National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani said that references to the Gujarat riots and Babri Masjid demolition have been modified in school textbooks to avoid creating “violent and depressed citizens”.
The NCERT’s Director’s comments come after reports suggested that several topics in the textbooks have either been dropped or altered.
In an interview with PTI, Saklani asserted that the latest tweaks in textbooks are part of annual revision, adding that this should not be a subject of political ‘hue and cry’.
The revised Class 12 Political Science textbook by the NCERT does not mention the Babri Masjid by name and refers to it as a ‘three-domed structure’. Moreover, the Ayodhya section has been trimmed from four to two pages as the details from the earlier version have been removed.
Commenting on the references to Gujarat riots and the Babri Masjid demolition being tweaked in NCERT textbooks, the NCERT director noted, “Why should we teach about riots in school textbooks? We want to create positive citizens, not violent and depressed individuals”.
“Should we teach our students in a manner that they become offensive, create hatred in society or become victims of hatred? Is that education’s purpose? Should we teach about riots to such young children … when they grow up, they can learn about it but why school textbooks? Let them understand what happened and why it happened when they grow up. The hue and cry about the changes is irrelevant,” Saklani added.
It is to be noted that the lesson in the new or revised textbook focuses more on the Supreme Court judgement that paved the way for the construction of the grand Ram Temple in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya.
“We want to create positive citizens and that’s the purpose of our textbooks. We cannot have everything in them,” Saklani said, adding that the purpose of our education is not to “create violent citizens … depressed citizens,” the NCERT chief added.
“Hatred and violence are not subjects of teaching, they should not be the focus of our textbooks,” Saklani added.
Further, he went on to note that the same hue and cry was not made about the 1984 riots not being there in textbooks.
According to a Times of India report, a detailed table on Mughal emperors’ achievements has been omitted. The other deletions include the ‘rath yatra’ of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from Somnath to Ayodhya, the role of kar sevaks, communal violence post the Babri Masjid demolition and President’s rule in BJP-governed states, among others.
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