Now, RSS wants Pash banished from NCERT textbook

Chandigarh : At 19, when Pash questioned the aesthetics of Punjabi poetry, an established writer dismissed his poetry as “red rag”. Undaunted, the young poet retorted: “Don’t expect me to talk about your rotten taste.” One wonders, if alive, what would have been his reaction to RSS ideologue Dinanath Batra’s suggestion that his poem be removed from an NCERT textbook.
“Logically, Pash would have welcomed it,” says London-based writer Amarjit Chandan, Pash’s contemporary and friend, who also edited his works. “Ironically, the forces against whom Pash wrote introduced his work in the education syllabi. And now the much more sinister and philistine establishment wants it withdrawn,” he remarked. More than a decade ago (in 2006), the Hindi translation of Pash’s famous poem ‘Sabh Ton Khatarnak’ (The Most Dangerous) was introduced in the Class XI Hindi textbook — the only Punjabi poet to have earned that privilege. Besides Pash’s poem, Batra now wants the NCERT to remove Rabindranath Tagore’s thoughts, Mirza Ghalib’s poem and extracts from MF Husain’s autobiography.