The newly elected Congress government in Rajasthan has decided to review school textbooks and other reference materials which were revised by the previous BJP regime with a “saffron tinge”.
The textbooks had deleted references to Jawaharlal Nehru, made a passing mention of Mahatma Gandhi and given dominant space to RSS ideologue V.D. Savarkar.
Minister of State for School Education Govind Singh Dotasara said here on Saturday that the role of national icons would be restored and their contribution to the freedom struggle given due space in the textbooks of the State Board of Secondary Education.
Mr. Dotasara said he had directed the officers of his department in his first meeting with them to prepare a status report on the revision of textbooks.
“We are committed to removing the objectionable references and chapters preaching bigotry and falsehood to young students,” he said.
The Minister also said that the BJP government’s decision to provide bicycles of saffron colour to students, posting RSS-affiliated officers in various Boards and Councils and changing the school curriculum with distortion of history would be shortly reviewed.
Raje ‘restructuring’
The Vasundhara Raje government had started carrying out revision of textbooks in 2015-16 as part of “curriculum restructuring” by the State Institute of Educational Research & Training, Udaipur.
The main emphasis was on slashing the contributions of Congress leaders of the Independence era, with the deletion of any references to Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Madan Mohan Malaviya and other freedom fighters.
Later, the then Education Minister Vasudev Devnani carried forward the agenda by making changes in medieval history, for which textbooks for Classes I to VIII were rewritten with focus on “Indian culture”. The traditional title of “Great” was removed from Mughal Emperor Akbar’s name, ‘Surya Namaskar’ was made compulsory and the ancient Indian scientific discoveries were explained with greater prominence in the textbooks.
The Congress had severely criticised the decisions of the then ruling BJP and described its acts as “saffronisation of education system”.
