Students’ organisations have strongly condemned the State government’s decision to omit a lesson on Bhagat Singh and include a speech of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in the Class X Kannada revised textbook.
All-India Democratic Students Organisation (AIDSO) and All-India Save Education Committee (AISEC) have slammed the government’s decision.
“The founders of our renaissance movement and many great freedom fighters had hoped for democratic, scientific, and secular education. But all political parties that have ruled so far have been working out their own agendas in textbooks,’’ they said.
“In the Kannada textbook, a lesson on a great revolutionary who sacrificed his life at the age of 23, Bhagat Singh, has been omitted, while a speech made by the founder of the RSS, which does not unite people but spreads communal hatred, has been added. This makes it clear that the ruling BJP and the Sangh Parivar have no regard for the great revolutionaries of the country’s independence movement, including Bhagat Singh. A lesson which condemns racial hatred, ‘Mruga Mattu Sundari’ by P. Lankesh, and Sara Aboobacker’s ‘Yuddha’ and A.N. Murthi Rao’s ‘Vyaghrageethe’ have been removed,” AIDSO said in a statement.
“Already, people across the State had raised questions about the committee set up for textbook revision by the BJP government and its chairman. It is now proven that the government constituted this committee to include BJP agenda in education. AIDSO calls upon people and students to resist the government’s propaganda of narrow-minded ideology. We demand that the texts removed be immediately added,” the organisation added.
