KOZHIKODE: A reading material on Vaikom Muhammad Basheer distributed among school students has landed in a controversy. It describes the acclaimed writer as one who wrote for an ‘extremist magazine’ under a pseudonym.
The material for a quiz competition in PDF format was distributed to the WhatsApp group of students of a school in Kozhikode as part of the death anniversary of the writer. ‘Under what pen name did Basheer write in Ujjeevanam, the mouthpiece of an extremist organisation?’ was the question, and the answer given to the question is ‘Prabha.’
The material came for public discussion after senior journalist Jamal Kochangadi raised the issue in a Facebook post. Kochangadi is the son of P A Zainuddin Naina, the publisher of the magazine. His grandson, who is a 7th-standard student, received the question as a WhatsApp forward from a teacher at the school.
“Basheer and Naina met in jail after they were arrested for taking part in the freedom struggle. The idea for the magazine was conceived in the prison and they started its publication from West Kochi after they were released,” Kochangadi said.
“They got the name ‘Ujjeevanam’ from a poem of the same name written by Sahodaran Ayyappan. The school authorities did not create the material, they got it from elsewhere,” he said. “We have come to know that the material was prepared by the Block Resource
Centre (BRC) at Mattannur in Kannur district. Authorities should make clear what extremist organisation published ‘Ujjeevanam’. Or else it will soon become stamped as a terrorist organisation and Basheer and Zainuddin will be branded terrorists,” Kochangadi said.
BRC is a unit of the Samagra Shiksha Kerala (SSK), which comes under the state government and aims at placing the education system “on the right track catering to the foundational needs of the students in accordance with the changing times.”
When contacted, Jayathilakan, the BRC project officer in Mattannur, said that he is not aware of the material. “We have nothing to do with it. There was a similar controversy last year as well,” he said.
Vinod E C, the Kannur district officer of the project, told TNIE that the controversial material was prepared by a teacher who uploaded it to a blog in 2016. “It was removed at that time itself as we found the wording inappropriate. It is up to the school authorities to make clear as to from where they got the material,” he said.
The teacher, who forwarded the PDF format, told TNIE that he received it as a forward from a WhatsApp group of teachers. “It is still available in many groups. It is a mistake that we overlooked the inappropriate content before forwarding it to students,” he said.