How India and China explain the Holocaust to school kids

Indian school history textbooks don’t use the word “holocaust” while teaching world history and the second World War. In one instance, where a government-prescribed textbook was published during the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) previous reign at the centre, even the details of the genocide are completely glossed over.

These revelations were made in a study titled “International Status of Education About the Holocaust,” conducted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and the George Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. The study aimed to compare how the holocaust is taught in countries around the world and find out whether the dissemination of information about the holocaust is fragmented or distorted in any way to serve political ends.

In surveying five prescribed textbooks in India, the study found that none of them makes a mention of the term “holocaust” or its Hebrew equivalent “shoah.” The holocaust, which is broadly defined as the killing of millions of Jews and other minority groups by the Nazis during World War Two, is only mentioned as part of several events that occurred during the war.