History books teach hatred in South Asia too

History professor Naeem Afsar Mughal concedes with a tinge of regret that the school textbooks his students read at a postgraduate college for boys in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir are biased against India.

History professor Naeem Afsar Mughal concedes with a tinge of regret that the school textbooks his students read at a postgraduate college for boys in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir are biased against India.

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"I must admit that prejudices are involved. Reading history only gives you pleasure when there is no preconceptions," says Mughal, a teacher for nearly 20 years in Muzaffarabad, the capital of PoK.

With a row over a nationalist schoolbook on the other side of Asia sparking the worst rift between China and Japan in decades, analysts say the issue of how history is taught is a source of friction on the subcontinent.

"Textbooks are the cultural DNA of a nation, and our history textbooks are full of hatred towards India," Zafarullah Khan, director of the Islamabad-based private Centre for Civic Education, tells AFP.

On Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistani textbooks only mention religious themes concerning the majority Muslim area, ignoring the wider political issues, Khan says.

History is also a controversial subject in Bangladesh as the two main political parties have starkly contrasting ideas about how events unfolded during the country's independence struggle and who should receive the credit.

More than 30 years on, Bangladeshis disagree over who was first to proclaim the country's independence.