Identified for being vocal on the necessity for a “nationalist” system of training infused with “religious values”, educationist Dinanath Batra who served because the principal of the primary faculty of the Vidya Bharati, an RSS-allied organisation devoted to training, in Kurukshetra from 1965 to 1990 handed away at his dwelling in Delhi on Thursday. He was 94.
Born on March 5, 1930, Batra was ailing and bedridden at his dwelling for a while. His physique will likely be stored on the workplace of the Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, with which he was related, from 8 am to 10 am on Friday. His cremation will likely be carried out in Nigambodh Ghat in New Delhi at 11.30 am.
Batra made information repeatedly for submitting lawsuits in opposition to books that he deemed offensive, together with Wendy Doniger’s e-book Hindus — An Various Historical past in 2011. The petition accused Doniger of getting an anti-Hindu mindset. In 2014, the writer, Penguin India, agreed to pulp the e-book, resulting in an outcry amongst intellectuals.
In 2008, Batra moved the Delhi Excessive Courtroom in opposition to A Ok Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas being on Delhi College’s historical past syllabus. In 2011, the college’s educational council voted for the elimination of the essay, with 111 votes in opposition to it and simply 9 votes in its favour.
In 2017, Batra’s Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas wrote to the NCERT, which had sought solutions from the general public on reviewing faculty textbooks of all lessons, to take away from the textbooks English, Urdu and Arabic phrases; a poem by the left-wing poet Avatar Singh Pash and a couplet by Mirza Ghalib; the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore; extracts from painter M F Husain’s autobiography; references to the Mughal emperors as benevolent, to the BJP as a “Hindu” social gathering and to the Nationwide Convention as “secular”; an apology tendered by former PM Manmohan Singh over the 1984 riots; and a sentence that “practically 2,000 Muslims had been killed in Gujarat in 2002”.
Batra wrote about 15 books on topics starting from the “Indianisation” of training and in opposition to portray nationalists as “terrorists”, and on a curriculum for character constructing.
“His whole life was devoted to training. He by no means desired something for himself. He made calls for just for training. His life was the message he wished to convey. Even within the final days, he would ask me about whether or not the nationwide training coverage was being applied. Since 2012, we had been engaged on it, and plenty of of his solutions had been included in it. He went to fulfill former Cupboard Secretary T S R Subramanian, who was heading a committee for the brand new training coverage, to his second-floor dwelling with our help regardless of not having the ability to stroll at the moment,” Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas’s nationwide secretary Atul Kothari, who has been intently related to Batra, instructed The Indian Specific.
Batra was born on March 5, 1930, in Rajanpur in Dera Ghazi Khan, now in Pakistan. He taught from 1955 to 1965 at DAV faculty in Dera Bassi, Punjab. He was additionally the nationwide joint secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Shiskhan Mandal, an organisation related to the RSS. He additionally served because the nationwide normal secretary of the Vidya Bharati Akhil Bharatiya Shikshan Sansthan.
Batra wished a mix of spirituality and science in training. He additionally advocated for the combination of historical and trendy data, saying that those that research Newton must also be made to review Aryabhata. He wished each college to undertake 10 villages and each secondary faculty to undertake one village or slum. He additionally argued in favour of a stability between idea and vocational coaching.
