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Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh addressing a press conference at AICC HQ, in New Delhi.
| Photo Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR
The Congress on Monday accused the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) of working as an “affiliate” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) amid the controversy over revision of NCERT text books.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Congress leader Jairam Ramesh alleged that NCERT is mounting an assault on the Constitution. He said the National Testing Agency (NTA) has blamed the NCERT for the ‘grace marks’ fiasco in NEET 2024 but that only drawing attention away from the NTA’s own abject failures.
“However it is true that the NCERT is no longer a professional institution. It has been functioning as an RSS affiliate since 2014. It has just been revealed that its revised Class XI political science textbook criticises the idea of secularism as well as what it considers policies of political parties in this regard. NCERT’s objective is to produce textbooks, not political pamphlets and propaganda,” Mr. Ramesh alleged.
The Congress leader charged the NCERT of “mounting an assault on our country’s Constitution in whose Preamble secularism features explicitly as a foundational pillar of the Indian republic”.
“Various Supreme Court judgments have clearly held secularism to be an essential part of the basic structure of the Constitution. The NCERT needs to remind itself that it is the National Council for Educational Research and Training, not the Nagpur or Narendra Council for Educational Research and Training. All of its textbooks are now of dubious quality vastly different from those that shaped me in school,” Mr. Ramesh added.
Trinamool Congress MP Saket Gokhale also hit out at the NCERT, and stated that the government is hiding “inconvenient facts” from students.
“By this logic, why teach kids about other ‘violent depressing things’ like the World War? Are BJP and Modi ashamed of their history as criminals and rioters? Why hide the truth from students?” Mr. Gokhale asked in a post on X
The comments by Opposition leaders come amid changes including removal of certain events like the Gujarat riots and Babri masjid demolition from the NCERT school textbooks. However, NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani had defended the move by calling the changes as part of annual revision process.
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