The controversy over a cartoon in an NCERT textbook sends a chill down the spine as it shows the extent to which the culture of intolerance has eaten into the vitals of our democratic polity. The cartoon in question shows B R Ambedkar sitting on a snail (Constitution) and flogging it while Jawaharlal Nehru too is brandishing a whip standing behind Ambedkar. It is clear that he is also aiming his...
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HRD panel cleared all textbooks, say experts
-The Economic Times The prospect of political cartoons going out of textbooks is a dangerous one. Lessons will become drab again. Worried scholars say the move could signal a devastating reversal in what was nothing short of a revolution in textbook-writing in India. Besides, an HRD ministry panel had vetted and cleared the text books, they say. A beleaguered NCERT, which designed and published the books, has set up a committee to...
More »Just getting by
-The Economist UNDER a thatched roof, lit by a full, yellow moon, Shiv Kumari explains how she and her five children survive. She is a widow, 30 years old, living in a home made of packed mud. She works the nearby fields, draws a small pension, some food rations and gets a few days of paid labour each month from a rural make-work scheme. Semra village, made up of 70 households, most...
More »Hardly funny-R Akhileshwari
An illustration in a textbook must expand or add to the lesson; Shankar's cartoon of Ambedkar does neither The controversy kicked up over the withdrawal of a textbook for high school over a cartoon after a ruckus in Parliament has been superficially interpreted and uniformly criticised without understanding the sensitivities of the oppressed for whom B.R. Ambedkar is a hero. The anger of dalits is being interpreted as intolerance while in...
More »Ambedkar cartoon row: An act of cowardly populism, says Shiv Visvanathan
-The Economic Times Babasaheb Ambedkar is one of the most fascinating figures in Indian politics. In hagiographic terms, if Gandhi is the father of the nation, Ambedkar is father of the Indian Constitution. Both have a legendary status which inspires hagiolatry. Any critique of them is seen as iconoclastic. Gandhians tend to put Gandhi in moth balls in their Ashrams. dalits similarly tend to freeze Ambedkar, disallowing the slightest controversy. Strangely Hindu...
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