NCERT an ‘affiliate of RSS’ — Congress slams textbook revisions on secularism, vote bank politics

New Delhi: Congress general secretary (communications) Jairam Ramesh Monday accused the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) of functioning as an “affiliate” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and mounting an “assault” on the Constitution of India.

He was reacting to a report published Sunday by ThePrint on NCERT revising a chapter on secularism in its Class 11 Political Science textbook so that it does not come across as “justification of vote bank politics”.

In a statement on X, Ramesh said the NCERT, which is an autonomous body under the Union Ministry of Education, needs to remind itself that it is not the “Nagpur or Narendra Council for Educational Research and Training”.

“The National Testing Agency has blamed the NCERT for the ‘grace marks’ fiasco in NEET 2024. That is only drawing attention away from the NTA’s own abject failures. However it is true that the NCERT is no longer a professional institution. It has been functioning as an RSS affiliate since 2014,” Ramesh wrote, attaching a link to ThePrint news report.

Commenting specifically on the changes, Ramesh said that the revised Class 11 political science textbook criticises the idea of secularism as well as what it considers policies of political parties in this regard.

“NCERT’s objective is to produce textbooks, not political pamphlets and propaganda. NCERT is mounting an assault on our country’s Constitution in whose Preamble secularism features explicitly as a foundational pillar of the Indian republic. Various Supreme Court judgments have clearly held secularism to be an essential part of the basic structure of the Constitution.”

As reported earlier, the revised chapter states that political parties in India “give priority to the interests of a minority group” with an eye on “vote bank politics”, which leads to “minority appeasement”.

This marks a complete shift from what was taught until the 2023-24 academic session — that if students “think hard”, they will find there is “little evidence” to suggest that vote bank politics favours minorities.

The NCERT justified the changes saying that the section on vote bank politics in the previous version of the book “failed” to define the  phenomenon.

“This section only intends to justify vote bank politics. Therefore, the new added text elaborates the points, which are criticism of Indian Secularism. The rewritten section addresses these anomalies and makes this section (vote bank politics) a relevant criticism of Indian Secularism,” according to the NCERT’s official records on the revisions.

(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)