DEHRADUN: Following the footsteps of Uttar Pradesh, the Uttarakhand government has decided to remove chapters on Mughals from their textbooks.
How Islam emerged and what was the contribution of the Mughal rulers in the history of India?” the school children of Uttarakhand will no longer get to read such chapters in history books. After this decision of the state government, the history of Mughal rulers has become 'history' for school children.
In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, the students of Class 10th to 12th, all the streams of UP Secondary Education Board (UPSEB) would not be reading history related to Mughal courts, the industrial revolution and the Partition of the country, as per NCERT prescription.
However, the teachers of UP Board felt that the changes in the syllabus in the science subjects would have an adverse impact on students preparing for NEET. Meanwhile, commenting on the changes, UPSEB secretary Dibyakant Shukla said that the students of UP Board would read the books of NCERT with the changes from the academic session 2023-24 as the UP Board students go by the NCERT syllabus.
In Uttarakhand, according to the information received in the state capital, “Children of the state will no longer read the history of Mughals. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) pattern is applicable in government schools here, under which changes in NCERT will be implemented from this year. The NCERT has decided to remove the history of the Mughals from the history books for the upcoming academic session 2023-24. Chapters on ‘Rise of Islam’, “Clash of Cultures,’ “Industrial Revolution” and “Beginning of Time’ will be removed from the syllabus of the Class 11 textbook.
“NCERT academicians and experts have taken such a decision and will definitely prove effective in terms of changing the perspective,” state Director General of Education Banshidhar Tiwari told this daily. “The NCERT syllabus needs to be studied now, definitely new subjects must have been added to it,” said Tiwari.
When contacted by this newspaper, BJP state spokesperson Virendra Bisht said, “CM Dhami is also focusing on teaching what is inspirational for children. Children behave according to what will be taught and what will be given in their studies. Mughals can neither be an inspiration nor a source of inspiration. Therefore, the removal of the Mughal period chapter is a welcome step,” said Bisht.
Meanwhile, Congress state spokesperson Garima Dasuoni took a dig at the government's decision, "Debating on whose history has disappeared and whose has been kept is meaningless. The only thing that matters is that after 2014, India has become 'independent'. History is being written in a new way. In such a situation, who will be glorified in this history and who will be made secondary, it will be decided by the one who is in power, which is exactly what the BJP is doing."