The National Council of Educational Research and Training has reconstituted the team preparing political science textbooks for Classes 11 and 12. NCERT says the exercise is intended to bring cultural roots, Indian knowledge systems and inclusivity into the books.
The Class 11 textbook is scheduled to be prepared by November, while the Class 12 book is due by July next year. The panel will be led by Sandeep Shastri, an educationist and political analyst who is vice-chancellor of Nitte, a deemed university in Karnataka.
The new team includes Yadunath Deshpande, Prashant Divekar, Vandana Mishra and Ravi Rameshchandra Shukla. Reporting on the panel identifies these four academics and scholars as having direct or indirect links with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad or the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Deshpande, a senior adviser in the Ministry of Education, has had a long organisational association with ABVP. According to the organisation’s records, he served as its joint state organisation secretary in Maharashtra and also worked as organisation secretary of its Mumbai-Konkan unit. His LinkedIn profile describes him as a political adviser to the BJP.
Divekar has been associated for a long period with Pune-based Gyan Prabodhini, described in the report as an RSS-linked organisation founded in 1962 by RSS pracharak Vinayak Vishwanath. A profile on the National Guidance Mission portal of the National Council for Teacher Education says Divekar’s approach is based on Indian educational philosophy. It also records his contribution to the National Curriculum Framework.
Mishra is a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Political Studies and has served as ABVP’s national secretary. Shukla is an associate professor at JNU’s Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory. He has served on the editorial board of the Indian Journal of Democratic Governance, published by the RSS-linked Indian Institute of Democratic Leadership-Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini.
Shukla has also researched cultural and spiritual nationalism. He is the principal investigator of an ICSSR-funded JNU project examining the role of festivals in shaping India’s spiritual and cultural nationalism, with the Kumbh and Magh fairs as its study.
Other members include Prakash Kandpal, Needhi Gupta, Chetan Singhai, Sukanshika Vats, Satish Kumar, Divanshu Srivastava, Pranav Gupta, Nand Kishore and Swapna Prabhu. Savita Sagar, M N Suresh Kumar, Diana Isabel and N Bharani are also on the panel. NCERT’s Vanthangpui Khobung and Subhash Singh will serve as member coordinator and co-coordinator.
An NCERT notification issued by director Dinesh Prasad Saklani says the team will receive guidance from curriculum groups covering social sciences, languages, Indian knowledge systems, environmental education, innovation-based teaching methods and teaching-learning materials.
