Portions of 2002 Gujarat riots, Emergency scrapped from Class 12 textbooks by NCERT, know why

The NCERT has removed portions about the 2002 Gujarat riots, Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite movement and Mughal courts from its class 12 textbooks as part of its "syllabus rationalisation" exercise.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has cited "overlapping" and "irrelevant" as reasons for dropping those portions from the syllabus.

Many of these changes were announced earlier this year when the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) rationalised its syllabi in April. Besides schools under CBSE, some state boards also use NCERT textbooks.

Listing the changes, the NCERT, in a note, said, "The content of the textbooks has been rationalised for various reasons, including overlapping with similar content in other subject areas in the same class, similar content included in the lower or higher classes on the same subject.

It also stated that difficulty level, content which is easily accessible to students without much intervention from teachers and can be learned by self-learning or peer-learning and content which is irrelevant in the present context have been removed.

In class 12 political science textbook, pages on the topic 'Gujarat Riots' will be excluded from the chapter titled 'Recent Developments in Indian Politics'. The mention of the National Human Rights Commission report on the 2002 violence and the "raj dharma" remark by then Prime Minister Atal Bihar Vajpayee has been dropped from the textbook.

Also, chapters on Mughal courts in a history textbook, a poem on the Dalit movement and a chapter on the Cold War, are among the exclusions from the political science textbook.

In Class 10, the excluded chapters included verses of poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the 'Religion, Communalism and Politics - Communalism, Secular State' section of the textbook 'Democratic Politics II'.

Also, chapters titled 'Democracy and Diversity', 'Popular Struggle and movements' and 'Challenges to Democracy' have been dropped.

In the social science textbook of classes seven and eight, references to Dalit writer Omprakash Valmiki were removed. In the class seven textbook titled 'Our Pasts-2', the topic 'Emperors: major campaigns and events', has been removed. 

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