Censors in the House
A day after the 60 {+t} {+h} anniversary of Indian Parliament was celebrated on Sunday with much solemnity and many pious promises to uphold the dignity and sanctity of the institution, we were witness to a sad spectacle. MPs, cutting across party lines, displayed a rare sense of unanimity when they took umbrage at the use of cartoons in the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks, some of which mocked politicians. And the government, in what has now become a depressingly familiar practice, buckled under pressure and dec-lared that it was withdrawing the offending cartoons as well as reviewing the textbooks.