Jaya erases Karunanidhi’s ideologies off textbooks

Chennai, May 19: After Jayalalithaa has been hailed for her stellar performance in the

; she was elevated as the reigning queen decorating the prized catch of the Chief Minister"s chair. Now, it looks like Jaya is determined to remove all references to the ousted DMK leader Karunanidhi from school textbooks.

Students who are slated to get back to schools after their summer vacations will have to wait a little longer to get their textbooks, especially the Samacheer Kalvi Tamil textbook so that the specific parts that laud the former Chief Minister can be removed. The school education minister C V Shanmugam has been quoted as saying, “There are some objectionable content in the textbooks. The books will not be distributed till they are removed."

The new government also hopes to wipe out a particular poem called 'Semmozhi Vaazhthu" from textbooks written by Karunanidhi himself. The poem has become an anthem of sorts and is published in all textbooks along with the official 'Tamil Thai Vaazhthu" which is considered an official invocation.

The changes will be made for close to nine crore textbooks which is currently under production. The former DMK government aimed to implant his ideologies to the school children in the form of imbibing his works through additional reading and supplementary reading material in the Class 10 Tamil textbook. The chapter includes Karunanidhi"s efforts to uplift the classical status of the Tamil language through 'Uyar Thani Semmozhi'.

With the new move, the timely availability of textbooks to schools will be impacted. The Samacheer Kalvi textbooks are part of an ambitious initiative by the DMK government to impart a common syllabus from primary classes to class 10.

OneIndia News