Calling for protest against the NCERT’s moves to delete portions from textbooks, including passages on Mahatma Gandhi, his assassin Nathuram Godse, and the 1948 ban on RSS, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said Friday that the decision showed “the agenda of a complete saffronisation of books”. In a facebook post, Vijayan said: “Historical facts cannot be obscured by removing portions of textbooks, which are unpleasant for them. These steps show the agenda of a complete saffronisation of textbooks.’’ He said it was “clear at whose interest the portions about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and subsequent ban on RSS have been removed from the Political Science text of class 12”. The removal of a portion on Mughal era, he said, “would leave a study about India’s medieval history incomplete”. For the Sangh Parivar, Vijayan said, “the medieval history of India has always been an area for distortions. “By removing these portions from the textbook, NCERT has now whitewashed the fake history manufactured by Sangh Parivar,” he added. Saying that “historical truths cannot be altered by saffronisation”, the CM said the Sangh was “trying to stealthily take to the tender minds of children the politics of hatred and division”. “NCERT has taken a stand in favour of the distorted history-writing methodology of RSS. Strong protests have to emerge against these steps, which undermine the secular education envisaged by the Constitution,” he said. On Wednesday, The Indian Express had first reported that the NCERT has deleted sentences pertaining to Mahatma Gandhi's assassination and his assassin Nathuram Godse. Significantly, these deletions did not figure in the “list of rationalised content” that were officially released by the NCERT in June last year. In the first chapter of the Class 12 Political Science textbook Politics in India since Independence, the NCERT removed sentences on how Hindu extremists disliked Mahatma Gandhi and had made several attempts to assassinate him. A reference to the government’s ban on the RSS following Gandhi’s assassination was also deleted. In the Class 12 History textbook titled Themes In Indian History Part III’, the Council has dropped a “Brahmin” reference to Godse along with a line that said he was “the editor of an extremist Hindu newspaper”.
