Nepal, which has turned out to become a subservient state to China has now taken its unilateral conflict with India a notch higher, with the publication of a highly fallacious and propaganda book for high school students, named Nepal ko Bhubhaag Ra Seemasambandhi Swadhyay Samagri (Nepal’s Geography and Territorial Boundary). The book, which is said to have the blessings of the Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, has a six-page preface to it, written by Nepal’s Education Minister Giriraj Mani Pokharel himself. The said preface is a condensed manifesto of the former Maoist-turned-Minister’s abject hatred for India and its people.
The reference book aims at “teaching students” Nepal’s territory and border disputes, primarily with India. Instead of teaching, the book works as a medium of indoctrinating young minds to toe KP Sharma Oli and China’s bizarre line of hating India.
In Nepal, however, the launch of the said book, and the prospect of young and susceptible students reading the propaganda in it has irked many, and Nepal’s academicians have condemned the release of the book which aims at nothing but leading to a diplomatic-freeze of relations between India and Nepal, who are religiously and culturally indistinguishable countries. Pokharel, who is no less than an aide to Prime Minister Oli, writes in the preface how he campaigned 24 years ago to “chase the Indian army away from Nepal’s territory”.
The book, in its entirety, beginning from its preface written peculiarly by a Minister himself, is shoddy misinformation and India-hating pamphlet, calling which a book would be a grave injustice to academics. Interestingly, the Education Minister of Nepal is said to be a stooge of China, and it is a modus operandi of the Chinese Communist Party to indoctrinate young and impressionable minds with fictitious state propaganda. The Communist government of Nepal seems to have borrowed the same tactic from the Chinese playbook, however, it is meeting unprecedented resistance from Nepalese citizens and various government departments.
Almost all stake-holding departments of Nepal have come out and spoken in opposition to the ludicrous book aimed at spreading hatred against India among the Nepalese youth. As a result of the outrage caused in Nepal due to the book, the distribution of the same has been halted by Oli’s cabinet no less. “We concluded that distribution of the erroneous book should be stopped,” Minister for Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Shiva Maya Tumbahangphe told the Kathmandu Post.
In fact, the Ministry of Land Management, Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation and Ministry of Foreign Affairs have all voiced their opposition to the hateful publication being shrouded as a work of academics. “There are errors in the books the Ministry of Education prepared on a subject that it did not have expertise on,” said Janak Raj Joshi, spokesperson at the Ministry of Land Management. “The Education Ministry stepped on the jurisdiction of the Land Management and Foreign Affairs ministries…We are amazed to see some of the facts in the book,” the ministry added.
The Giriraj Mani Pokharel-led Education Ministry has also been called out for overstepping its powers and deciding on issues that are way over its scope, such as land, borders, and foreign relations. Essentially, what KP Sharma Oli and his lackeys thought would be an immensely populist move has turned out to be a rather painful dud, as the Nepal government’s own departments take to opposing and causing a halt in the distribution of the book.
“A country’s curricula should be designed to produce academics, not activists,” said Mrigendra Bahadur Karki, an associate professor at the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies. “Such books neither help produce an informed new generation nor facilitate dialogue between the countries at a time of frayed ties,” he said. Karki is one among the innumerable of academicians who have voiced their utter shock over the release of the book, which is a figment of the Education Minister’s imagination at best.