New Delhi: The newly-elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Tripura has decided to change the syllabus that was being used in schools for the past 15 years under the Left Front government. The BJP defeated Tripura’s Marxist government in a landslide victory last month.
The state’s new chief minister, Biplab Kumar Deb, has said textbooks circulated by the Tripura Board of Secondary Education under the Left Front regime lean too much towards personalities like Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. The chief minister regrets that the textbooks have neglected Indian freedom fighters.
Deb believes that “Hindu kings” will be forgotten by students, since the syllabus only focusses on personalities like Mao (Zedong). The new government wants students to focus more on Indian history, rather than ‘the Russian and French Revolutions, the birth of cricket in England and Nazism’.
The Financial Express reported that Deb plans to set up a committee to consider syllabus changes. Under this plan, schools will implement the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) syllabus while they will retain 10% of the state syllabus.
The chief minister said: “When I say education, I mean quality education and not just numbers. The Communists only wanted the people of Tripura to study Mao (Zedong) and forget our Hindu kings. They removed Mahatma Gandhi from textbooks in government-run schools. I am going to implement NCERT syllabus in all these schools which will also have chapters on Tripura’s history”.
Educationists believe that Deb’s recommendations are part of a larger pattern of saffronising and changing school curriculum to suit a particular strain of ideology. In 2016, Ram Shankar Katheria, former minister of state for human resource development, commented at a conference in Lucknow University on how students would end up reading Genghis Khan if they were not taught Shivaji.
Last year, the BJP-ruled state of Rajasthan endorsed a change in the history section of class X social science books. Turning history on its head, the revised textbook incorporated that the battle of Haldighati fought between Maharana Pratap and Akbar, was conclusively won by the Maharana Pratap. Till now, history textbooks have told us that the battle, fought at Haldighat on June 18, 1576, was inconclusive, with Akbar inflicting heavy damages on Maharana Pratap’s army.
In similar vein, the Madhya Pradesh government has sought to replace the study of socialism and Nehruvian ideology with right-wing ideology.