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Kamla Bora in Jaipur
The Rajasthan government has launched an all out war against saffronisation of education in the desert state.
"We must save young minds from being polluted by fundamentalist forces," state Education Minister Dr C P Joshi said.
All schoolbooks published by the Rajasthan Pathya Pustak Mandal, a state government undertaking, have been vetted and screened by experts to delete portions that are not in sync with the secular character of the Constitution.
Several facts about the Congress and the Emergency rule were found unpalatable to the experts and were deleted.
The Hindi Granth Academy, another state agency which publishes reference books for university level education, refused to publish a book on the Emergency proclaimed by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1975.
The manuscript of the book was written by Mangal Behari, a retired Indian Administrative Service officer, during the previous Bharatiya Janata Party rule.
But when the final proofs came for corrections, someone alerted the new Congress regime about its contents, which were considered defamatory to the late Indira Gandhi. The book was subsequently dropped like a hot cake.
The state government cannot tolerate the subtle way in which the previous BJP-headed government changed the school texts during its ten year tenure, Dr Joshi said.
The state government's stance against the saffronisation of education hardened further during the last few months when several parts of the state witnessed communal clashes.
They are the results of inculcation of an ideology of hatred by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideologues who had a field day during the previous BJP regime, he said.
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