There is a delicious irony in the judicial wrath visited upon the Central government over a class VIII social sciences textbook titled Exploring India & Beyond — Part II, published by NCERT (National Council for Educational Research and Training) – the country’s largest school textbooks publisher and nominally autonomous subsidiary of the Union ministry of education. In this textbook for 13-14-year-olds (since withdrawn and pulped), a reference was made to corruption in India’s much vaunted and proclaimed independent judiciary and also to India’s 50 million pending cases, the world’s highest judicial backlog mountain.

This passing reference to judicial corruption — last year a huge cash pile was discovered in the garden garage of Justice Yashwant Varma, a judge of the Delhi high court and widely reported in the media — aroused the wrath of Chief Justice Surya Kant of the Supreme Court who ordered immediate halt to distribution of the textbook and recall from all schools.

Taking strong suo motu action, CJI Surya Kant said he will not allow the judiciary to be “tainted or defamed”, expressing serious concern about such content being taught to impressionable class VIII children. Even after Prime Minister Modi and Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan issued apologies, the irate CJI was not ready to let the matter rest, discerning a “deep conspiracy” which he intends to expose “root and branch”.

The irony is that although professedly autonomous, NCERT is a willing handmaiden of government and very prompt in abiding by its dictates to write textbooks ideologically aligned with the BJP, which heads the ruling coalition at the Centre. Moreover under a cosy arrangement, all Central government and private schools affiliated with the CBSE — also an ‘autonomous’ subsidiary of the education ministry — are obliged to prescribe NCERT textbooks for their students. Which creates ideal conditions for the ruling party to shape history texts to suit its ideological preferences. Education minister Pradhan, who rules the ministry with an iron hand, in his over four years in office, has refused dozens of genuflecting requests for a conversation (interview is too scary a word for ministry babus) from your editors. In the circumstances, some sentiment of schadenfreude is justified.