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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | NCERT cartoon issue is more about degeneration of political debate

NCERT cartoon issue is more about degeneration of political debate

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published Published on Jul 5, 2012   modified Modified on Jul 5, 2012
-The Economic Times

At its root, the whole controversy on cartoons in NCERT textbooks underlines the malaise afflicting political debate in the country: passions whipped up in aid of divisive political ambitions.

Here, rage and slanging matches trump reasoned debate. One of the stated reasons for the order of the six-member panel constituted to review cartoons - that politicians and bureaucrats can't be shown in an 'incorrect' way - amply reveals that undemocratic spirit.

Some of the suggestions of the panel, say, about changing the captions of cartoons that have appeared years ago border on the Orwellian. This is not just tantamount to changing history, it is indicative of school textbooks and curriculum being tinkered with according to ideological inclinations in India.

Often, it is one political party or the other raising a furore over such issues, citing the oft-invoked 'hurt sentiments' theory. Which is just another means of reinforcing the social and political faultlines the entire political class thrives on, given that it envisages politics as a competitive identity management project.

Just as people's representatives cannot amend, just because they have a majority, say, the theory of relativity, they cannot decide the school syllabus. There is a National Curriculum Framework, meant to further a consultative approach to framing school textbooks, but that fact is drowned in the cacophony of contesting, and largely manufactured, rage.

Of course, school texts have to evolve, cannot, necessarily, remain stagnant as they incorporate evolving history and events. But if there is a situation where a cartoon is presumed to be causing offence decades after it was first published, then that posits the narrowing down, the shrinking, of public debate and tolerance.

This also illustrates what the political class thinks of itself: as some sort of a holy cow, whose figures can't be subject to scrutiny or satire.

Naturally, this will also affect the already dwindling art of political cartooning in India. When satire, the foundational principle of such cartooning, is sought to made into some sort of blasphemous act, our public culture is bound to get even poorer.

The Economic Times, 5 July, 2012, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/editorial/ncert-cartoon-issue-is-more-about-degeneration-of-political-debate/articleshow/14683903.cms


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