Popular farmer movement of Tikait-led Bharatiya Kisan Union removed from NCERT textbooks

Karam Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 25

Amid various deletions by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) from the content of their textbooks, the body has also removed a popular movement of farmer union – Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU).

Condemning the deletion, BKU said they would meet the union government over this issue.

It was the rise of the BKU — in the late eighties and disciplined agitation in 1988, in New Delhi — that has been removed from the Chapter titled ‘Rise of Popular Movements’ of the class 12 political science textbook.

“The BKU was one of the leading organisations in the farmers’ movement of the eighties,” reads the excerpt of deleted contents from the textbook.

Notably, then farmer leader, Mahendra Singh Tikait, father of Rakesh Tikait, had founded the Bhartiya Kisan Union.

“Throughout the decade of eighties, the BKU organised massive rallies of these farmers in many district headquarters of the State and also at the national capital,” another excerpt that has been deleted.

Some political experts are looking at this deletion in light of the yearlong farmers’ agitation, which was led by the BKU against the three farm laws at Delhi borders. The farmers’ agitation was wound up in December 2021, after the three Agri laws were scrapped.

NCERT though claimed that contents were removed last year during the rationalization of NCERT textbooks. However, students received rationalised textbooks from this academic session.

Farmers’ leader Rakesh Tikait while talking to The Tribune said, “We will meet the central government over this. This union government wants to remove factual history and replace it with their own narrative. We will not allow this to happen at all.”