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From India News Network (INN) Parliament should intervene to oust the knuckleheads from HRD and NCERT-SFI New Delhi, November 23:, The SFI President P.Krishnaprasad along with Samik Lahiri, MP and General Secretary of SFI today strongly condemn the unwarranted and authoritarian dictate of HRD Minister Mr.Murali Manohar Joshi, dated 6th October to NCERT and CBSE to censor the text books by eminent authors including R S Sharma, Romila Thapper, Arjun Dev and Sathish Chandra. The censorship is quite arbitrary in nature and reminds us the period of emergency when authoritarianism took away all democratic spaces from our social life. Removing portions of any book without prior consultation is an insult to the author, to say the minimum. HRD Minister and NCERT have no right to do so. The portions deleted contains significant findings from the researches done for years in history and without bringing evidences it can not be questioned or banned. No civilised person or institution will dare to do so. The SFI has demand that the Parliament that is in session should discuss the authoritarian acts of theHRD Minister and NCERT to change the curriculum and syllabi. The opposition parties have to take initiative in this regard considering the seriousness of the matter. Earlier, the HRD Ministry consciously avoided the National Curriculum Framework being discussed by the Parliament since the NDA allies did not support it. It shall be recalled that when the opposition initiated a discussion on the communalisation of education in the Parliament all the constituents’ of NDA, except BJP joined the opposition to criticise the HRD Ministry. The National Policy on Education (NPE) formulated in 1986 and the amendments made in 1992 was discussed with representatives of national political parties, with the education ministers of all states and UTs, in Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) and was adopted after being endorsed by both houses of Parliament. But the New Curriculum Framework or the censorship and introduction of obscurantist courses like Astrology, Pourohithya (Karmakanda), Vedic Arithmetic etc have not been introduced by a process of consensus building. Mr. Joshi released the Curriculum Framework even before the meeting of the council of NCERT that includes Ministers of Education of all states and UTs. The CABE has not been constituted since 1994 and Mr. Joshi wants to avoid it. All this shows Mr. Joshi in a poor light as undemocratic and authoritarian in attitude. His Ministry is working independent of the Cabinet and without any respect and accountability to the Parliament and our democratic tradition. The censorship on the textbooks by the MHRD and the NCERT is part of the larger agenda of RSS to communalise the education system in order to establish a Hindu Rashtra in India. The RSS wants to impose the perspective of a ‘Brahmanical hierarchy’ upon the younger generation. It is a serious offence to the secular character of our constitution. Hence, and the SFI demands the secular political parties who are constituents of NDA and the opposition in the Parliament to come forward to resist the efforts of the MHRD to communalise the education system. eom |
