Hyderabad: Reacting to the National Council for Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) decision to replace the term “Babri Masjid” with “three-domed structure” in school textbooks, Asaduddin Owaisi, chief of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and MP, asserted that India’s children must know the truth about the Babri Masjid demolition. He emphasized that the Supreme Court deemed the demolition an “egregious criminal act” and clarified in its November 2019 judgment that no temple was destroyed to build the Babri Masjid, debunking claims made by the RSS-BJP.
“The NCERT’s decision to replace ‘Babri Masjid’ with ‘three-domed structure’ and to portray the Ayodhya judgment as an example of ‘consensus’ distorts historical facts. India’s children should be aware that the Supreme Court called the demolition of Babri Masjid an ‘egregious criminal act’,” Owaisi stated in a post on micro-blogging site X.
Owaisi further stressed that children should learn that a functioning mosque was desecrated in 1949 and demolished by a mob in 1992. “They should not grow up glorifying criminal acts,” he added.
Earlier, Owaisi remarked, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” in response to NCERT Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani’s defense of the textbook modifications, where Saklani claimed that teaching about riots could create violent and depressed citizens.
In contrast to NCERT’s stance, the Kerala government announced it would retain the term “Babri Masjid” in its school syllabus.
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