Accusing the Congress government of trying to impose “Ahinda and Leftist agenda” on schoolchildren through the revision of textbooks, the principal Opposition, Bharatiya Janata Party, on Thursday demanded that the decision to revise textbooks from the next academic year be put off.
Going ahead with the textbooks revision exercise would result in friction between different communities owing to the alleged “divisive” agenda of the Congress government, said BJP leader and former Minister for Primary and Secondary Education Vishweshwar Hegde Kageri on Thursday.
In a hurry
At a press conference here, Mr. Kageri accused the government of being in a hurry to revise the textbooks for classes one to 10 as per the recommendation by the textbook revision committee headed by writer Baragur Ramachandrappa.
Arguing that the committee recommendations were yet to be officially made public, Mr. Kageri said the government should not go ahead with the textbook revision exercise till public opinion was sought on the recommendations. Also, it would require a long time for the new textbooks to be printed, he argued, while maintaining that it may not be possible to supply new textbooks by the time the next academic year commences.
“Students are bound to suffer because of shortage of textbooks if the government insists on revising them from the next academic year itself,” he said.
‘Sudden change in stance’
He said the government had recently said it was too late to revise the textbooks from the next academic year as the revision committee was yet to submit its report, and wondered why the government had “suddenly changed its stance”. He also demanded to know if the plans to revise the textbooks were in tune with the guidelines prescribed by the Centre.
There had been some confusion over the last week as to whether the government would go ahead with the revision of textbooks as recommended by the committee, or use old textbooks or use translated textbooks prepared by the NCERT for some classes. The Chief Minister on Wednesday reportedly clarified that the government was firm on using the books recommended by the committee.
Earlier controversy
It may be mentioned here that the previous BJP government had seen a huge controversy over textbooks, with allegations that the content had a “saffron agenda”. The social science textbooks, especially, had created a furore.
