‘No regard for great revolutionaries’: AIDSO condemns dropping lesson on Bhagat Singh from Kannada book

NEW DELHI: All India Democratic Students Organization (AIDSO) Karnataka condemned the Karnataka government's move of omitting a lesson on Bhagat Singh from a Kannada text book of Class 10 and demanded to immediately add the removed texts. The organisation asked “to stop inducing unscientific, undemocratic and unsecular thoughts onto textbooks.”

According to a statement from AIDSO, in Kannada textbook which is newly being published by the Karnataka state government, a lesson on great revolutionary who sacrificed his life at the age of 23, Bhagat Singh, has been omitted; while speech made by a man who turned his back on the freedom movement, RSS founder, K B Hedgewar, which does not unite the people but spreads communal hatred, is being inducted.

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Along with this, a lesson which condemns racial hatred, "mruga mattu sundari" of P. lankesh, and also many valuable lessons like Sara Abubakar's "Yuddha" and A N Murthi Rao's "Vyaghrageethe" have been removed, the statement alleged.

“AIDSO condemns in strongest words, this rhetoricism by the government which distorts the established truth. This makes it clear that the ruling BJP and the Sangh Parivar have no regard for the great revolutionaries of the country's independence movement, including Bhagat Singh. And this highlights their ideology,” the statement said.

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The founders of our Renaissance movement and many great freedom fighters had hoped for democratic, scientific and secular education. But all political parties that have ruled so far, have been working out their own agendas in textbooks, the AIDSO Karnataka secretary Ajay Kamath said in the statement.

“Already the educated and education loving people, across the state, have raised questions about the chairman and committee of the textbook revision board appointed by the BJP government. It is now proven that the government has constituted this committee as a ploy to instill its ideas into education. AIDSO calls upon the conscious people and student community of the state to resist the government's propaganda of narrow minded ideology,” the statement further read.