When the Solicitor General told the Supreme Court that a textbook is not a place for cartoons, he was not objecting to decoration. He was making a claim about what kind of knowledge belongs inside a school and what kind of reader a textbook should produce. The Court sent the matter to a committee headed by Justice Indu Malhotra, even though it has itself, in Indibility Creative Pvt Ltd v Government of West Bengal, described satire as having a “unique ability to quickly and clearly make a point” and warned that suppressing such expression stifles public debate. When a committee sits to decide which cartoons are proper for schoolchildren, it is deciding which ways of looking at politics count as legitimate knowledge for an entire generation.

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Political cartooning has worried every government, not only the present one. During the Emergency, when fundamental rights were formally suspended, cartoonists such as R K Laxman and Abu Abraham recorded censorship, personality cults and everyday abuse of power for readers who might never study constitutional law. Retrospectives on Laxman show how his “Common Man” stands silently in scenes of corruption, price rise and bureaucratic indifference and allows readers to measure the gap between political promises and lived reality. Political elites carry a memory of these panels as criticism that outlasts official narratives, which is partly why cartoons inside school textbooks feel especially unsettling to those in power.

This is what made the National Curriculum Framework 2005 an important shift. It encouraged writers to move away from rote learning and to use dialogues, visuals and cartoons so that students could explore democracy, power and inequality in concrete situations. Political science and sociology textbooks that followed turned the margins into spaces of inquiry, with drawings of politicians and protesters alongside questions that asked students who held power in each scene. For a brief period, the textbook itself hosted critical thinking instead of speaking only in a neutral, official voice.

The roll back came in stages. In 2012, protests over Shankar’s cartoon on the slow pace of Constitution making led to the Thorat Committee review of NCERT cartoons and the quiet removal of several images. Under more recent rationalisation, NCERT dropped discussion of the Emergency and the Cold War from political science and history books on the ground of overlap, a puzzling claim for events that shaped both the Constitution and India’s democratic imagination. Class 10 permanently lost its chapters on popular struggles and challenges to democracy, along with content on protest movements. The curriculum no longer needs to ban the question. It simply scripts the answer.

That scripting is visible in what replaced the coalition cartoon by Ravishankar in the Class 12 chapter “Recent Developments in Indian Politics”. The original had shown a sequence of prime ministers on a precarious vehicle and asked whether democracy would survive coalition rule. NCERT removed it on the ground that it cast India in a negative light and replaced it with two students exchanging pre-framed questions and answers about coalition governments. Where the cartoon left the question open, the replacement performs the appearance of discussion while foreclosing it. The classroom becomes a room where students receive the correct conclusion in the shape of a conversation, not a room where a drawing makes them uncomfortable before anyone has said a word.

The handling of a Class 8 Social Science book shows that prose now faces the same suspicion. In February the Court took suo motu notice of a chapter in Exploring Society India and Beyond which discussed delays, corruption and structural problems in the judiciary. It ordered a blanket and complete ban on the book and NCERT asked schools to return all copies, while offering an unconditional apology for an “error in judgement”. The authors were briefly treated as if they had tried to malign the courts before the Court softened its remarks, but the recall remained. Textbooks are safest, the episode suggests, when they deposit approved lines about institutions and leave children with nothing unexpected to interpret.

For young academics who enter textbook projects with the promises of NCF 2005 still in their heads, this climate works as a steady discipline. Each deletion and each public controversy narrows the range of examples that feel safe and pushes the work toward neutral description that will not anger any powerful institution. The National Education Policy 2020 promises creativity and inquiry-based learning, but the books produced under its framework are the least critically provocative since before NCF 2005. That is not an accident of implementation. It is the shape of a policy when the goal of critical thinking and the goal of institutional deference are asked to share the same page.

School textbooks remain one of the last mass printed spaces the state fully controls, while coaching centres and social media carry more unruly versions of the same history. When cartoons vanish and difficult chapters thin out, the curriculum keeps the vocabulary of democracy on the page but removes the scenes in which democracy is contested or survives only because citizens pushed back. Students still learn the terms. What they encounter less and less is the productive discomfort of sitting with an open question, which is precisely what a well-chosen cartoon does before anyone in the room has said a word.

(Rahul Verma is an Independent Researcher and Sociology Educator.)