New Delhi: The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) recently was in trend due to its rationalization process, after which the chapters and topics related to Mughal Empire, Mahatma Gandhi's assassination and other references from the history textbooks taught in school has been tweaked.
As per the various media reports and sources, the NCERT has now omitted the references of India's first Education minister, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad from Class 11th textbooks.
As per the Hindu report, In the older version of the textbook, a paragraph in the first chapter read, “The Constituent Assembly had eight major Committees on different subjects. Usually, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad or Ambedkar chaired these Committees. These were not men who agreed with each other on many things. Ambedkar had been a bitter critic of the Congress and Gandhi, accusing them of not doing enough for the upliftment of Scheduled Castes. Patel and Nehru disagreed on many issues. Nevertheless, they all worked together.”
In the revised version of the textbook, Azad’s name had been dropped, with the relevant paragraphs stated, “Usually, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel or B.R. Ambedkar chaired these Committees.”
Azad was born on 11 November 1888 in Mecca, then a part of the Ottoman Empire, now a part of Saudi Arabia. His real name was Sayyid Ghulam Muhiyuddin Ahmed bin Khairuddin Al Hussaini, but known as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Azad settled in Calcutta with his family in 1890.
From removing instances from medieval history to contemporary, NCERT has sidelined a lot of content in the rationalisation process. References of 2002 Gujarat riots from all NCERT social science textbooks have been dropped too.
The report by Hindu also says that the reference to Jammu and Kashmir’s conditional accession has also been deleted. The dropped paragraph had said, “For example, the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian union was based on a commitment to safeguard its autonomy under Article 370 of the Constitution.”
Article 370 was abrogated by the Central government in August 2019.
