The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) class 12 sociology paper held on Wednesday asked students to name the party under which the “anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002” took place, a question the board later said was “inappropriate” and against its guidelines.
The CBSE also said strict action would be taken against “responsible persons”.
“A question has been asked in today’s class 12 sociology Term 1 exam which is inappropriate and in violation of the CBSE guidelines for external subject experts for setting question papers. CBSE acknowledges the error made and will take strict action against the responsible persons,” the board said in an official statement.
It said the CBSE guidelines for paper-setters clearly state that they have to ensure the questions should be academic-oriented only and should be neutral about class and religion and “should not touch upon domains that could harm sentiments of people based on social and political choices”.
The multiple-choice question in the sociology exam asked “The unprecedented scale and spread of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 took place under which government?”
The options offered were — Congress, BJP, Democratic and Republican.
The question appears to have been picked from a paragraph under the chapter, ‘The Challenges of Cultural Diversity’, in the NCERT Class 12 Sociology textbook, ‘Indian Society’.
The Gujarat riots broke out in the Western state of India in 2002 after the burning of two coaches of the Sabarmati Express train near Godhra railway station in which 59 Hindu ‘karsevaks’ were killed. Some 20,000 Muslim homes and businesses and 360 places of worship were destroyed and roughly 150,000 people were displaced. The riots had left over a thousand dead. The charred bodies of the 59 victims were displayed for the public in Ahmedabad.
Later, in a concluding report in February 2012, a special investigation team released Narendra Modi from all the charges levelled against him, who was the then chief minister of Gujarat in 2002, and 63 others citing “no prosecutable evidence”.
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