Kerala cannot agree with the decision of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, or NCERT, to remove certain portions from textbooks under the guise of rationalisation, state Education Minister V Sivankutty said on Saturday, reported The Indian Express.

Sivankutty suggested that the NCERT should be reconstituted with representatives of all states.

“What the NCERT has done is unacceptable,” Sivankutty said, according to The Times of India. “[The] BJP cannot make unilateral changes in textbooks to suit their political views and needs.”

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Paragraphs on attempts by Hindu extremists to assassinate Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the ban imposed on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh after his killing are among the texts dropped by the NCERT from its new textbooks.

A paragraph on the 2002 Gujarat riots was also omitted from the new textbook of Class 11 Sociology. The riots were mentioned in the textbook called “Understanding Society”, to emphasise how communal violence could lead to ghettoisation. With the omission, no NCERT book has any reference to the Gujarat riots anymore.

In June, NCERT had announced the dropping of content on the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Mughal rule in India and the nationwide Emergency imposed in 1975. It had said that the revision was part of the “rationalisation of contents in textbooks”. Notably, the changes, pointed out by The Indian Express, were not a part of it.

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On Saturday, Sivankutty alleged that the changes by the NCERT were an attempt to sync academic studies with the agenda of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, reported The Times of India.

“We are not obliged to take instructions if somebody wants to exclude Mahatma Gandhi from the school books,” he said.

He also added that the Kerala government would be forced to publish supplementary books if NCERT fails to address its concern.