NCERT drops Gujarat riots, Mughal courts from books
New Delhi, June 17
The NCERT has removed portions of the 2002 Gujarat riots, Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite movement and Mughal courts from its Class 12 textbooks as part of “syllabus rationalisation,” citing “overlapping and irrelevant” as reasons.
Many of these changes were announced earlier this year when the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) rationalised its syllabi in April. Besides schools under the CBSE, some state boards also use NCERT textbooks.
Listing the changes, the NCERT, in a note, said: “The content of the textbooks has been rationalised for various reasons, including overlapping with similar content in other subject areas in the same class and similar content included in the lower or higher classes on the same subject.”
In the Class 12 political science textbook, pages on ‘Gujarat Riots’ have been excluded from the chapter titled ‘Recent Developments in Indian Politics’. The mention of the National Human Rights Commission report on the 2002 violence and the “raj dharma” remark by then PM Atal Bihar Vajpayee have been dropped too.
Chapters on Mughal courts in a history textbook, a poem on the Dalit movement and a chapter on the Cold War are among the exclusions from the political science textbook. In Class 10, the excluded chapters include verses of poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Also, chapters titled ‘Democracy and Diversity’, ‘Popular Struggle and movements’ and ‘Challenges to Democracy’ have been dropped.
In the social science textbook for Classes VII and VIII, references to Dalit writer Omprakash Valmiki have been removed. In the Class VII textbook titled ‘Our Pasts-2’, the topic ‘Emperors: Major campaigns and events’, has been removed.
