A fresh controversy gripped India when a Twitter handle yesterday posted the cover page of a Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), Class 10 French textbook, showing the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) as not an integral part of India.
According to Indian media, the Twitter handle ‘Legal Rights Observatory- LRO’ or @LegalLro claims to be an NGO which carries out legal activism in the national interest and has over 47,000 followers, posted “Hey @cbseindia29 is this true? Don’t U recognize Jammu n Kashmir as integral part of India?
Later, it went on to tag Indian Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Home Minister Amit Shah.
The leading Indian media highlighted that NCERT dropped several topics from textbooks of Classes 6 to 12 in an effort to rationalise the syllabus for the academic session 2022-23 to ease the load on students because of the Covid-19 disruption in the last two years.
Under Modi government’s Hindutva policies, references to the 2022 Gujarat Riots, the Cold War, and Mughal courts were also dropped from the Class 12 textbook.
Small and large sections and entire chapters were removed on a variety of topics spanning from facets of politics to climate and environment to psychology and socialism, the media reported.
However, according to observers, the publication of such text exposed reality about Indian the government’s false claim over the internationally recognized disputed territory.
