Idol which we made is now corpse; never took money from NCERT: Yogendra Yadav
‘You may have the copyright in the texts, but not on our names. We don’t want NCERT's acknowledgement. Please free us," Yogendra Yadav said.
Amid the ongoing row over Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar dissociating themselves from the revised version of the Political Science textbooks from Class 9 to 12, Yogendra Yadav on Sunday in his Facebook Live addressed the issue in detail and asked why the NCERT was not leaving them. Speaking in detail about how they started writing the books -- Democratic Politics I for class 9 and Democratic Politics 2 for Class 10, Political Theory for Class 11, Contemporary World Politics for Class 12-- Yogendra Yadav said the idol that they made has turned into a corpse now.
"Many people were involved in the process of the writing. In the end, the drafts came to me and Professor Suhas Palshikar. The meaning of chief advisors did not mean we were advising from far. We weighed every word and the ramifications that they may have years after. The books were ready by 2007," Yogendra Yadav said.
'BJP did not change those books in 2014'
Yogendra Yadav said those books remained untouched even after the BJP came to power. "There were many controversies over the books and the first one started during the Congress time. Kapil Sibal was the minister then. The controversy was over an old cartoon of Babasaheb Ambedkar. The issue reached Parliament. A committee was set up and the cartoon was dropped," Yogendra Yadav said adding that small changes started to be introduced after 2014.
What changes were made in the recent years
Yogendra Yadav said on the excuse of the pandemic and to ease the burden on the students references to mass movement, human rights, diversity, equality were dropped. Large-scale changes were made in the texts, Yadav said. "Even the chapter on Congress's Emergency was dropped. Someone might have been scared that if the students read about Emergency, they may also question 2019-20. Now this is not the idol that we made. Now we are ashamed of these texts and the body of the idol has now become a corpse. So we asked the NCERT to drop our names," Yogendra Yadav said adding that it was a painful decision to ask for dissociating their names from the textbooks.
'People think we must have got money'
Yogendra Yadav said earlier when individual writers used to write NCERT texts, they used to get royalty. "But after 2005 when books were prepared through committees, the issue of royalty ended. The NCERT said it would give some fees to the members. I will clarify that I never took any money for writing those books because I took it as a duty to the nation," Yogendr Yadav said.