New Delhi: Amid the row over revision of NCERT textbooks, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Monday alleged that the institution has been functioning as an RSS affiliate since 2014 and is mounting an assault on the Constitution.
In a post on X, Ramesh said the National Testing Agency has blamed the NCERT for the ‘grace marks’ fiasco in NEET 2024.
That is only drawing attention away from the NTA’s own abject failures, he alleged.
“However it is true that the NCERT is no longer a professional institution. It has been functioning as an RSS affiliate since 2014. It has just been revealed that its revised Class XI political science textbook criticises the idea of secularism as well as what it considers policies of political parties in this regard.
“NCERT’s objective is to produce textbooks, not political pamphlets and propaganda,” the Congress leader said.
“NCERT is mounting an assault on our country’s Constitution in whose Preamble secularism features explicitly as a foundational pillar of the Indian republic. Various Supreme Court judgments have clearly held secularism to be an essential part of the basic structure of the Constitution,” he said.
Ramesh said the NCERT needs to remind itself that it is the National Council for Educational Research and Training, “not the Nagpur or Narendra Council for Educational Research and Training.”
“NCERT’s objective is to produce textbooks, not political pamphlets and propaganda,” the Congress leader said.
“NCERT is mounting an assault on our country’s Constitution in whose Preamble secularism features explicitly as a foundational pillar of the Indian republic. Various Supreme Court judgments have clearly held secularism to be an essential part of the basic structure of the Constitution,” he said.
Ramesh said the NCERT needs to remind itself that it is the National Council for Educational Research and Training, “not the Nagpur or Narendra Council for Educational Research and Training.”