Chennai: In a rebuttal to Tamil Nadu governor R V Arlekar’s statement that National Education Policy (NEP) should not be rejected, TNCC president B Manickam Tagore said on Tuesday that the state would never accept NEP.In a statement, Tagore said the NEP was an attempt to push the RSS’s ideological agenda through the education system. “TN will never accept an NEP that seeks to impose the RSS politics of hatred,” he said.The statement comes days after R V Arlekar’s remarks at a convocation ceremony in Chennai, that aspects of the NEP can be questioned, but it could not be rejected outright. In a statement seen as a justification of the gurukul system, Arlekar had also said that variations of the ancient system of education continued to exist in England.Condemning the remarks, Tagore alleged that the BJP-led Union govt was dismantling an education framework built over decades by successive Congress govts since the time of Jawaharlal Nehru. He said Congress had consistently championed the principle of “education for all”, while BJP was attempting to advance an exclusionary model under the guise of quality, nationalism and patriotism.Arguing that education was a subject on the concurrent list, Tagore said the Union govt had framed the NEP without adequate consultation with states and was now attempting to impose it across the country. He urged the governor to refrain from intervening in TN’s education policy.
