While the Primary and Secondary Education Minister has announced that a committee will deliberate on whether the chapters related to Mysuru king Tipu Sultan should be dropped, retained or modified, there are worries that the panel may have no subject experts.
Interestingly, while BJP MLA for Madikeri Appachu Ranjan, who was the first to urge the government to drop references to Tipu from textbooks, has received an invitation to the committee’s meeting scheduled for November 7 and has been asked to bring along necessary documents, none of the officials of the Department of Public Instruction has received a meeting notice.
The department, which has convened the meeting, is itself in a dilemma. It has sent a letter to the State government asking which particular committee should meet to deliberate upon this issue. Social Science textbooks of three grades have lessons on Tipu.
When contacted, Primary and Secondary Education Minister S. Suresh Kumar said the Karnataka Text Book Society-empowered committee will be asked to deliberate on the issue.
“The existing KTBS committee will decide this and the government will not form a new committee and politicise the issue,” he said. Department officials, however, are worried as none of the members of the empowered committee is a subject expert and all of them hold administrative posts.
Writer Baragur Ramachandrappa, who was the chairman of the textbook revision committee formed when the Congress was in power, argued that subject experts were mandatory for such an exercise. “A committee was formed when the BJP government was in power earlier to decide on the content of textbooks. This committee had also included lessons on Tipu. We had only made minor additions to these,” he said. He argued that subject experts who were part of both these committees — the one formed by the previous BJP government and the one he had headed — should be part of the deliberations now.
Mr. Ranjan, besides other BJP leaders, have dubbed Tipu “anti-Hindu” and demanded removal of lessons related to him in textbooks. This is brewing into a political controversy, with the Opposition Congress strongly opposing it and saying that it is an attempt to rake up a communal issue before the byelections slated for December 5.
