Delete, delete! It's Maulana Azad 's turn to be dropped from textbooks

A paragraph stating that Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to India on the condition that it would remain autonomous has also been removed

NT Correspondent

New Delhi: References to freedom fighter and India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (in pic) have been removed from the new class 11 political science textbook by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).

As part of its “syllabus rationalisation” exercise last year, the NCERT, citing “overlapping” and “irrelevant” as reasons, dropped certain portions from the course including lessons on Gujarat riots, Mughal courts, Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite movement, among others from its textbooks.

In class 11 political science textbook’s first chapter, titled ‘Constitution – Why and How’, a line has been revised to omit Azad’s name from the constituent assembly committee meetings. “For example, the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian union was based on a commitment to safeguard its autonomy under Article 370 of the Constitution,” says the dropped paragraph.

The revised line now reads, “Usually, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel or Dr BR Ambedkar chaired these Committees.” In the tenth chapter of the same textbook, titled “The Philosophy of the Constitution”, the reference to Jammu and Kashmir’s conditional accession has also been deleted.