DW BUREAU / Chandigarh

Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal on Sunday challenged Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh to produce before the media copies of the Punjab Education Board’s new book on history for Class 11 to prove his claim that chapters on Sikh history had not been deleted from the syllabus of Class 12 and had merely been shifted to the syllabus of class 11.

“I dare the CM to share with everyone the new book containing all the old chapters on Sikh history today itself before his officers tried to deceive the people by getting a new book printed now to hide their mischief in deleting Sikh history from the syllabus.”

Badal was referring to Captain Singh’s rejoinder to the allegation of the SAD about deletion of the chapters on Sikh history from the class 12 syllabus of the state education board.

The Chief minister had claimed that no chapters had been expunged from the Board syllabus and that chapters had been merely been shifted from Class 12 to Class 11 to align the syllabus with the NCERT’s guidelines.

Badal described the CM’s denial of the SAD’s allegation as “totally erroneous and misleading”, and said that the Chief Minister should have ordered an inquiry into the issue instead of embarrassing himself with a factually incorrect statement which was fed to him by the very officers who were responsible for the mischief in the first place.

Badal asked the Chief Minister to order an inquiry to rule out or defeat a conspiracy to downgrade Sikh history and to erase it for future generations. In a statement here, Mr Badal said the Chief Minister should first have called for the old and the new books for the relevant classes and then compared the two before rushing with a statement which is bound to embarrass him now. He said the Chief Minister’s claim of shifting Sikh history from class 12 to class 11 is totally erroneous.

(editor@dailyworld.in)