The ruling party BJP in Madhya Pradesh has decided to include Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's biography as a compulsory subject for students of the state board. State Education Minister Inder Singh Parmar said the government has decided to include biographies of true heroes and the new syllabus will include Veer Savarkar, Bhagavad Gita Sandesh, Lord Parshuram, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and others.
Further, the minister said Savarkar is one of those revolutionaries who have been imprisoned twice. He said that Veer Savarkar was the first writer who called the movement of 1857 a freedom struggle, otherwise, people used to call it Ghadar, as stated in a report by IANS.
"Veer Savarkar has an irreplaceable contribution to India's independence and he should be honoured in society. But unfortunately, the great revolutionaries of India were not given a place in the pages of history," Parmar added. Meanwhile, they criticised Congress's claim that the true revolutionaries were not given enough space in the school syllabus in the past several decades.
"In 2019, a book, based on the biography of Veer Savarkar was distributed in some schools, but the Kamal Nath-led Congress government had suspended the school principals," he claimed. This decision of the BJP government is likely to spark political controversy in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh as the Congress has objected to the proposal.
Congress MLA Arif Masood, addressing the press today, said he would oppose the government's decision. "It is unfortunate that they want to include Savarkar. He apologised to the British and including him in the syllabus is an insult to freedom fighters," Masood said, as stated in a report by IANS.
