New Delhi: Political scientists Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar wrote to the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) earlier this week, reiterating their demand for removal of their names from NCERT’s textbooks.
Yadav and Palshikar – former chief advisors for NCERT’S political science textbooks for classes 9 to 12 – have threatened legal action if their names are not deleted from the textbooks, their latest letter to NCERT chief D.P. Saklani said.
The duo expressed shock at discovering “that more than a year after our original request, the NCERT has gone ahead [and] published the new edition of these six textbooks without removing our names from the publications that we do not wish to be associated with.”
The two had written to NCERT in 2023 over modifications in the text that did not appear to have a “pedagogic rationale” and were carried out without informing the chief advisors.
The letter sent earlier this week followed reports of significant alterations to the class 12 political science textbooks. The revised textbooks, which became available in markets last week, do not mention the Babri Masjid by name, calling it a “three-domed structure”. Details about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s rath yatra, the role of kar sevaks, communal violence after the Babri Masjid’s demolition, President’s rule in BJP-ruled states and the BJP’s expression of “regret over the happenings at Ayodhya”, have all been deleted from the books, the Indian Express reported.
Yadav and Palshikar called the additions and rewriting “out of sync with the spirit of the original textbooks”.
“The NCERT has no moral or legal right to distort these textbooks without consulting any of us and yet publish these under our names despite our explicit refusal. There can be arguments and debates about someone’s claims to authorship of any given work. But it is bizarre that authors and editors are forced to associate their names with a work they no longer identify as their own,” the letter states.
Calling the books “politically biased, academically indefensible and pedagogically dysfunctional,” the two said that they do not want the NCERT to hide behind their names to pass on to students such textbooks of political science.
“While the modifications have been justified on the grounds of ‘rationalization’, we fail to see any pedagogic rationale at work here. We find that the text has been mutilated beyond recognition. There are innumerable and irrational cuts and large deletions, often without any attempt to fill the gaps thus created. We were never consulted or even informed of these changes. If NCERT did consult other experts for deciding on these cuts and deletions, we explicitly state that we fully disagree with them in this regard,” their letter to NCERT, sent last year, said.
This was followed by a collective letter by a majority of scholars associated with the ‘Textbook Development Team’, for the political science textbooks, making the same request last year.
In its response the NCERT has said, “Textbooks at the school level are ‘developed’ based on the state of our knowledge and understanding on a given subject. Therefore, at no stage individual authorship is claimed, hence the withdrawal of association by any one is out of [the] question.”
