Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala government on Saturday criticised the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for its recent move to drop references to the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the killing of Muslims in Gujarat riots and accused it of erasing historical facts from textbooks.
State General Education Minister V Sivankutty said Kerala is firm on its position as far as the issue is concerned.
The Kerala government had strongly opposed the NCERT's earlier decision in this regard alleging that it was part of the "saffronisation" bid by the BJP-led Union government and brought out a supplementary textbook containing the dropped portions.
In a statement, Sivankutty said the NCERT had made similar attempts before as well and dropped certain portions from its history, social science and politics textbooks. Kerala reacted against it by publishing additional textbooks containing the dropped portions, the minister said.
Children should understand the reality through studies and that's Kerala's stand, he said, adding that the state has already made it clear that it won't accept distorted history or scientific portions in the textbooks. The minister accused the NCERT of erasing historical facts from textbooks and said the state would continue its proclaimed stand in the matter.
Dropping references to the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the killing of Muslims in Gujarat riots and tweaking the reference to Manipur's merger with India are among the latest set of revisions made public by the NCERT in its textbooks.
While NCERT did not comment on the topics being dropped, officials said the tweaks are part of the routine updating and are not linked to the development of new books as per the New Curriculum Framework (NCF). The changes have been made in the Political Science textbooks of classes 11 and 12, among others.
According to a document detailing the changes prepared by the curriculum drafting committee of the NCERT, the references to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement have been tweaked "as per the latest development in politics". Chapter 8 on Secularism in the class 11 textbook earlier said, "More than 1,000 persons, mostly Muslims, were massacred during the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 2002."
It has been changed to "more than 1,000 persons were killed during the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 2002". The NCERT's rationale behind the change is that in any riots people across communities suffer. It cannot be just one community.
