In an attempt to make Indian school textbooks less “biased and more inspirational”, the RSS-affiliated Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas has sent a 5 page long document of recommendations to the National Council for Education and Research Training. The Nyas, headed by Dinanth Batra has unequivocally pushed a non-secular agenda, and the fact that they believe these are viable recommendations is more than just a slight concern.
Some of the recommendations listed in the document include “Remove English, Urdu and Arabic words, a poem by the revolutionary poet Pash and a couplet by Mirza Ghalib; the thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore; extracts from painter M F Husain’s autobiography; references to the Mughal emperors as benevolent, to the BJP as a “Hindu” party, and to the National Conference as “secular”; an apology tendered by former prime minister Manmohan Singh over the 1984 riots; and a sentence that says “nearly 2,000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat in 2002” as cited in this Indian Express article.
“Several things (in these books) are baseless, biased. There is an attempt to insult members of a community. There is also an appeasement… how can you inspire children by teaching them about riots? The history of valour, of great personalities like Shivaji, Maharana Pratap, Vivekananda and Subhas Chandra Bose find no place,” Atul Kothari, secretary of the Nyas reportedly told the Indian Express.
In what makes for less than one page document, we present our own list of recommendations to the Nyas as well as NCERT since it appears recommendations are welcome. We recommend that sex-ed be compulsory in every school with mandatory attendance, that history classes in India need to include the North-Eastern states’ history that lies largely ignored, and that these terrifying excerpts from textbooks in the country be banned at once. We hope our recommendations are taken into consideration should any revisions be made.
If you liked this, you may also like: