Mamata condemns right-wing organisation's suggestion to remove Tagore's writings from textbooks

"How dare they think to remove R.N. Tagore's thoughts from school textbooks! It's just rubbish," Mamata Banerjee said.

"Tagore is a matter of pride for us, the whole world respect him. None will support their such recommendations, I think," Banerjee added.

Recently, Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas (Trust for the Uplift of Education and Culture), which is headed by former general secretary of RSS-run school network Vidya Bharati- Dinanath Batra, asked the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to review few portions of its school textbooks.

According to a report published in The Indian Express, Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas has suggested the NCERT to remove all English, Urdu and Arabic words, a poem by the revolutionary poet Pash, a couplet by Mirza Ghalib, writings of Rabindranath Tagore, extracts from painter Maqbool Fida Husain’s autobiography and references to the Mughal emperors as benevolent rulers.

The RSS-affiliated educational outfit has also recommended to expunge former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s apology for the 1984 riots and the sentence "nearly 2,000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat in 2002" from the school books.

The organization has objections to describe Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a Hindu outfit and the National Conference as secular.

Earlier on Monday, condemning the right-wing educational activist organization's recommendations, CPI-M Rajya Sabha MP Ritabrata Banerjee sent a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking his intervention into the issue.

Meanwhile, Union Minister for Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar on Tuesday clarified in the Parliament that Central government does not have any plan to remove R.N. Tagore's writings from school textbooks as they respect the bard and his thoughts like other Indians.

(Reporting by Deepayan Sinha)