Senior Congress leader and three- time Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, Shashi Tharoor has slammed the government over the removal of references to India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in the new NCERT class 11 political science textbook, calling it a “disgrace”.
References to freedom fighter and India’s first education minister Azad have been removed from the new class 11 political science textbook by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
What a disgrace. I have no objection to adding neglected figures to the historical narrative, but deleting people, especially for the wrong reasons, is unworthy of our diverse democracy and its storied history. https://t.co/k87G1HfVg5
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) April 14, 2023
Tagging a media report on it, Tharoor, a former minister of state for human resource development, tweeted, “What a disgrace. I have no objection to adding neglected figures to the historical narrative, but deleting people, especially for the wrong reasons, is unworthy of our diverse democracy and its storied history.” As part of its “syllabus rationalisation” exercise last year, the NCERT, citing “overlapping” and “irrelevant” as reasons, dropped certain portions from the course including lessons on Gujarat riots, Mughal courts, Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite movement, among others from its textbooks.
