This is a longer version of an article published today in The Hindu. This version includes a section with illustrative examples that refute the contention of the petition that there is “inadequate representation of the role of Ambedkar” in the new textbooks.
At the end of this, I respond to the points raised by K. Satyanarayana and Anoop Kumar in their response to my article, also published today in The Hindu, to which I have linked below.
The petition against the Ambedkar – Nehru cartoon published in the Hindu makes for sad reading. Sad, because it bears the signatures of some of our best scholars, universally admired for their rigorous scholarship, who nevertheless chose to sign a petition short on facts. The petition asks the Thorat Committee to “reconsider the Ambedkar cartoon (and possibly other such insensitive material)”and urges “Kapil Sibal, the Union HRD Minister, to desist from seeking any major overhaul of the basic National Curriculum Framework on which the textbooks are based.” Perhaps the petitioners are not aware that the particular cartoon is now beyond the purview of the committee. A decision to remove it had already been taken by the Minister himself, and a commitment made to this effect on May 11 by Kapil Sibal on the floor of the Rajya Sabha. It was after this announcement that the parliamentarians intensified their attack and targeted other cartoons in all the textbooks claiming that they mocked and ridiculed the political class in general. It was in response to this outrage that the government announced the formation of a review committee to be chaired by Prof. S K Thorat to find out if there is any ‘educationally inappropriate’ material in the textbooks. Continue reading Response to “In defense of the democratic struggle against Shankar’s cartoon”
At last, the real anxieties lurking behind what has come to be called the “Ambedkar cartoon” controversy are out in the open. It is hideously clear by now that MPs “uniting across parties” are acting as one only to protect themselves from public scrutiny, debate and criticism. It turns out, as some of us suspected all along, that the “sentiments” that have been “hurt” this time are the easily bruised egos of our elected representatives.
The uproar over what is being referred to as the ‘Ambedkar cartoon’ in the class XI textbook prepared by NCERT first began over a month ago, that is to say, almost six years after the books have been in circulation, been taught and received high praise for their lively style and a critical pedagogical approach (more on this below). It was a political party – one of the factions of the Republican Party of India – that decided to kick up a ruckus over ‘the issue’ – that is, the ‘affront’ to Dr Ambedkar that the cartoon in question supposedly constitutes, and the resultant ‘hurt sentiments’ that it has caused. Very soon everyone began to fall in line, and practically every member of our august Parliament was vying with one other to prove that they were indeed more hurt than their colleagues. One of them, Shri Ram Vilas Paswan has even demanded that the
