NCERT Has Been Functioning As An RSS Affiliate: Congress (image:x.com/PanditSaibpal/)
In the midst of controversy over the revised NCERT textbooks, Congress general secretary in-charge of Communications Jairam Ramesh on Monday criticised the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for functioning as an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
His recent remark came as the NCERT has made significant changes, including deletions and tweaking, in the Political Science textbooks, which has now hit the markets. The most notable revisions in Class 12 Political Science include removal of the name “Babri Masjid,” and renaming it as a “three-domed structure”, and pruning of the chapter on Ayodhya from four pages to two. Meanwhile, the new edition included the Supreme Court’s 2019 verdict that the disputed land belongs to the temple.
Taking to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, senior Congress leader remarked that the National Testing Agency (NTA)’s blame game on the NCERT for the “‘grace marks’ fiasco” in NEET 2024 is former’s attempt to draw attention away from it’s own “abject failures”.
The National Testing Agency has blamed the NCERT for the ‘grace marks’ fiasco in NEET 2024. That is only drawing attention away from the NTA’s own abject failures.
However it is true that the NCERT is no longer a professional institution. It has been functioning as an RSS…
— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) June 17, 2024
“. . . it is true that the NCERT is no longer a professional institution. It has been functioning as an RSS affiliate since 2014. It has just been revealed that its revised Class XI political science textbook criticises the idea of secularism as well as what it considers policies of political parties in this regard. NCERT’s objective is to produce textbooks, not political pamphlets and propaganda,” he said in the tweet.
The new edition of the Political Science textbook says that the ‘vote bank politics’ is associate with ‘minority appeasement’ and it means political parties “disregard the principles of equality of all citizens and give priority to the interests of a minority group,” the Indian Express reported quoting from the textbook.
Though the section on vote bank politics was included in the last version, the word minority appeasement is an addition in the 2024-25 version. These major revisions were brought in the chapter on secularism which also includes a section on ‘criticism of Indian secularism’.
Current update marks the fourth round of revisions of the NCERT textbooks since 2014.
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“NCERT is mounting an assault on our country’s Constitution in whose Preamble secularism features explicitly as a foundational pillar of the Indian republic,” Congress leader alleged.
Adding further, Jairam Ramesh remarked: “NCERT needs to remind itself that it the National Council for Educational Research and Training, not the Nagpur or Narendra Council for Educational Research and Training. All of its textbooks are now of dubious quality vastly different from those that shaped me in school.”
Meanwhile, the NEET-UG result row is still hitting national headlines and evoking reactions from the top leaders.
