NEW DELHI: India's history books, rewritten by the outgoing Hindu nationalist government, are likely to be revamped again once a new Congress-led government takes power, party leaders have indicated.

The Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi in 2001 began a programme of "rewriting" Indian history through the eyes of Hindu hardliners. Joshi, a former physics professor, had claimed that the new curriculum was cleared by his ministry and was not about imposing the viewpoints of Hindu nationalists or their interpretation of events.

Rather, he said the move, which created a fierce storm in academic circles, was about instilling values in children based on the concept of the equality of all religions.

But academics and opposition politicians, among them senior Congress leader Eduardo Faleiro - himself a former human resources development minister - vehemently opposed the historical reinterpretation.

According to Faleiro, there were many problems with the textbooks that Hindu nationalists circulated to schoolchildren. "The quality of the new books was much below the expected standards.

There were several instances of history being distorted. The subject of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination was deleted," he said, referring to the killing of India's apostle of peace by Hindu fanatic Nathuram Godse in January 1948.

"When that was corrected, the new version too had mistakes as the identity of Gandhi's killer was deleted," Faleiro said this weekend. Another example was when the new history textbooks cast aspersions on the Mughal rulers of India and Muslims in general, he said.

"Minorities were clearly defined as aliens and through innuendo stated as enemies," Faleiro said. "This obviously provoked members of (Muslim) communities, besides making them feeling insecure."

Media reports over the past three years have regularly pointed out distortions. Common examples were passages in textbooks glorifying the years of Hindu political dominance and denigrating the medieval period when the Mughal empire flourished.

A chapter in a high school social sciences textbook titled "Problems of the Country and Their Solutions" listed "minority communities" as the foremost component of India's problems.

The chapter also termed Muslims, Christians and Parsis as "foreigners" saying, "... apart from the Muslims, even Christians, Parsis and other foreigners are also recognized as minority communities," the Times of India reported recently.

"In most of the states, Hindus are in minority and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are in majority in these respective states," the paper said. Other charges against Joshi included removing independent historians and academics from education policymaking bodies and packing them with people sympathetic to Hindu hardliners.

The distortions will now be rectified, Faleiro said on Saturday as the Congress, which swept the Hindu nationalists from power in an upset electoral victory last week, went into talks with allies about forming a government.

"It is clear from Congress president Sonia Gandhi's speech ... (that) a new Congress-led government is likely to take steps to correct the distortions," said Faleiro, who was in charge of the education portfolio when the last Congress government was in office in 1996.

He was referring to a speech delivered by Ms Gandhi soon after being elected on Saturday as head of the Congress parliamentary caucus in which she slammed the "destructive and self-serving policies" of the outgoing BJP-led government and the ideology of its right-wing mentors.

Another senior Congress leader said on Saturday that the new government was preparing a common minimum programme - an indicator of the policies the coalition was likely to follow.

Education and foreign policy were two major issues being addressed in the programme, he said. "Whatever wrongs have been done by the previous government will be corrected by this government," the official said. -AFP