Jammu University panel recommends dropping Jinnah, Muslim thinkers from syllabus after ABVP protests

A committee set up by the University of Jammu has recommended that topics related to former Pakistan president Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Muslim reformer and educationist Syed Ahmad Khan and Pakistani poet Mohammad Iqbal be removed from the institution’s MA Political Science syllabus, reported The Indian Express on Monday.

The recommendation has been forwarded to the Board of Studies, which will meet on Tuesday to discuss the matter, according to the newspaper.

The committee, headed by Professor Naresh Padha of the Physics Department, had been constituted after the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad held protests on campus against including a chapter on the political thought of Jinnah in the syllabus, The Times of India reported.

The ABVP is the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The ABVP’s J&K State Secretary Sannak Shrivats, who led the protests on Friday, said that Jinnah was earlier mentioned in a chapter on “two-nation theory”. But in the revised syllabus, the Pakistani leader appears in a chapter on “Minorities and the Nations”, he was quoted as saying by The Indian Express.

Shrivats claimed that Jinnah was portrayed as the leader of minorities in India, the newspaper reported.

Baljit Singh Mann, the head of the Political Science Department at Jammu University, had earlier said that including...

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