Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) founder Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar’s speech was included in the first language syllabus for Class X students in Karnataka text books from the 2022-23 academic year, reported The Hindu. The inclusion was recommended by the Textbook Revision Committee headed by writer Rohith Chakrateertha, in March.
Titled “Nijavada Adarsha Purusha Yaraagabeku?” (Who should be the real role model?), it will now be a part of the Kannada prose textbook, being printed. The committee had submitted its final report to the government.
According to Chakrateertha, this was not an ideological imposition, and said “There was no pressure from any political party or organisation. This does not amount to imposing any organisation’s ideology on students. We have chosen Hedgewar as a writer and not on the basis of his ideology or organisation.”
According a news report, some lessons dropped include works by Karnataka’s writer and journalist P. Lankesh, titled “Mruga Mattu Sundari” and another by Leftist thinker G. Ramakrishna’s “Bhagat Singh”. The lessons that ‘replace’ them are works by writer Shivananda Kalave’s “Swadeshi Sutrada Sarala Habba” and M. Govinda Pai’s “Naanu Prasa Bitta Kathe”.
The other lessons dropped “in the detailed text are Sara Aboobacker’s “Yuddha”, A.N. Murthy Rao’s “Vyaghra Kathe”, and Shivakotyacharya’s “Sukumara Swamy Kathe”, and the inclusions now made “Vedic scholar the late Bannanje Govindacharya’s “Sukanashana Upadesha” and Shatavadhani R. Ganesh’s “Shrestha Bharatiya Chintanegalu” stated the news report.
In April 2022, the CBSE dropped poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, sections on Non-Alignment Movement, Cold War era, rise of Islamic empires in Afro-Asian territories, chronicles of Mughal courts, and the industrial revolution, from the CBSE’s Class 11 and 12 political science syllabus.
