Academician Suhas Palshikar and political scientist Yogendra Yadav on Monday said that they may have to sue the National Council for Educational Research and Training if their names are not dropped from the textbook development committee.
Palshikar and Yadav wanted their names to be removed as chief advisers of political science textbooks for Classes 9 to 12 after the NCERT either deleted or watered down important details of India’s history in their latest revisions.
A similar request was made by the two last year as well, in response to which the NCERT had said that there was no question of withdrawing any individual’s name as a member of a textbook development committee.
“Despite our request a year ago, NCERT has decided to publish our names in the mutilated textbooks that we do not wish to be associated with,” Yadav said in a social media post on Monday. “Palshikar Suhas and I have written to NCERT that we may have to take legal action if they don’t withdraw these books and remove our names.”
In a letter addressed to NCERT chief DP Saklani on Monday, the two said they were “shocked to discover” that more than a year after they disassociated themselves from the textbooks and requested the organisation to remove their names, it had yet again mentioned their names in the reprinted the textbooks with further revisions.
Yadav and Palshikar's response comes after the NCERT made another series of revisions in its textbooks, including the removal of references to the 2002 Gujarat riots and the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition from school textbooks.
The NCERT has also removed content on the Mughal rule in India and the nationwide Emergency imposed in 1975 from its textbooks. The revised Class 12 political science textbook also does not mention the Babri Masjid by name and refers to it instead as a “three-domed structure [that] was built at the site of Shri Ram’s birthplace”.
In their letter to Saklani, Yadav and Palshikar said that besides the earlier practice of “selective deletions”, the autonomous educational body has resorted to “significant additions and rewriting” that are not in 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,” the letter said. “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.”
Yadav and Palshikar said that they do not want the NCERT to “hide behind” their names to pass on to students “such textbooks of political science that we find politically biased, academically indefensible and pedagogically dysfunctional”.
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