The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) director Dinesh Prasad Saklani said that references to Gujarat riots and Babri masjid demolition were modified in school textbooks because teaching about riots “can create violent and depressed citizens.”
Saklani, in a conversation with PTI on Saturday, stressed that tweaks in textbooks are part of annual revision and should not be a subject of political “hue and cry”.
The new revised NCERT Class 12 Political Science textbook does not mention the Babri Masjid by name but refers to it as a “three-domed structure”. Also, the Ayodhya section has been trimmed from four to two pages deleting the details from the earlier version.
Speaking about references to Gujarat riots or Babri masjid demolition being tweaked in NCERT textbooks, Saklani said, “Why should we teach about riots in school textbooks? We want to create positive citizens not violent and depressed individuals”.
“Should we teach our students in a manner that they become offensive, create hatred in society or become victim of hatred? Is that education’s purpose? Should we teach about riots to such young children … when they grow up, they can learn about it but why school textbooks. Let them understand what happened and why it happened when they grow up. The hue and cry about the changes is irrelevant,” he added.
The lesson in the newly revised textbook focuses on the Supreme Court judgement that paved the way for the construction of a Ram temple.
“We want to create positive citizens and that’s what is the purpose of our textbooks. We cannot have everything in them. The purpose of our education is not to create violent citizens … depressed citizens. Hatred and violence are not subjects of teaching, they should not be focus of our textbooks,” Saklani further said.
The NCERT director went on to say that the same hue and cry is not made about the 1984 riots not being in textbooks.
(With PTI inputs)
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