Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Friday strongly condemned the dropping of certain chapters and portions from NCERT Class 12 textbooks and alleged that "complete saffronisation" of academic books was the objective behind the move.
The educational body has been facing criticism for “rationalisation” of textbooks which dropped the chapters on ‘Kings and Chronicles’ and ‘The Mughal Courts’ from the CBSE history books for Class 12.
Historical facts cannot be denied by just cutting out portions that are inconvenient (to some one) from textbooks, he said in a Facebook post. "Excluding certain portions and chapters from the textbooks with a political motive was not only a negation of history but also a condemnable move. It is evident that the objective behind such actions is the "complete saffronisation of textbooks", the CM added.
The minister also that it was clear whose interest was being served by the omission of portions about the assassination of the 'Father of the Nation' Mahatma Gandhi and the subsequent banning of the RSS, from the political science textbook of Class 12. Portions about the Mughal Empire were also cut down from the history textbook of the same class, he pointed out.
"The medieval history of India, excluding the Mughal Empire, is incomplete," he said, alleging that medieval Indian history had always been an area that the Sangh Parivar had twisted and distorted. The Kerala CM accused the NCERT of "whitewashing the fake history" created by the Sangh Parivar by excluding these portions.
He further charged that the Sangh Parivar, through the textbooks, was trying to inculcate the politics of hatred and division into the minds of children. Accusing the NCERT of supporting the distorted methodology of the RSS in writing history, Vijayan said strong protest needs to be registered against such moves which would otherwise undermine the secular education envisaged by the Constitution.
The NCERT recently dropped from its Class 12 history textbook certain portions on Mahatma Gandhi and how his pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity "provoked Hindu extremists". It also left out the portion where the government had placed a ban on the RSS after Gandhi's assassination. The revision of textbooks by obfuscating facts has triggered a row, PTI reported.
Earlier, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh called it, "Whitewashing with a vengeance" while tagging a media report on it on Twitter.
Tagging another report which claimed that chapters related to the Mughals and Dalit writers have also been axed from the textbooks, he said, "This reveals the ruling regime's TRUE mindset. After all, the RSS had not only attacked Gandhi but had been bitterly opposed to Dr Ambedkar as well."
NCERT Chief Dinesh Saklani said the syllabus was "rationalised" in June last year itself, and there has been no trimming of the curriculum this year. The top advisory body for Centre NCERT, according to a report in NDTV has said, "As we explained last year as well, there has been a lot of learning loss due to the Covid pandemic and the students underwent a lot of trauma. To help stressed students, and as a responsibility to society and the nation, it was felt that the content load in textbooks should be reduced”.
(With inputs from PTI)
