Guru Gorakhnath, Jan Sangh leaders in UP textbooks soon

LUCKNOW: Guru Gorakhnath, the founder of the Nath monastic order to which UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath belongs, Jan Sangh leaders Deen Dayal Upadhyaya and Syama Prasad Mookerjee among others, are all set to find a place in the primary textbooks of Uttar Pradesh, an official familiar with the matter said.

Famous socialist Jayaprakash Narayan popularly known as JP, Rani Avanti Bai, the OBC queen who fought the British, Swami Pranavananda, the social reformer from West Bengal are among those whose life and times will be taught to impressionable young minds in UP.

A senior official of the UP’s primary education department confirmed that students would now be taught the life and times of these great leaders.

“All of them are inspirational figures, all of them diehard nationalists and who worked selflessly for the glory of the country,” the official said.

The decision comes after several BJP leaders, including union home minister Rajnath Singh, VHP and RSS leaders, as well as governors like Kalyan Singh called for a need to ‘rewrite history’. The saffron brigade has long maintained that history books written under the Congress regime have ignored contributions of many national heroes and stressed on the need to correct what they call, ‘historical blunders’.

UP BJP spokesman Shalabh Mani Tripathi confirmed that chapters on these leaders will be included in textbooks.

“Previously, history of a certain section of leaders was taught to children despite the fact that some of them were raiders and plunderers. They were glorified while real heroes like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and Chandra Shekhar Azad were forgotten,” Tripathi said.

Chandramohan, a BJP leader with an RSS background, said, “Over the past several decades there has been a systematic attempt to brainwash our youth. Our opponents have been running a canard against us that we are rewriting history. Our party’s government are merely correcting historical blunders.”

He said, “For instance, why have great fighters Alha and Udal never been taught as part of our rich history. Why has Akbar always been written as ‘great’ and our homegrown fearless warrior Maharana Pratap ignored? Why has history historically been tilted towards the Left and one family of the Congress?”