The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)

Many riots in the country… mentioning a few selectivel­y not good: NCERT head on omissions

‘Why should we teach about riots in school textbooks? Will create violent, depressed individual­s’: NCERT’S D P Saklani

NCERT Director D P Saklani Sunday justified the omissions of the Gujarat riots and the violence after the Babri Masjid demolition from the NCERT Class 12 Political Science textbook, telling The Indian Express that an expert committee felt that “mentioning a few selectivel­y is not good”.

Separately, in an interview to news agency PTI, he said: “Why should we teach about riots in school textbooks? We want to create positive citizens, not violent and depressed individual­s.”

Saklani also told The Indian Express that the revisions in the Ayodhya section were based on feedback from experts and were carried out to accommodat­e the Supremecou­rt’s2019 judgment on the dispute.

Theayodhya­sectionhas­been pruned to from four to two pages in Chapter 8 of the Class 12 book titled ‘Politics in India since Independen­ce’. As first reported by The Indian Express on Sunday, the revised textbook, which hit the market last week, does not mention the Babri Masjid by name, calling it a “three-domed structure”, and has deleted telling detailsfro­mtheearlie­rversion,including the BJP rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya; the role of kar sevaks; communal violence in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992; President’s rule in Bjp-ruled states; and the Bjp’sexpressio­nof“regretover­the happenings at Ayodhya.”

On the omission of content on communal violence in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition and the 2002 Gujarat riots,

Saklani said: “There have been many communal riots in our country.theexpertc­ommitteefe­lt that mentioning a few selectivel­y is not good and that history was taught in schools to give out facts, andnottoma­keitabattl­eground.”

He said the revision of school textbooks with latest developmen­tsisa“globalprac­tice”.“since the Supreme Court has pronounced its judgement on the Ayodhyaiss­ue,theexperts­feltthat this should be added,” he said.

Asked why other details on events leading up to the Babri Masjid demolition and its aftermath were left out, he said: “That could have been left out to make space for the new content (on the SC judgement) that had to be introduced.” This is the fourth round of revisions of NCERT textbooks since 2014.

Meanwhile, the revised NCERT Class 11 Political Science textbook associates “vote bank politics” in India with “minority appeasemen­t”, saying political parties “disregard the principles of equality of all citizens and give priority to... a minority group”.

The 2023-24 version of the textbook did not include “minority appeasemen­t”.

According to the NCERT, the rationale behind the revision is that the section in the older version “only intends to justify vote bank politics”, and that the revisionma­kesthesect­iona“relevant criticism of Indian secularism”.

In this section, both the 202324and2­024-25textbook­versions say: “If secular politician­s who soughtthev­otesofmino­ritiesalso manage to give them what they want, then this is a success of the secularpro­ject...toalsoprot­ectthe interests of the minorities.”

Both versions ask: “But what if the welfare of the group in question is sought at the cost of the welfare and rights of other groups...then a new injustice is born.” The answer to these questions varies in the two versions.

The older version reads: “But canyouthin­kofsuchexa­mples?... If you think hard, you might find that there is little evidence that this has happened in India... The mere fact that secular parties utilise vote banks is not troublesom­e. All parties do so in relation to some social group.”

The longer, revised version reads: “In theory, there may not be anything wrong with vote bank politics but only when vote bank politics leads to the mobilisati­on of a social group to vote en masse for a particular candidate or political party during elections, this distorts electoral politics. Here,theimporta­ntfeaturei­sthat the whole group works as a single monolithic unit during voting. Despite the diversity within the unit, the party or leader pursuing such vote bank politics tries to artificial­ly construct a belief that the interest of the group is one. In effect, by doing this, the political parties’ priorities short- term electoral gains over the longterm developmen­t and governance needs of society.”