NEW DELHI: Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday traded barbs after NCERT released new special modules on Partition, putting blame on the grand old party.

Congress leader Pawan Khera refuted the claims made in the book and accused Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League of “collaborating” for the division between India and Pakistan.

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“Set this book on fire if it does not mention all this. The truth is that Partition happened because of the collaboration between the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League. If history has the biggest villain, it is the RSS. Future generations will not forgive the role it played in spying, which it continued for 25 years at that time. And in that spying, there was collaboration with Muslims and with Jinnah,” Khera said during a press conference.

“Advani ji went to Jinnah’s mausoleum to bow and give thanks. So, when institutions are being interfered with and history is being distorted, are we supposed to sit quietly? Can they erase the pages of history from 1938, 1940, 1942?” he added.

Reacting to objections, BJP accused Congress of “running away from history when it is not convenient.”

“We have come to know about a special module of NCERT on Partition, but we cannot run away from facts.

The fact is, who was at the helm at the time of Partition? They were the Muslim League, Congress led by Nehru, Mountbatten. And who could stop the Partition? Either the Muslim League or Congress. There are statements of Nehru in favour of Partition. At that point of time, the wrong steps that were taken in greed of power and appeasement politics are still making us suffer.

Lakhs of people died, crores got displaced, thousands were raped,” party spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla said.

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“When we remember it, the Congress opposes. They want to run away from history when it is not convenient; otherwise they live in history. The question is, Congress is repeating the historic mistake of appeasement politics and greed of power. They don’t want to face the truth. They should apologise for the way they divided people,” he added.

NCERT in its new special modules said that Congress accepted the plans of Partition and “underestimated Jinnah,” while failing to foresee the long-term impact of the division.

“The Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan were by no means inevitable. Jinnah demanded it; the Congress accepted it; Mountbatten formalised and implemented it,” an extract from the module reads.

“None of the Indian leaders had experience in running national or even provincial administration, the army, police, etc. Hence, they had no idea of the massive problems that would naturally arise. Otherwise, such haste would not have been made,” it added.

Recently, references to the Mughals and Delhi Sultanate were dropped from Class VII content. The Class VIII book also described Babur as a “brutal and ruthless conqueror” instead of a romanticised empire builder.

The Partition modules are followed by backlash in Assam against another NCERT revision. The newly updated Class VIII history textbook has been criticised for claiming that the Ahoms migrated from Myanmar, a version at odds with historical accounts linking their origins to China.