NEW DELHI - After nine years in power, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has finally defeated the long departed Mughal Empire and other Muslim rulers, according to Aljazeera.

It has quietly pushed them to the margins in school textbooks, where they had occupied significant territory for the past seven decades, recent revelations show.

Several pages on the Mughal rulers and Delhi Sultanate have been deleted from the textbooks of different classes. The Mughals have not disappeared entirely, but students will no longer learn of the milestones and achievements of some of India’s most important rulers even though their legacy lives on in the architecture and cultural landscape of India.

It’s shocking – how will students make sense of present-day India without understanding the role and contribution of Mughal and Muslim rulers? Yet these edits aren’t surprising. They are in keeping with the ideological agenda of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which seeks to portray India as a historically Hindu-only land. Any other presence, especially of Muslims, is to be seen as an intrusion and pollution – a distortion of the ideal original past that the BJP wants to persuade Indians was the reality.

The marginalisation of Mughals and Muslims in textbooks mirrors what Muslims in Modi’s India are facing in real life. The recent textbook edits are part of a cultural genocide.