Education News

Delhi New texts row The Delhi-based National Council of Educational Research & Training (NCERT), India’s largest publisher of school textbooks, is in the eye of yet another storm. Previously, during the five-year rule (1999-2004) of the BJP-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government in New Delhi, NCERT under the leadership of BJP ideologue J.S. Rajput had precipitated a national storm by revising school history texts and including Hindu myths and legends in them, thereby giving historical events a Hindu nationalist spin. The slants and nuances of NCERT textbooks are important because not only are they prescribed in the country’s 8,278 CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) schools, they are also standard texts in all Central government schools including 928 Kendriya Vidyalayas and 509 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas as also army, navy and air force schools. Moreover they serve as model texts to the country’s 31 state examination boards. Therefore a recent proposal of the NCERT textbooks committee to update the content of class XII social science textbooks to include socio-politically sensitive events of the recent past like the Gujarat riots of 2002, the Ayodhya row, demolition of the Babri Masjid (1992) and the pogrom against Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, has set the dovecotes of Delhi aflutter. According to Prof. Yogendera Yadav, a well-known political scientist and chief advisor to NCERT’s textbooks panel, all the post-1947 landmark events including the Emergency, wars and other controversies will be covered. “Political science cannot be taught by side-stepping major events which influence society and polity,” says Yadav. This decision to include recent history in school texts has evoked sharp response from the BJP (now in opposition) with its spokesman Prof. Vijay Kumar Malhotra attributing malafide intentions to the Congress-led UPA coalition government at the Centre. “The government is trying to instill anti-Hindu sentiment among children and together with leftists and pseudo-secularists is playing vote bank politics,” he says. Meanwhile the country’s Left and communist parties have welcomed the NCERT initiative. “Most politicians are born fools. Let academics judge these historical narratives rather than politicians. I don’t believe they are biased. If the Gujarat riots of 2002 allegedly sponsored by the BJP are covered, so are the Congress-engineered 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the Emergency of 1975. The new texts will definitely help students understand the major blots on our political and social history,” says Ashis Nandy, eminent socio-political analyst and a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Academics also argue that class XII students are old enough to judge these narratives themselves. “It is imperative to put the facts in the right perspective and make them available for reference, more so because students of class XII have sufficient maturity to make their own judgements and discern propaganda,” says Prof. Mohd Mujtaba Khan, who teaches political science at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia. However BJP ideologue Prof. J.S. Rajput, who was sharply criticised during the NDA regime for ‘saffronising’ NCERT texts during his tenure as director believes…