Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar want their names to be removed from NCERT textbook association
Swaraj India chief Yogendra Yadav has repeated his demand for his name to be dropped from the NCERT's Political Science textbooks and accused the country's top educational research body of trying to ignore his request.
Mr Yadav and another academician, Suhas Palshikar, are mentioned as chief advisers by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), and both want to remove their association from what they called "mutilated" textbooks.
"Sad to see that NCERT has chosen to respond to professor Suhas Palshikar and my letter through an unsigned statement. Even more disappointing that it does not respond to the sole point we had made," Mr Yadav tweeted today, referring to the NCERT's refusal to remove their names.
The NCERT, in the unsigned reply to Mr Yadav's earlier letter asking for his name to be dropped, said textbooks at the school level are developed "based on the state of our knowledge and understanding on a given subject. Therefore, at no stage individual ownership is claimed, hence the withdrawal of association by anyone is out of the question."
The NCERT in its reply also defended its authority to make changes to textbooks from time to time based on feedback, identification of factual inaccuracies and other factors.
Mr Yadav, however, said the NCERT's response doesn't answer one simple question - why can't his and Mr Palshikar's name be removed? He said he did not raise any query on content ownership or copyrights, alluding to the NCERT's alleged attempt to divert the issue.
"We have not raised issues of authorship, copyrights and NCERT's legal authority to modify these textbooks. Our point is very simple: if they can use their legal right to distort and mutilate the text, we must be able to exercise our moral and legal right to dissociate our name from a textbook that we do not endorse," Mr Yadav said in the tweet today.
Mr Palshikar and Mr Yadav were chief advisers for Political Science textbooks for Classes 9 to 12, originally published in 2006-07 based on the 2005 version of the National Curriculum Framework.
Their names are mentioned in a "letter to students" and in the list of the textbook development team members at the beginning of each book.
The dropping of several topics and portions from NCERT textbooks last month triggered a controversy, with the opposition blaming the BJP-led centre for "whitewashing with vengeance".
At the heart of the controversy was the fact that while the changes made as part of the rationalisation exercise were notified, some of the controversial deletions were not mentioned. This led to allegations about a bid to delete these portions surreptitiously.
The NCERT has described the omissions as a possible oversight, but declined to undo the deletions, saying they were based on the recommendations of experts.