Why India Keeps Removing Cartoons from Textbooks, and Getting It All Wrong
V. Aravinda | 25 May 2026 | The Federal
A cartoon, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Supreme Court last week, has no place in a school textbook. Children of an “impressionable age” should not have to read one. The Bench agreed that the propriety of cartoons in NCERT textbooks be examined by the Indu Malhotra Committee.
The committee, headed by Malhotra, a former Supreme Court judge, was set up earlier to review the Class VIII chapter on judicial corruption that prompted the court's February cognizance, and is now to take up the cartoons too. The phrase and the reflex are familiar. They are nearly 14 years old…