NEW DELHI: “Gandhiji’s death had magical effect on communal situation in the country”, “Gandhi’s pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists” and “Organisations like RSS were banned for some time” are among the many parts lacking from the category 12 political science textbook for the brand new educational session. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), nevertheless, claims that no curriculum trimming has taken place this yr and the syllabus was rationalised in June, final yr.
As a part of its “syllabus rationalisation” train final yr, the NCERT, citing “overlapping” and “irrelevant” as causes, dropped sure parts from the course together with classes on Gujarat riots, Mughal courts, Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite motion, amongst others from its textbooks. A textual content studying, “Communal Politics began to lose its appeal” in reference to the time after Gandhi’s dying in 1948 was additionally faraway from the textbook. The rationalisation observe had no point out of excerpts about Mahatma Gandhi.
“The entire rationalisation exercise was done last year, there is nothing new which has happened this year,” NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani stated. He, nevertheless, didn’t touch upon the lacking excerpts which went unannounced on the time of rationalisation. A observe by NCERT on its web site reads, “in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was felt imperative to reduce content load on students. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 also emphasises reducing the content load and providing opportunities for experiential learning with creative mindset. In this background, the NCERT had undertaken the exercise to rationalise the textbooks across all classes and all subjects”.
“The present edition is a reformatted version after carrying out the changes. The present textbooks are rationalised textbooks. These were rationalised for the session 2022-23 and will continue in 2023-24,” it provides. Among the explanations cited behind the selection of dropped topics throughout rationalisation are content material based mostly on genres of literature within the textbooks and supplementary readers at completely different levels of college schooling; for lowering the curriculum load and examination stress in view of the prevailing situation of the pandemic; content material.
Subjects simply accessible to college students with out a lot interventions from academics and may be discovered by kids via self-learning or peer studying and content material which is “irrelevant” within the current context had been additionally dropped from the curriculum. An official from the schooling ministry, who didn’t want to be recognized, stated the brand new curriculum framework as per the NEP remains to be being labored out and the brand new textbooks as per the up to date curriculum will solely be launched from the 2024 educational session.
A portion referring to Gujarat riots has been dropped from class 11 Sociology textbook by NCERT, months after it eliminated the reference to the 2002 communal violence in two class 12 textbooks. The purged paragraph from the category 11 textbook was not introduced within the curriculum rationalisation booklet notified by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) final yr.
NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani, nevertheless, claimed that the change was permitted throughout the identical train and it didn’t discover point out within the official notification on account of an “oversight”. In the category 11 Sociology textbook titled “Understanding Society”, the deleted paragraph talked about how class, faith and ethnicities typically result in segregation of residential areas and it then cites the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002 for example how communal violence furthers ghettoisation.
“Where and how people will live in cities is a question that is also filtered through socio-cultural identities. Residential areas in cities all over the world are almost always segregated by class, and often also by race, ethnicity, religion and other such variables. Tensions between such identities both cause these segregation patterns and are also a consequence,” the purged paragraph learn.
“For example, in India, communal tensions between religious communities, most commonly Hindus and Muslims, results in the conversion of mixed neighbourhoods into single-community ones. This in turn gives a specific spatial pattern to communal violence whenever it erupts, which again furthers the ‘ghettoisation’ process. This has happened in many cities in India, most recently in Gujarat following the riots of 2002,” it added.
As a part of its “syllabus rationalisation” train final yr, the NCERT, citing “overlapping” and “irrelevant” as causes, dropped sure parts from the course together with classes on Gujarat riots, Mughal courts, Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite motion, amongst others from its textbooks.
The council had then introduced dropping the Gujarat riots reference at school 12 Political Science and Sociology textbook. In the category 12 political science textbook, two complete pages on the riots within the chapter titled “Politics in India Since Independence” have been deleted. The first web page carried the chronology of occasions and refered to the National Human Rights Commission’s criticism of the Gujarat authorities for failing to manage the violence.
“Instances, like in Gujarat, alert us to the dangers involved in using religious sentiments for political purposes. This poses a threat to democratic politics,” the deleted portion learn.
The second web page carried a collage of three newspaper stories on the riots together with an excerpt of NHRC’s commentary from its Annual Report of 2001-2002 on the Gujarat authorities’s dealing with of the riots. Former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s well-known “Raj dharma” comment on this part was additionally eliminated.
In the category 12 sociology textbook, NCERT had dropped a paragraph underneath the part titled “Communalism, Secularism and the Nation-State” which described how communalism “drives people to kill, rape, and loot members of other communities in order to redeem their pride, to protect their home turf”.
