After Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa's statement that the BJP government would "try everything they can" to remove the chapter on Tipu Sultan from school textbooks, the state government is now setting up a new committee to deliberate on the matter.
The Department of Primary and Secondary Education has decided to scrap the old committee formed last week and form a new one to discuss whether chapters in school textbooks related to the Mysore king Tipu Sultan should be scrapped entirely, retained or modified.
According to The Hindu, Primary and Secondary Education Minister S Suresh Kumar that the department will finalise the members of the committee and the first meeting will be held on November 7. Suresh Kumar said that the new committee was being formed to include subject-matter experts and also people who are 'neutral', TOI reported.
The decision to form a new committee came as the state government faced flak for not including any subject-matter experts in the earlier committee that was formed. Earlier in October, the Karnataka Textbook Society-empowered committee, was formed which was earlier tasked to decide on the matter. SR Umashankar, Principal Secretary of the Primary and Secondary Education Department said that the Karnataka Textbook Society did not have a panel of experts and experts are consulted only when textbooks are to be framed, the Hindu report added.
Baragur Ramachandrappa, former chairman of the textbook committee, said that the BJP government in 2008 had allegedly formed a committee to decide whether the chapter on Tipu Sultan must be included in the syllabus. At the time, the expert committee had allegedly concluded that the chapter stays, with some minor additions to the existing lesson.
BJP MLA Appachu Ranjan, whose letter to the government to drop Tipu from textbooks kick started the entire controversy, has also been invited to the committee’s meeting on November 7, the report added. However, officials from the Department of Public Instruction have not received an invitation for the meeting. The political controversy was triggered by BJP leader Appachu Ranjan claiming that Tipu Sultan was “anti-Hindu”. The issue was highly politicised after former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah made Tipu Jayanti a state-sponsored celebration in 2015.
Soon after Yediyurappa took oath as the Chief Minister on July 26 this year, one of the first moves made by his government was to scrap Tipu Jayanti celebrations. Yediyurappa had on Friday also said that he was "against Tipu Sultan" and that his government would do "everything they can to remove Tipu from school textbooks."