UP Board removes Nehru from list of great leaders from syllabus

The Uttar Pradesh board has announced the removal of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru from the list of 50 great men in India from the syllabus of students of classes 9-12. The board has decided to include biographies of Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, Sarojini Naidu, and Bhagat Singh, among others. First President Dr. Rajendra Prasad and second President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan have also been excluded from the list.

Secondary education minister, Gulab Devi defended the move to exclude Nehru by saying, “Nehru did not sacrifice his life for the country.” She also reasoned why Savarkar was included by saying, “If we don’t teach students about our great leaders like Savarkar and Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay, then what do we teach them? Are we supposed to tell our kids about terrorists instead of making them aware of the life and times of great personalities of India?”

BJP had promised in its manifesto release before the 2022 elections to include the life stories of freedom fighters and great men in the education curriculum. This decision by BJP comes after two recent controversies both surrounding NCERT books. One was the removal of passages on Gandhi’s assassination and the ban on RSS that followed; the other was the decision to move topics from lower classes to higher classes.

Congress heavily criticized the decision made by the BJP to change the education pattern Anshu Awasthi, media co-ordinator of UP Congress said, “The inclusion of Savarkar in the syllabus by the BJP government is very unfortunate. Pandit Nehru was jailed for almost nine years in the freedom struggle but UP Board ignored him. including Savarkar who stood with the British, opposed India’s freedom, wrote an apology letter, and called himself the most obedient servant of the British.”

Interestingly, earlier this month, the newly appointed Congress government decided to remove chapters on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and RSS Founder KB Headgewar among others from its Social Science and Kannada textbooks from classes 6 to 10, while adding poetry on Ambedkar and Nehru’s letters to Indira Gandhi.

The Congress government had also promised in its election manifesto to undo the changes made to the school curriculum by the BJP government when it was in power along with a promise to scrap the National Education Policy (NEP). Primary and Secondary Education Minister Kumar Bangrappa said, “We have only restored what was there before the previous BJP government made changes; we have removed the changes they had made.” He also added, “We have removed a chapter on Hedgewar, Savarkar and a chapter written by Hindu activist and thinker Chakravarthy Sulibele, also some harsh words have been changed.”

However, he made no comments when asked about if a chapter on Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan is being reintroduced or not.