NEW DELHI: Catch Them Young and Brainwash Them Thoroughly! This has been a concept often used by marketing people who try and target the kids as their primary audience for selling their product.

But, what happens when it is the Administration which starts targeting young kids withpolitical propaganda and religious agendas?

A well known CBSE school in Bangalore, one of the top 5 private schools there, appears to be peddling a political and religious Agenda to their students, as young as 10 years old.

The subject is SST (Social Sciences) and the Text Book being recommended by the school is "Getting Ahead" written by Abha Sahgal and Sushmita Malik, printed by Orient BlackSwan Publications.

While most of the book is quite okay albeit debatable, the fun starts when you reach the weblinks given for the kids to refer to.

The prominent Weblink being http://www.freeindia.org/biographies which is supposed to direct you to stories of some of the great and legendary Indians.



The Freeindia.org link opens with a well placed BJP advertisement with the Lotus Symbol right in the Center and Chief Minister Devendra Fadanvis grinning on one side of it.



On following the exact link mentioned, you arrive to a page which gives out the Biographies of Great Indians, listing down Sages, Rushis, Saints, Devotees and Gods and Godesses amongst the Great Indians.

If you pursue these individual links further you would be in for some more surprises.

On going to the link of "Great Leaders" you have M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS head honcho, listed amongst people like Lal Bahadur Shastri and Lala Lajpat Rai, alleging that he has dedicated his whole life to the service of the Motherland.



If you go to the Link "Great Personalities" you are greeted with a list which is filled with a mix of Historical and Mythological characters.

This page is probably one of the most distorted them of all.

It lists down Savitri, Draupadi, Ekalavya, Veer Abhimanyu, Karna, Lakshmana, Bhishma, Vidura and Lava-Kusha as great personalities of India, along with Keshava Baliram Hegdewar, the founder of RSS who "had the strong desire that all the people should dedicate themselves for the service of Motherland, forgetting the differences of Caste, Creed, etc."



Surprisingly Mahatma Gandhi does not even make it to list of either the Great Leaders or the Great Personalities. And while multiple paragraphs of odes are presented for Hegdewar and Golwalkar, Motilal Nehru is dismissed in a single paragraph which makes him appear to be a lucky nobody while Jawaharlal Nehru is dismissed within a line in the same paragraph as Motilal Nehru.

Further research makes it clear that Freeindia.org is part and parcel of a larger domain called the Dharma Universe which is a completely religious propaganda website.

That such websites are being used as reference links for 10 year old kids is quite worrisome for reasons that are obvious to all those who do not want their children to be brainwashed under the guise of education.

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