As part of a “textbook rationalisation” exercise due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has dropped content on the anti-Muslim Gujarat Riots from the Class 12 Political Science curriculum.
A note on the rationalised content released by the NCERT on Thursday said pages 187-189 on Gujarat Riots has been removed from the book, the Indian Express reported.
“Gujarat riots show that the government machinery also becomes susceptible to sectarian passions. Instances, like in Gujarat, alert us to dangers involved in using religious sentiments for political purposes. This poses a threat to democratic politics,” reads one the of the now-removed paragraph. The content on the Gujarat riots titled “Recent Developments in Indian Politics,” was featured in chapter 9.
According to the newspaper, one of the paras also contains a blurb carrying then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s, who had stated that his “one message to the Chief Minister (of Gujarat) is that he should follow ‘raj dharma’. “A ruler should not make any discrimination between his subjects on the basis of caste, creed and religion,” Vajpayee has been quoted as saying.
The NCERT has also dropped “Naxalite movement” on 105 of the history book and “Controversies regarding Emergency” on pages 113-117.
In a statement, the NCERT team said the removals as part of the rationalisation include “overlapping with similar content included in other subject areas in the same class” and “content, which is irrelevant in the present context”.
The NCERT content rationalisation process was started in last December for the academic curriculum of 2022-23 and has been concluded now.
Chapters on Mughal Courts, a poem on ‘The Dalit Movement’, a chapter on the Cold War, as well as Chapters titled “Central Islamic lands” and “the Industrial Revolution” are among the other contents removed from Class 12 textbooks.
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Rabia Shireen is a Staff Reporter at The Cognate.
