NCERT proposal to use Bharat instead of India unacceptable says CM Pinarayi Vijayan

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Thursday said the NCERT panel’s recommendation that "Bharat" should be used instead of 'India’ in textbooks, is totally unacceptable.

The NCERT-appointed social sciences committee had recently recommended that the country's name be changed to 'Bharat' instead of 'India' in social science textbooks. The chief minister said the Constitution referred to the country as "India that is Bharat” and the politics behind removing the name India is as clear as daylight.

Vijayan said the Sangh Parivar was afraid of the politics of inclusion that the term 'India' represents. This is one of the reasons behind the hatred towards the word "India".

According to him, the new proposals should be seen as a continuation of the arbitrary exclusion from school textbooks, a section on Mughal history and a section on the RSS ban that followed Gandhi's assassination. The NCERT has consistently taken a stand in favour of the Sangh Parivar's attempts to distort history,” he said and added that the textbook committee is desperate to whitewash the fake history created by the Parivar.

The chief minister alleged that the Sangh Parivar has always been against the idea of 'India' based on pluralism and co-existence. The new proposal of NCERT committee is the latest example of this agenda.

Pinarayi called upon the democratic society at large to come out against the unconstitutional suggestions in the position paper submitted by the NCERT committee.