Kerala textbooks to include deleted portions on Gandhi’s assassination, Gujarat riots, Nehru

Kerala has decided to restore the deleted chapters in NCERT Class 11 and 12 textbooks including those on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the 2002 Gujarat riots, Jawarharlal Nehru by incorporating them in supplementary textbooks.

The chapters will be introduced in schools after the Onam vacation in September, said the Minister for General Education V Sivankutty. He said the new curriculum under the Kerala State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) will bring back deleted portions including references to Jawaharlal Nehru and Mughal emperors, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the 2002 Gujarat riots, and more. Portions removed from Economics and Science textbooks will also be re-introduced. They had also removed reference to independent India's first education minister, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

“Kerala’s curriculum committee formed a sub-committee, held comprehensive discussions, and arrived at the conclusion that several portions the NCERT had removed from textbooks were of significance, and hence should be taught to students in the state. This committee has recommended teaching all these chapters in schools under the General Education Department in Kerala. The new textbooks have already been prepared,” he said. The curriculum is expected to change for students from pre-primary to higher secondary classes, replacing the NCERT syllabus the state has so far followed.

The minister clarified that this would not be limited to additional reading. “They will be a proper part of the syllabus and not just complementary readings. Students will have to study them for their exams, because only then would they find the drive to read and understand their history,” he explained.

Last year, National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) amended history and social sciences textbooks to remove mentions of the 2002 Gujarat Riots and passages around the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. They had also removed industrial revolution from a Class 11 textbook and some Dalit writers from a Class 7 textbook as part of a new rationalised syllabi for the current academic session.

This June, NCERT also removed the periodic table, democracy and sources of energy from class 10 textbooks. The chapters that have been removed include Charles Darwin on evolution, origin of life on Earth, and human evolution and heredity as well as the chapter on periodic classification of elements.

The 2007 edition of the last chapter of the “Politics in India since Independence” textbook – titled “Recent Developments in Indian Politics” – had a passage with the subhead “Anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat”. The first sentence read, “In February-March 2002, large-scale violence against Muslims took place in Gujarat.” The latest revision of the textbook has dropped both references to Muslims, though it remains critical of the way the government handled the riots.

From class 12th history textbooks, the background of Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse has been removed, the fact that the then-Union government cracked down on Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

(RSS) after Gandhi's assassination, and the fact that Gandhi stood for Hindu-Muslim unity and opposed Hindu majoritarianism after Independence have all been removed.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) had cited "overlapping" and "irrelevant" as reasons for dropping those portions from the syllabus. This is the first time since 2007 that NCERT textbooks are being reviewed. Former CBSE Chairman RK Chaturvedi suggested the changes in June 2017. Since 2014, the NCERT has undertaken three syllabus revisions — in 2017, 2019, and 2021.