Revati Sahijwani, 16, is bewildered by a controversy over a 63-year-old cartoon in an Indian textbook that her New Delhi school has been using for five years. The cartoon shows Dalit leader BR Ambedkar, who guided the drafting of the constitution, sitting whip-in-hand on a snail labelled The Constitution with the country's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru standing behind him, also with a whip.
Opposition lawmakers forced several adjournments of both houses of parliament over the cartoon on May 11. Politicians from both left and right said the cartoon and others like it were disrespectful to Ambedkar, inappropriate for young minds and would give a false impression of national icons in particular and politicians in general.
Education Minister Kapil Sibal said the cartoon would be removed and ordered the review of all cartoons used in political science textbooks, products of the state-sponsored but autonomous, National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee went a step further Monday, as lawmakers continued with their complaints, and said all political cartoons would be removed from government-sponsored textbooks. "The cartoons were in good humour. They were used to make the books more interesting and attractive. It's how you interpret them," said Sahijwani, a high school student in New Delhi.
Her interpretation of the controversial cartoon is that the constitution took a long time to make and politicians were impatient. Sahijwani said the lawmakers were wasting their time with their outrage over the cartoon. "Don't they have better things to talk about with people dying every day? I am quite shocked," she said.
"The cartoons help us understand issues quicker. The snail idea is so creative, I was thinking I'll use it in my next art competition," Mugdh Sethia, 15, said. "Why don't MPs (members of parliament) talk about development and corruption instead of such silly topics?" "Do they think we form opinions only through textbooks? What about TV and the internet? They're just not in tune with the times," added Sethia.
One day after the ruckus in parliament, political scientists Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, advisers to the textbook council, resigned. They had played a key role in formulating Indian Constitution at Work, the textbook now in the limelight, along with several others for senior grades.
"The whole purpose of creating these new textbooks was to inculcate a spirit of questioning and enquiry in young minds," Palshikar said. "We wanted to make students think because cartoons do lend to multiple readings and to inculcate the idea that 'politics' is out there and needs to be studied by intellectually engaging with it."
The new textbooks signalled a departure from reams of dull material focused on rote learning. They were released in 2006 after approval by a committee appointed by the Ministry of Education that included bureaucrats, academics and experts.
"The textbooks have been approved through due processes. It is being taught in 15 states of very different political ideologies only because of their very high quality. I am totally puzzled," said Krishna Kumar, a former director of NCERT. Both the subject of the cartoon and its creator, famous cartoonist K Shankar Pillai, are dead. In his lifetime, neither Ambedkar nor his followers objected to the cartoon. So what has changed now?
"Possibly the nature of Indian politics," said Vidhu Verma, professor of political science at New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University. Verma said that with civil society movements against corruption, incidents of shoes being thrown at ministers and media campaigns running them down have left politicians feeling fragile, insulted and offended - and their reaction to the cartoons is a by-product.
Palshikar said political parties were increasingly becoming isolated from the public, leading to a sense of insecurity. "Refusal to engage in politics leads them to take such stands when they think they are under attack and losing credibility," he said. The reaction to the cartoon was also a reflection of group politics that has come to stay, Verma said.
"Ambedkar was not an icon when the cartoon was made, but today he is the biggest icon for an increasingly assertive Dalit community, a social group that has been marginalized for centuries." Members of the community could interpret the cartoon as a slight on their leader, but the reaction could well end up triggering a dangerous trend - which is evident in the finance minister's statement that all political cartoons would be removed from textbooks, Verma added. Many cartoons in the books are directed at former prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, members of the Indian National Congress party, which leads the ruling coalition.