Parliament adjourned briefly over Ambedkar cartoon row

New Delhi: Parliament was adjourned briefly over the B.R. Ambedkar cartoon row on Friday. Seeking to put a lid on the controversy human resource development minister Kapil Sibal said he had asked the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to remove the offending picture and stop the distribution of the textbooks.

The publication of a cartoon of Ambedkar in an NCERT book had threatened to snowball into a crisis with Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati declaring she would not allow Parliament to (BSP) function if action was not taken against those responsible within three days. Sibal told the Lok Sabha he had written to NCERT in April asking it to withdraw the offending cartoon from the political science textbook for class XI.

Sibal said the distribution of the book had been stopped and a review ordered into the content of textbooks.