After intense political and personal rivalry, several rounds of legal wrangling and postponement, and finally a reluctant administrative nod, over a crore school students of Tamil Nadu have finally got their new textbooks, the subject of a controversy that the courts have eventually managed to put a lid on.
Yet the books come with portions blocked and pages torn out, with the J Jayalalithaa government having found the content objectionable. The books had been prepared under the previous DMK government. Among the parts that have been blocked out, one is reportedly a picture of the sun and a solar eclipse, simply because the “rising sun” is the DMK’s electoral symbol.
This is the one of many instances, in fact the very first, of the new administration overturning a major decision of the previous government headed by M Karunanidhi. Other recent decisions have included the conversion of Karunanidhi’s pet project, the new Assembly-Secretariat complex, into a government-run hospital and medical college. The government has also reversed a “change” that had been made to the Tamil calendar — the former government had started the New Year in the month of Thai (the date falls in January) but this has been shifted back to Chithirai, the date falling in April.
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