‘Drop our names from textbooks or we’ll take legal action’ — Yogendra Yadav, Suhas Palshikar to NCERT

Palshikar & Yadav, who were chief advisers for political science textbooks, asked NCERT to take their names off last year too, but council refused citing its status as copyright owner.

SOURAV ROY BARMAN

New Delhi: Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, who helped develop the NCERT political science textbooks for classes IX to XII, Monday wrote to the council’s director D.P. Saklani saying they will take legal action if their names are not dropped from the textbooks that have undergone “indiscriminate distortion”.

Yadav and Palshikar had in June last year requested the NCERT to drop their names as chief advisers from the textbooks, but the council had refused to do so citing its status as copyright owner, while also stressing that no one can claim individual authorship.

In their latest letter to the NCERT, Palshikar and Yadav wrote that more than a year after their request, they were “shocked to discover that the NCERT has gone ahead to publish and distribute the new edition of these six textbooks without removing our names from the publications that we do not wish to be associated with”.

The letter further said: “We are also distressed to learn that the NCERT has taken a step further in its drive towards indiscriminate distortion of these textbooks. Besides the earlier practice of selective deletions, the NCERT has resorted to significant additions and rewriting that are out of sync with the spirit of the original textbooks.”

Also read: RSS-run schools are going strong in West Bengal, and Trinamool Congress is irked

Palshikar and Yadav go on to say that both of them, as chief advisers for the original textbooks, have already registered their “strong disapproval of this unethical, unacademic and illegal practice of mutilation of textbooks that violate both the authors’ rights to intellectual property and the students’ right to quality education”.

On Sunday, ThePrint reported that the NCERT has rewritten a section on vote bank politics in the chapter on secularism in the Class XI political science textbook. Till the last academic session, students were taught that there is “little evidence” to suggest that vote bank politics favours the minorities in the country.

Following the revisions, the students, among other things, will now be taught that in India, political parties “give priority to the interests of a minority group” with an eye on “vote bank politics”, which leads to “minority appeasement”. The rewritten section addresses “anomalies” and presents a “relevant criticism of Indian Secularism”, said the NCERT, justifying the changes.

Among the changes in the Class 12 political science textbook is the deletion of references to the events leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid and what happened after. The mosque is not even named in the book anymore, it is now introduced as a three dome structure built at the birthplace of Shree Ram.

Courtesy: the news post

Note: This news is originally published in www.theprint.com and was used completely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes especially for human rights