Suhas Palshikar, Yogendra Yadav to sue NCERT if names not removed from revised textbooks

New Delhi: Academician Suhas Palshikar and political scientist Yogendra Yadav threatened to file a lawsuit against the National Council for Educational Research and Training on Monday if their names were not removed from the textbook development committee.

Following the NCERT's recent changes, which either deleted or significantly reduced key historical information about India, Palshikar and Yadav requested that their names be removed as primary advisers for political science textbooks for Classes 9 through 12, Scroll.in reported.

The two made a similar request last year, and the NCERT responded that there was no question of withdrawing any individual's name as a member of the textbook development committee.

“Despite our request a year ago, NCERT has decided to publish our names in the mutilated textbooks that we do not wish to be associated with,” Yadav said in a social media post on Monday. “Palshikar Suhas and I have written to NCERT that we may have to take legal action if they don’t withdraw these books and remove our names.”

The two said in a letter to NCERT chief DP Saklani on Monday that they were "shocked to discover" that the organisation had once again mentioned their names in the reprinted textbooks with additional revisions, more than a year after they asked the organisation to remove their names and distanced themselves from the textbooks.

Yadav and Palshikar responded following yet another round of textbook revisions by the NCERT, which included removing references to the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 Gujarat riots.

Additionally, the NCERT has eliminated material from its textbooks that discussed the Mughal era in India and the 1975 National Emergency. The updated political science textbook for class 12 also refers to the Babri Masjid as a “three-domed structure [that] was built at the site of Shri Ram’s birthplace” rather than calling it by name.

Yadav and Palshikar claimed in their letter with Saklani that in addition to the previous practice of "selective deletions," the autonomous educational authority had turned to "significant additions and rewriting" that are in contradiction with the original textbooks' spirit.

“The NCERT has no moral or legal right to distort these textbooks without consulting any of us and yet publish these under our names despite our explicit refusal,” the letter said. “There can be arguments and debates about someone’s claims to authorship of any given work. But it is bizarre that authors and editors are forced to associate their names with a work they no longer identify as their own.”

According to Yadav and Palshikar, they do not want the NCERT to "hide behind" their names in order to give students access to "such textbooks of political science that we find politically biased, academically indefensible and pedagogically dysfunctional”.