Another uncomfortable chapter removed
Once again, the NCERT has removed a chapter from a textbook that contained content uncomfortable to the Narendra Modi government—the popular farmers’ movement of the 1980s, which was led by the BKU, the organisation at the forefront of the farmers’ protest in 2021 that forced the government to withdraw the three controversial laws known as the Farm Laws.
That the NCERT’s deletions of passages from textbooks are dictated by the powers that be has been proved once again in the removal of the chapter, ‘Rise of Popular Movements’ from the class 11 political science textbook.
The chapter contained material on the rise of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) in the late 1980s and its disciplined agitation of 1988 in New Delhi.
And BKU was the farmers’ union at the forefront of the year-long farmers’ protest that resulted in the Modi government being forced to withdraw the three controversial laws related to farmers and farming practices, popularly known together as the Farm Laws. The farmer agitation ended in December 2021 after three farm laws were revoked.
The BKU said it would meet the Union government over the issue.
Rakesh Tikait, the head of BKU and the son of its founder, Mahendra Singh Tikait, told The Tribune newspaper that “the government wants to remove factual history and replace it with their own narrative. We won’t let that happen.”
