Yogendra Yadav has resigned as NCERT’s chief adviser for political science. He along with fellow political scientist Suhash Palshikar, who has also resigned, oversaw the writing of the Standard XI textbook which carried the controversial Ambedkar cartoon.
Proceedings in Parliament were disrupted yesterday over the cartoon drawn in the 1940s by cartoonist Shankar.
“I am actually surprised that cartoon came under debate six years after the book was published,” Yadav told CNN IBN. “There are cartoons that laugh at Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Indira Gandhi and they have been faithfully represented in these textbooks,” he said.
AFP
Asked whether writing a textbook will invariably get politicised, Yadav said: “I think in these new set of textbooks represent a new age of textbook writing that we as democracy should be proud of, do we want to retain that or do we want go back to that insecurity that we associated with politics.”
Yadav also mentioned about a New York Times article that praised the NCERT books. One can read the entire article here.
Yadav also said that these textbooks for the first time established the foundational role of Ambedkar. “It’s indeed ironic that these textbooks are seen as anti-Ambedkar,” he said.
