After rhymes, MP govt to prune Nehru in textbooks

A few days after the Madhya Pradesh Government decided to do away with a couple of English nursery rhymes to dilute ‘‘western influence’’ on school education

A few days after the Madhya Pradesh Government decided to do away with a couple of English nursery rhymes to dilute ‘‘western influence’’ on school education, it has decided to remove a poem on Jawaharlal Nehru and one of his writings from textbooks with the objective of being ‘‘practical’’ and not putting an ‘‘overemphasis’’ on one individual.

While the poem Chacha Nehru mujhe bana do has been dropped from Class I book, Nehru’s memoirs on his wife Kamala Nehru have been replaced by another of his writings Vasiyat in Class VII textbook, state School Education Minister Narottam Mishra said.

The move has evoked a strong protest from Congress, which has threatened statewide agitation against it. Accusing BJP of ‘‘saffronising education’’, state Congress general-secretary Manak Aggrawal alleged that it was working on the directions of the RSS.

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Governor Balram Jakhar’s intervention has been sought to prevent the ‘‘implementation of RSS’ saffron agenda’’.

However, denying any political motive, Mishra said ‘‘these (changes) were effected on the recommendation of a permanent committee formed to review the school course material’’.

‘‘Why should we talk about only one person repeatedly, why not others?’’ asked Mishra, explaining the rationale behind the decision.

On Wednesday evening, Youth Congress workers burned Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s effigy outside the Congress party’s headquarters in the capital.

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Agarwal said the party would take to the streets on the issue till the deleted portions were not added to the textbooks again. ‘‘The RSS is behind this,’’ he alleged and accused the BJP government of ‘‘playing with the future of students by saffronising education.’’ He asked the party to immediately stop revising syllabus.

Only recently Chouhan had strongly defended the government’s decision to drop nursery rhymes like Twinkle twinkle little star and Baa Baa black sheep.

The BJP government did not find anything western about Nehru but found there was too much of him everywhere. ‘‘There was something or the other about Nehru in textbooks of Class I to Class VIII. And why impose one leader on students as early as Class I,’’ pointed out Govind Sharma, chairman of Textbook Standing Committee while explaining the reason behind deleting the poem and the memoirs.

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