‘Bharat’ and ‘India’ to be used interchangeably in textbooks, Constitution upholds both: NCERT director

“It is interchangeable… our position is what our Constitution says and we uphold that. We can use Bharat, we can use India, what is the problem?” Saklani questioned.

The remarks come after a high-level panel for social sciences, working to revise the school curriculum, had recommended the replacing of ‘India’ with ‘Bharat’ in all textbooks last year.

“The committee has unanimously recommended that the name Bharat should be used in the textbooks for students across classes. Bharat is an age-old name. The name Bharat has been used in ancient texts, such as Vishnu Purana, which is 7,000 years old,” committee chairperson C I Isaac had said in an interview to PTI.

NCERT has been at the midst of a controversy after omissions in its Class 12 Political Science textbook, which hit the market last week. The book carried no mention of the Babri Masjid by name, instead referring to it as a “three-domed structure”, and pruned the Ayodhya section from four to two pages, deleting telling details from the earlier version.

In an interview with The Indian Express on Sunday, Saklani justified the omissions of the Gujarat riots and the violence after the Babri Masjid demolition, stating that an expert committee felt that “mentioning a few selectively is not good”.

Saklani also told The Indian Express that the revisions in the Ayodhya section were based on feedback from experts and were carried out to accommodate the Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment on the dispute.

– With inputs from PTI