Can anyone even imagine a cartoon drawn in 1949 will be the subject of Parliamentary furore in 2012? But it can and will happen only in India. Yesterday both the houses of Parliament were witness to the fury of a group of Parliamentarians, who interpreted the 1949 cartoon to be derogatory to the ‘then’ Congress Leader and later Dalit icon Babasaheb Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.
The irony is that the cartoon was drawn while Babasaheb was not only alive, but was tasked with the monumental work of drafting together the Constitution for the soon to be formed Republic of India between December 1946 and November 1949 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_Assembly_of_India].
Of the 2 houses of Parliament thus formed, Lok Sabha was disrupted and later adjourned almost for a full day, while the Rajya Sabha has been held to ransom by the defeated former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
The fallout of the furore was the abject bending down to such disruptive tactics by the Minister in charge of the Education, Kapil Sibal, who apologised for the incident and ordered the cartoon to be removed from the textbook. The joke is that the cartoon has been in the 11th standard text book on Political Science since 2006, but our leaders woke up to the fact after six long years.
The matter didn’t end there. Two eminent political scientists, Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar, resigned from the NCERT committee, hours after the cartoon provoked a furore in Parliament. Understandably Academics are up in arms with this seeming inability to suffer criticism by politicians and the knee jerk reaction of the Minister to bow down at the slightest threat of intolerance.
Personally a political cartoon is just that - a cartoon and though I don’t want to be patronizing, I think even Babasaheb, if he had seen the cartoon (as he might well have), would have had a good laugh at it.
Instead we have -
:-P
update 1: And in case the GoI wants to pursue a ‘case’ against the Minister under whom the 2006 ‘original’ textbook was prepared, it was Arjun Singh, who died in March 2011 and who ironically tried to style himself as a ‘protector’ of Dalits and Other Backward Classes.
:-P (twice)
This story just keeps getting atrocious. Yesterday night on Primetime TV, on Times Now debate at 9 p.m., two Dalit activists appeared live. No one objected when Kancha Illaiyah made a statement to the effect that ‘Babasaheb is more than a Prophet to Dalits’. But when cartoonist Sudhir Tailang made a statement that ‘Shankar Pillai is like a Ambedkar to the cartoonists’, he was howled down by the other Dalit activist lawyer. Personally, it certainly wasn’t great to see that type of behaviour.
update 2: Whatever I may or may not think of such behaviour, personally I do not feel that the original cartoon is offensive to anyone, whether Pandit Nehru or Babasaheb.
However there is a mad.madrasi take - what is a political cartoon doing in a school text book? Are textbooks supposed to contain cartoons? (other than the caricatures drawn by naughty students, if any).
Today morning ‘The Hindu’ carried this cartoon on its front page [http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3409271.ece]. Mind you this is not the original cartoon, but a cartoon of today which has the original cartoon sort of ‘embedded’ in it. Would be interesting to see what becomes of this cartoon - the part of ‘original’ cartoon is marked (by me) with dashed box.
My Bemused half murmurs, ‘You know something? Tomorrow, on Sunday, there is a special sitting of Parliament scheduled. If you ask for what? It is to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Parliament’s first sitting.’
To which my Wicked half whispers, ‘I do hope they mean the 60th anniversary of the Republic and not the Parliament. Because if my memory is correct, my NCERT history textbook (no pun intended) taught me that the ‘Parliament of India’ was recommended by the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms and formed under the Government of India Act 1919.’
But then so much for history!
:-P
The irony is that the cartoon was drawn while Babasaheb was not only alive, but was tasked with the monumental work of drafting together the Constitution for the soon to be formed Republic of India between December 1946 and November 1949 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_Assembly_of_India].
Of the 2 houses of Parliament thus formed, Lok Sabha was disrupted and later adjourned almost for a full day, while the Rajya Sabha has been held to ransom by the defeated former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
The fallout of the furore was the abject bending down to such disruptive tactics by the Minister in charge of the Education, Kapil Sibal, who apologised for the incident and ordered the cartoon to be removed from the textbook. The joke is that the cartoon has been in the 11th standard text book on Political Science since 2006, but our leaders woke up to the fact after six long years.
The matter didn’t end there. Two eminent political scientists, Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar, resigned from the NCERT committee, hours after the cartoon provoked a furore in Parliament. Understandably Academics are up in arms with this seeming inability to suffer criticism by politicians and the knee jerk reaction of the Minister to bow down at the slightest threat of intolerance.
Personally a political cartoon is just that - a cartoon and though I don’t want to be patronizing, I think even Babasaheb, if he had seen the cartoon (as he might well have), would have had a good laugh at it.
Instead we have -
- Mayawati asking for criminal action against those responsible;
- Ram Vilas Paswan asking for dismissal of the academics who put together the book;
- Ram Vilas Paswan also called for criminal action against the cartoonist and for the NCERT to be closed down; and,
- Pranab Mukherjee says the 64(?) year old cartoon was ‘totally wrong’, to name a few.
:-P
update 1: And in case the GoI wants to pursue a ‘case’ against the Minister under whom the 2006 ‘original’ textbook was prepared, it was Arjun Singh, who died in March 2011 and who ironically tried to style himself as a ‘protector’ of Dalits and Other Backward Classes.
:-P (twice)
This story just keeps getting atrocious. Yesterday night on Primetime TV, on Times Now debate at 9 p.m., two Dalit activists appeared live. No one objected when Kancha Illaiyah made a statement to the effect that ‘Babasaheb is more than a Prophet to Dalits’. But when cartoonist Sudhir Tailang made a statement that ‘Shankar Pillai is like a Ambedkar to the cartoonists’, he was howled down by the other Dalit activist lawyer. Personally, it certainly wasn’t great to see that type of behaviour.
update 2: Whatever I may or may not think of such behaviour, personally I do not feel that the original cartoon is offensive to anyone, whether Pandit Nehru or Babasaheb.
However there is a mad.madrasi take - what is a political cartoon doing in a school text book? Are textbooks supposed to contain cartoons? (other than the caricatures drawn by naughty students, if any).
Today morning ‘The Hindu’ carried this cartoon on its front page [http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3409271.ece]. Mind you this is not the original cartoon, but a cartoon of today which has the original cartoon sort of ‘embedded’ in it. Would be interesting to see what becomes of this cartoon - the part of ‘original’ cartoon is marked (by me) with dashed box.
My Bemused half murmurs, ‘You know something? Tomorrow, on Sunday, there is a special sitting of Parliament scheduled. If you ask for what? It is to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Parliament’s first sitting.’
To which my Wicked half whispers, ‘I do hope they mean the 60th anniversary of the Republic and not the Parliament. Because if my memory is correct, my NCERT history textbook (no pun intended) taught me that the ‘Parliament of India’ was recommended by the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms and formed under the Government of India Act 1919.’
But then so much for history!
:-P
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