Amid the row over the Congress party’s decision to revise school textbooks, the Karnataka Cabinet on June 15 confirmed that it has dropped a chapter on RSS founder KB Hedgewar and Veer Savarkar from school syllabus.
Along with it, all the changes in school syllabus made by the BJP government have also been reversed.
“The syllabus on KB Hedgewar has been dropped…whatever changes they (BJP Government) have done last year, we have changed it and reintroduced whatever was there last to last year…,” said Karnataka Education Minister Madhu Bangarappa.
According to reports, the Congress-led Karnataka Government scrapped the chapter from the Class X Kannada textbook. The Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Education Minister Madhu Bangarappa had reportedly reached this decision during a meeting focused on educational reforms in Bengaluru recently.
The Congress government has also decided to scrap the law against religious conversion introduced by the previous BJP government, said HK Patil, state’s Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister.
The Cabinet has also decided to introduce a new law on agricultural markets (APMC) that will replace the one enacted when the BJP was in power.
Earlier, the BJP had slammed the Congress government’s proposal to revamp the curriculum with the intent to remove Sangh’s contribution.
BJP’s National General Secretary CT Ravi said, “Congress can change syllabus, they’re in power but they can’t change the history. Everyone knows about Sangh Parivaar’s patriotism…everywhere Sangh Parivaar’s ideology is getting stronger, that can’t be changed…our ideology is patriotism and does Congress want to eliminate patriotism and want to make this ‘Mughalistaan’?”
Earlier, a group of intellectuals, including K Marulasiddappa, SG Siddaramaiah and Vasundhara Bhoopati, had met with Siddaramaiah after he became CM and urged him to withdraw textbooks which were revised by the previous BJP government.
Earlier, Congress MLC BK Hariprasad said that the Karnataka government would not include the life stories of individuals such as Dr Hedgewar in the school curriculum while calling the RSS founder a “coward” and a “fake freedom fighter.” He further said that the ideology of the Sangh Parivar would not be allowed to influence the functioning of any Government department.
Earlier, in a meeting with Siddaramaiah, the Programme Head of Universalisation of Education at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) Bengaluru, Professor VP Niranjan, proposed that the altered chapters in the school textbooks, which have been published, could be excluded from teaching and evaluation. Thereafter, it was reported that as the textbooks for the 2023-24 academic year have been published, the same will not be republished; however, the teachers have been ordered to exclude the lessons from the curriculum.
Karnataka Deputy CM DK Shivakumar had also said that the Government would not implement the National Education Policy and would rather have its own state education policy. He further said that under the state education policy, the changes made under the previous BJP government would not be implemented.
