DOGRA HERALD BUREAU
JAMMU, June 18
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) general secretary and media head Rajesh Gupta on Tuesday criticized the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for its recent move to drop references to demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the Gujarat riots and accused it of erasing historical facts from textbooks.
The BSP had opposed NCERT’s earlier decision in this regard alleging that it was part of the “saffronisation” bid by the BJP-led Union govt and brought out a supplementary textbook containing the dropped portions. In a statement, Gupta said NCERT had made similar attempts before as well and dropped certain portions from its history, social science and politics textbooks. “ BSP leader reacted against it by publishing additional textbooks containing the dropped portions,” he said.
“Children should understand the reality through studies and that’s BSP’S stand,” he said, adding that the party has already made it clear that it won’t accept distorted history or scientific portions in the textbooks. Dropping references to the demolition of Babri Masjid and Gujarat riots and tweaking the reference to Manipur’s merger with India are among the latest set of revisions made public by NCERT in its textbooks. Rajesh Gupta accused NCERT of no longer being a professional institution and said that it has been working with RSS since 2014. He also claimed that the revised Class XI political science textbook criticises the idea of secularism and what is perceived as policies of political parties in this regard.
