms and that's the reason why India has nuclear weapons.

Our question, then, is that why does the UK have nuclear weapons? Last we checked, it was not governed by Hindu laws, and neither is secular India.

We are still unsure if linkingHinduism to terrorism is weirder orlinking Hindu scriptures to India's nuclear arsenal. This is just one of the many things wrong with the British education system. It is misleading, myopicand custom-made to glorify Britons vis-a-vis others.

British schools also exclude British colonialism from their syllabus. School students are not taught about the terror called British Raj.Their textbooks go on and on about the Nazi concentration camps, the American Civil war,Victorian England, episodes like the plague, the great fire of London.

However, the British East India company, Boer war, Jalianwala Bagh, Bengal famile and such episodes are missing from the textbooks.

These are things too uncomfortable to discuss. So, they whitewash the history andkeep an entire country in the dark. Nearly 32 per cent of Britons are proud of their former empire,33 per cent think British colonies were better-off colonised and 27 per centof them wish Britain still had its empire.