Raj minister wants school uniform in ‘RSS-like colours’

A GOVT FUNCTIONARY SAID THE COLOUR OF THE NEW UNIFORMS WAS IDENTICAL TO THAT OF THE RSS UNIFORM INTRODUCED IN 2016

The new school dress for students of government-run schools in Rajasthan will have a tinge of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the state’s ruling party, the BJP.

Education minister Vasudev Devnani told HT that from the next academic session, boys will wear light brown shirt and brown trousers or shorts and girls will wear light brown kurta or shirt with brown salwar or skirt.

A senior government functionary, however, added that the colour of the trousers/ short and salwar was identical to the new RSS uniform introduced in 2016.

Since 1997, the colour codes of uniforms in more than 67,000 government schools in the state have been blue shirt and khaki shorts or trousers for boys and blue kurta and white salwar or skirt for girls.

To ensure that the shade of brown exactly matches with that of the RSS uniform, the education department is collecting samples from Bhilwara, the textile town that supplied clothes for the first lot of new uniforms of the rightwing organisation.

In an order, a copy of which is with HT, director of secondary education BL Swarnkar made district secondary education officer of Bhilwara a nodal officer for collecting 50 samples of brown shorts, trousers, salwars, skirts and chunnis.

The state’s education department is already in the midst of a controversy for changing textbooks to include personalities associated with the Hindutva ideology such as Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Deen Dayal Upadhyay and Veer Savarkar and to reduce content on Jawaharlal Nehru.

The decision to redesign the uniform was taken to make children of government schools as “elegant” as their counterparts from private schools, Devnani said, adding that all schools were notified about the new colour codes that will come into effect from the next academic session.

He, however, refused to buy the argument that the new colour codes of the uniforms were inspired by the RSS attire.