Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Sunday (December 28, 2025) warned that history as a discipline is facing a sustained political assault, with communal and obscurantist forces distorting curricula and undermining academic institutions. He called on historians to defend evidence-based scholarship to safeguard democracy.
Inaugurating the 84th session of the Indian History Congress, Mr. Vijayan said the rewriting of history over the last decade had moved beyond academic debate into organised political project. He alleged that institutions such as National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), University Grants Commission (UGC) and Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) were being reshaped ideologically, while Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) textbooks were being systematically hallowed out to suit a narrow vision of the past.
The Chief Minister pointed out that the dilution or removal of key themes from school syllabi, including the Mughal period, popular resistance movements against caste oppression, communalism and the trauma of Partition. He said the ideological depth of figures such as Bhagat Singh had been stripped away, while the freedom struggle was increasingly portrayed as uncontested and led by a few icons.
Describing the omission of the Malabar Rebellion of 1921 as particularly telling, Mr. Vijayan said the erasure of leaders such Variyamkunnath Kunhahamed Haji and Ali Musaliar amounted to removing an entire chapter of anti-imperialist struggle led by rural poor.
He criticised attempts to elevate figures with marginal roles in the freedom movement while belittling Mahatma Gandhi, calling it a sheer distortion of history.
The marginalisation of Marxist historiography and scholars such as D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib, he said, reflected discomfort with history as a critical discipline grounded in evidence and debate. Mr. Vijayan also warned against the capture of research bodies through ideologically driven appointments and the promotion of pseudo-scientific claims, arguing that attacks on scientific temper and dissent would inevitable strengthen authoritarianism.
Highlighting Kerala’s alternative historical trajectory shaped by anti-caste struggles, social reform and class politics, he said figures such as Ayyankali, Sree Narayana Guru and movements like the Vaikom Satyagraha are being marginalised in national narratives, as was the 1957 elected communist government and its reforms.
Defending history, the Chief Minister said, was a democratic duty. “History will not be surrendered. Truth will not be replaced by mythology. Scholarship will not bow to power,” he said, assuring the State government’s full support to the Indian History Congress and its efforts to uphold a secular, inclusive and scientific approach to the past.