Dinanath Batra, spelled Dina Nath Batra, was an Indian educationist who was the general secretary of Vidya Bharati, the school network run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
15 Facts About Dinanath Batra
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Dinanath Batra founded the educational activist organisations Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti and Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas.
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Dinanath Batra was born on 3 March 1930 in Dera Gazi Khan in Punjab, into a Punjabi Hindu family.
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Dinanath Batra worked as the headmaster of the Dayananda Anglo-Vedic School at Dera Bassi in Patiala district, Indian Punjab.
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On 30 May 2001, Dinanath Batra served a legal notice to Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress.
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Dinanath Batra stated that a resolution passed by the All India Congress Committee at its plenary session included statements that were defamatory towards Vidya Bharati.
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In 2006, Dinanath Batra filed a Public Interest Litigation against the National Council of Educational Research and Training, in which he raised 70 objections about the contents of secondary school history and social science textbooks.
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Dinanath Batra stated that this was a falsehood, and that cows had been worshiped in India since Vedic times.
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On 3 March 2010, Dinanath Batra sent a legal notice to Wendy Doniger, Penguin Group USA and the Penguin India subsidiary, raising several objections on the book The Hindus: An Alternative History by Doniger.
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In 2011, Dinanath Batra filed suit against Doniger and Penguin Publishing under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which punishes acts intended to cause outrage or offend the sentiments of religious communities.
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On 3 March 2014, Dinanath Batra sent a legal notice to the Aleph Book Company demanding that another book by Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism, be withdrawn.
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On 30 June 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party government of Gujarat issued a circular, declaring six text books written by Dinanath Batra to be part of the state education curriculum as supplementary literature.
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Dinanath Batra has indicated that the initiative for using the books came from the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat, and the books carry a foreword from Modi.
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On 12 November 2014, the newly elected BJP government of Haryana state announced that Dinanath Batra would be appointed to a new committee of educationalists.
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In July 2017, Dinanath Batra submitted another list of objections against the NCERT textbooks on various subjects.