New Delhi, India – In 2018, a year before the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stormed back to power for a second term, a federal education minister said he believed Indians were the descendants of Hindu “rishis” (sages) and not monkeys. In a move that the NCERT claimed would “rationalise” textbooks and reduce the workload on students affected by the pandemic, it deleted several pages from the Class 7 history textbook that referred to the Delhi Sultanate rulers, such as the Mamluks, Tughlaqs, Khiljis and Lodis. The review also found that two chapters in Class 7 social science textbook were removed