What Produces a History Textbook? The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Chughtai, Mariam. 2015. What Produces a History Textbook?. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:16461056 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA What Produces a History Textbook? Mariam Chughtai Richard Elmore Mark Moore Amartya Sen A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education 2015 © 2015 Mariam Chughtai All Rights Reserved For my father i Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of my doctoral advisors, Dr. Amartya Sen, Dr. Richard Elmore and Dr. Mark Moore. Specifically, I’d like to thank Dr. Sen, for giving me confidence and intellectual courage, Dr. Elmore, for showing me how to ask the right questions, and Dr. Moore for showing me the value of perseverance. I feel profoundly honored and privileged to have been their advisee. I am especially grateful to faculty assistants, Chie Ri, Tilman Feitag, and Mary Anne Baumgartner, for making sure my committee of very senior faculty remained accessible to me. The support of my doctoral writing group from the Harvard Graduate School of Education was invaluable in sustaining me through the many milestones of the doctoral program; for this, I thank Lissa Young, Lauren Elmore, and Charles Lang. For their mentorship and guidance, I thank professors Asim Khwaja, Shahab Ahmad, Parimal Patel, Tarun Khanna, Shankar Ramaswami and Ronald Heifetz. In particular, I’d like to acknowledge Professor Ayesha Jalal, whose work on the history of the 1971 separation of East Pakistan had a profound impact on me when I was a young adult. I thank my teacher Shafqat Mahmood for teaching the course in which I first recognized my calling to study education as a political tool. For their generosity with their time and guidance I am indebted to professors Fernando Reimers, Jal Mehta, Eileen McGowen and Deborah Garsen at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Shabnam Khan, Fouzia Saeed, Harpreet Singh, Baela Jamil and Aneela Asghar. I am also grateful to my friends, Mustafa Samdani and Beena Sarwar for refining the arguments and editing the final manuscript, respectively. For research support in data collection, I thank Aurangzeb Malik, librarian at the Punjab Textbook Board (PTB), Rehana Kausar, librarian at the Chughtai Public Library, Haji Hattar, librarian at the Library of the National Assembly, and Muhammad Usman who helped me collect old textbooks. I would also like to express my gratitude to the leadership at the Punjab Textbook Board, specifically, former chairman Shahid Ahmad Bhutta, and Finance Director Muhammad Asif, as without their support I could not have gained certain fundamental insights. I would also like to thank Sir Michael Barber ii for connecting me with the Punjab Textbook Board. I thank former PTB chairpersons Shaikh Izhar Ahmed and Dr. Fouzia Saleemi for sharing their valuable experiences. Finally, I thank the staff at Punjab Textbook Board who trusted me and candidly shared some of the most controversial aspects of making textbooks in Punjab. I am very grateful to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation for six years of financial support. I am also thankful to the Harvard South Asia Institute for selecting me as a Graduate Student Associate (GSA) three years in a row. Some of the most transformative conversations for the ideas expressed in this dissertation came from colleagues in the GSA program, and the larger community of doctoral students studying South Asia. In particular I am thankful to Lydia Walker, Bilal Ahsan Malik and Mircea Raianu. As a young child I heard my mother say, people who do not learn from their history their geography changes. I am thankful to her for showing me that it was not about knowing the answer to every question but learning to question every answer. I am grateful to my siblings, Omar, Reem and Ali, siblings-in-law, Faisal and Sarah, and uncle Terry Shaikh for keeping me anchored every step of the way. My nephews and niece, Aahil, Maaz and Sadia, who kept the child in me alive through this difficult journey. Expressing gratitude to my father seems out of place because, in many ways, we did this dissertation together; in some ways I did this PhD for him. My dearest friend, Dr. Stephen Pierrel (late) would have been proud to see me graduate today; his parting words to me read, A reminder – celebrating transformation, freedom, struggle, new beauty. You have come a long way. Congratulations. – Dr. P. (March 9th, 2006) iii Table of Contents CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1 History as an Instrument of Government Power ................................................................... 2 Research Question ............................................................................................................................ 3 Religious Political Extremism and Religious Fundamentalism ........................................ 3 Hypothesis ........................................................................................................................................... 5 Roadmap .............................................................................................................................................. 7 Three Bodies of Data: A Multidimensional Picture ............................................................... 8 Location in Current Research .................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER II. EDUCATION POLICIES ................................................................................ 12 Variable 1: Religious ideology ................................................................................................... 12 Methodology .................................................................................................................................... 14 Analysis ............................................................................................................................................. 16 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 61 CHAPTER III. HISTORY TEXTBOOKS .............................................................................. 62 Variables 2 and 3: Identity Politics and Military Revisionism ........................................ 62 Methodology .................................................................................................................................... 64 Analysis ............................................................................................................................................. 72 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 115 CHAPTER IV. THE POLITICS OF MAKING TEXTBOOKS ......................................... 117 Methodology .................................................................................................................................. 117 Roadmap ......................................................................................................................................... 125 Textbook Beltway ........................................................................................................................ 126 Changes After the 18th Amendment to the Constitution ................................................. 129 Variable 4: Political Power ....................................................................................................... 130 Kingdon’s Model of Agenda Formation ................................................................................. 136 2002 Curriculum: A Case Study in Agenda Formation .................................................... 141 2006 Curriculum: Additional aspects to Agenda Formation ......................................... 150 Variable 5: Financial vulnerabilities ..................................................................................... 166 Variable 6: Systemic Inefficiencies ......................................................................................... 181 Variable 7: Past History Textbooks ....................................................................................... 187 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 199 CHAPTER V. SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS ............................................................ 200 Summary of Findings .................................................................................................................. 200 Implications ................................................................................................................................... 203 Future Research ..........................................................................................................................