Thiruvananthapuram: The rationalists have reason to rejoice over the fact that the number of people who do not believe in religion and caste is growing in the state. This is clear from a statement made by education minister C. Raveendranath in the Assembly on Wednesday that the school records of 124,147 students have blank religion and caste columns.
The statement came in reply to a question raised by Mr D.K. Murali of the CPM.
Based on the figures of 2017-18 academic year, 1,23,630 students from classes one to ten, 278 students of Plus-One and 239 of Plus- Two have left the column unfilled.
The Bharatheeya Yukthivadi Sangham had been fighting for blank columns for religion and caste and had even petitioned former President Pranab Mukherjee in this regard.
Though the general education department had issued an order on April 1974 against denying admission to students if their parents were not interested to fill the religion or caste column in the form, the government failed to incorporate it in online facility created by the National Informatics Centre in 2004 for SSLC. A plea was put forward to the government to include ‘non-religion’ in the database for those who have no religious faith, which it had rejected.
Subsequently, the case reached the High Court which directed the government to include it. Hence, it was only recently that students were allowed to leave the columns blank.
Last year, CPM MP M.B. Rajesh and Congress MLA V.T. Balram had announced in Facebook that their children had been admitted to government schools without filling the religion column.
During the tenure of the previous LDF government, a chapter in the social studies textbook of class VII, titled ‘Madham Illatha Jeevan’ (Life without Religion), had to be withdrawn after protest alleging that it was propagating atheism. In the chapter, a headmaster who starts filling the admission form finds that the father of the child is a Muslim and the mother a Hindu. The parents tell the headmaster, "need not record anything, and write no religion." They also want him to leave the column of caste blank.
