Row over cartoon in NCERT textbook

Let me quickly disclose where I stand on the row that erupted in Parliament over the inclusion of Shankar's cartoon of 1949 in a text book for 11th class students published by the National Council for Education, Research and Training (NCERT).

All my sympathies are with the agitated MPs who eventually forced the Minister of Human Resources Development, Mr Kabil Sibal, to apologise and issue orders for the removal of the cartoon from future editions and withdraw the books still remaining to be distributed.

What puzzled me no end, and even made me doubt the sensitivity and sensibility of the news media and the majority of panelists appearing before the TV Channels, was the tendency on their part to go off at a tangent, and range far afield, in finding arguments which were, in my view, untenable, if not puerile, to condemn the conduct of the MPs.

Yes, Shankar was one of the world's greats in political cartooning. Yes, Jawaharlal Nehru gave him carte blanche to make him the subject of his cartoons, and said insistently, “Don't ever spare me, Shankar!” Yes, neither Nehru nor Babasaheb Ambedkar took exception to the cartoon. Yes, the cartoon has been in the textbook for nine years.

So? Looked at with a searing sense of rationality, with all the educational credentials and intellectual sophistication of the editors, anchors and panelists and their unbounded concern for freedom of expression and tenets of democracy, the 63-year old cartoon was nothing more than an innocuous nudge to further speed up the process of framing the Constitution.

COMPELLING ROLE OF SENTIMENT

Confirmed libertarians may also argue that Babasaheb sitting with a whip on the snail with ‘‘Constitution” written on it, and Nehru holding a whip behind the snail were nothing but the typical exaggerations of any cartoonist. For instance, David Low never shrank from picturing Mahatma Gandhi as a Micky Mouse, with large ears and diminutive face and nobody was offended.

But these liberal-minded freedom-lovers conveniently forget the compelling role played by sentiment and emotion in human life. When Marie Antoinette said, “If they don't have bread, let them eat cake”, poor woman, she thought she was giving a rational way out. But that very remark was the origin of the French Revolution and all the terrors associated with it.

Coming closer, the unprecedented uprising of the masses in their millions in response to the Dandi March of Gandhiji over an insignificant quarter-of-an-anna tax on common salt was the result of its tremendous sentimental value sanctifying the struggle for Independence itself.

In fact, when Gandhiji announced his March, rationalist Nehru was aghast at Gandhiji's choice of what to Nehru seemed a trivial demand which he felt had no bearing on the larger issues. He says in his Autobiography that he even thought that the old man had become senile and deranged. Later, he admits that he was wrong and Gandhiji was right in reading the mind of the masses.

There is a time and place for everything, including a cartoon. What might have passed unnoticed in 1949 could stir a tornado of emotions in 2012.

MONUMENTAL FEAT

Babasaheb has in the all the years since Independence become an icon par excellence and acquired a hypnotic halo, symbolising the determination of those oppressed and suppressed for millennia to break their shackles and assert their equality. Indeed, after he converted to Buddhism, he was even regarded as a Bodhisattva by his followers. The cartoon would have certainly created in impressionable minds the wrong notion that Dr Ambedkar was easy-going, whereas there was none who laboured so very hard to hammer out a near-perfect Constitution.

(Actually, the Constitution was not slow in the making: The most comprehensive Constitution in world history took just 27 months from August 15, 1947 to November 26,1949, the date of its adoption, and that is a monumental feat by itself.)

The advisers to the NCERT should have had the judgment to know that anything pertaining to Babasaheb, who evokes such devotion and adulation among millions round the world, should be approached with great delicacy of feeling and empathy. There was nothing that made it imperative for them to include it in the textbook.

I think Mr Sibal was entirely right in the way he dealt with the situation.

COMMENT NOW