AIMIM chief Owaisi flays NCERT over textbook revisions

Hyderabad: AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi on Tuesday said children should not grow up "glorifying criminal acts" in reference to Babri Masjid demolition being tweaked in NCERT textbooks.

In a post on 'X', the Hyderabad MP said India’s children should know that the Supreme Court called the demolition of Babri Masjid an "egregious criminal act".

"The NCERT has decided to replace Babri Masjid with the words "three domed structure." It has also decided to call the Ayodhya judgement an example of "consensus." India’s children should know that the Supreme Court called the demolition of Babri Masjid an egregious criminal act," Owaisi said.

The AIMIM chief further said India’s children should know that a functioning masjid was "desecrated" in 1949 and then demolished by a mob in 1992. "They should not grow up glorifying criminal acts," he said.

National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) director Dinesh Prasad Saklani had recently said the tweaks in textbooks are part of the annual revision and should not be a subject of hue and cry.

The comments by Saklani come at a time when new textbooks have hit the market with several deletions and changes. The revised Class 12 political science textbook does not mention the Babri Masjid but refers to it as a "three-domed structure".

It has pruned the Ayodhya section from four to two pages and deleted details from the earlier version. It instead focuses on the Supreme Court judgement that paved the way for the construction of a Ram temple at the site where the disputed structure once stood before it was torn down by Hindu activists in December 1992.

The Supreme Court verdict was widely accepted in the country. The consecration of the Ram idol in the temple was performed on January 22 this year by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.