Senior Congress leader S. Jaipal Reddy on Wednesday said disbanding the advisory committee of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s attempt to “substitute a global narrative of history with its own version”.
Addressing the media, he alleged that by removing international scholars such as Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib from the advisory board, the NDA government wanted to “dumb down the understanding of our own history” to pursue a communal agenda.
He dubbed the NDA government’s one year in office as “anti-poor and anti-people” by pointing to the controversial land acquisition Bill. The former Union Minister said the NDA government’s journey that began with “hype and hyperbole, ended with disappointment and disenchantment” at the end of the first year. “The government is following a ‘Modi’ (Moneyed Only-Deprived Ignored) policy,” he said.
The government had failed in bringing back black money stashed in Swiss banks and had “silently sabotaged” pro-poor programmes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Food Security Act in the guise of restricting fiscal deficit at targeted levels, he said.
