Southern States - Karnataka

AIDSO stir against `distortion' in texts

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE June 19. The State unit of the All-India Democratic Students' Organisation (AIDSO) will launch a State-wide campaign against the alleged distortions in the primary and high school textbooks.

The State AIDSO President, M.N.Sriram, told presspersons here on Wednesday that there were attempts to "saffronise and communalise education" by following the guidelines issued by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in its curricular framework for school education. Mr. Sriram accused the RSS-BJP combine of imposing its ideology on school textbooks by appointing its men to head NCERT and restructuring the school syllabus.

Some of the chapters in the textbooks from IV to VIII standards gave undue credit to the ancient Indian civilisation, and there was an attempt to establish its superiority over other civilisations, he said.

V.N.Rajashekar, Secretary, AIDSO, said that although there could be no dispute over the contributions of scholars such as Aryabhatta, Bhaskara, Brahmagupta, Sushruta, Charaka and others, they should be lauded as individual achievements and not attributed to any religion.

Saying that irrational writing in textbooks was tantamount to religious bigotry, Mr. Rajashekar averred that this would have a crippling effect on the children's way of thinking. He said the AIDSO had demanded withdrawal of the controversial textbooks from Class IV to VIII.

It had also sought the appointment of a committee of experts to rewrite the textbooks and delete the controversial portions immediately, he added.

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