Tag Archives: Gandhi assassination

Culture, Education, Islamophobia, Right watch

Statement by Historians and Concerned Scholars on Recent Changes Made by NCERT in Textbooks

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Received via Maya John, the following statement was issued by over 250 historians and concerned scholars, protesting against the blatantly ideologically driven agenda of the present government in deleting chapters and sections of the school textbooks.

The recent decision of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to drop entire chapters from the history textbooks for class 12, as well as from other classes and to delete statements from other textbooks is a matter of deep concern. Using the period of the pandemic-cum-lockdowns to argue that there was a need to lighten the load of the curriculum, the NCERT initiated a contentious process of dropping topics like the history of the Mughal courts, the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, the Emergency, mention of Dalit writers, the Naxalite movement, and the fight for equality from social science, history, and political science textbooks of classes 6 to 12. The new editions of these NCERT books have simply made the deletions the norm even when we are in a post-pandemic context in which school education has limped back to normalcy and is no longer in the online mode.

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Government, Movements, Politics, Right watch

Gandhi’s Assassination – Much More Than Just a Murder

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Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination was a culmination of a vicious campaign launched by Hindu communal groups in post-independent India

Gandhi’s_Assassination_Much_More_Murder

File Photo : Modi – India’s New Mahatma

It is far too early to dismiss the possibility of a future Hindu State in India. However, the possibility does not appear a strong one. The secular state has far more than an even chance of survival in India”

(India as Secular State, 1963).

It was the early sixties when American political scientist Donald Eugene Smith commented about the “possibility of a Hindu state in India”.

Today, even to a layperson, the secular state in India seems to be standing on very weak foundations, and the possibility of a Hindu State is far stronger than it was more than half a century ago, in 1963.

Perhaps, a pertinent expression of this transformation of India is the metamorphosis we witness in the image of Nathuram Godse – the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi — and the growing trivialisation of his most despicable act for which he and his accomplice Narayan Apte were sent to gallows. (November 15, 1949)

No doubt the act itself was the first terrorist act in independent India but was it just that or much, much more.

( Read the full article here : https://www.newsclick.in/gandhis-assassination-was-much-more-just-murder)