Section on Indian culture removed from government website, culture ministry says portal not owned or managed by it

New Delhi, August 24

A section on Indian culture was completely removed from a government website on Tuesday, a day after a paragraph describing the Mughal Empire as one of the greatest ever was deleted when complaints tagging the union culture ministry were raised on social media.

The culture ministry, which on Monday had said that it was working with the agencies to “accurately portray the events”, distanced itself from the issue, maintaining that neither was the content generated by any department of it nor had it made any recommendations to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which according to sources, runs the site KnowIndia.gov.in.

“We reacted because we were tagged to the complaints. We do not own or manage the website. The content too is not generated by us,” an official said.

Sources indicated that the content was from an NCERT book.

A day after MeitY removed the paragraph, the website no longer had the “culture and heritage” section which showcased India’s history, tradition, monuments, arts and other activities.

The paragraph on the Mughals on the site was on the Medieval India page.

The paragraph deleted on Monday said: “In India, the Mughal Empire was one of the greatest empires ever. The Mughal Empire ruled hundreds of millions of people. India became united under one rule, and had very prosperous cultural and political years during the Mughal rule. There were many Muslim and Hindu kingdoms split all throughout India until the founders of the Mughal Empire came.”

Ratan Sharda, author of ‘Secrets of RSS’, ‘The Sangh and Swaraj’ and ‘RSS 360’, had tweeted on Monday that the portal was “singing the praises of ‘great’ Mughal empire” and tagged the culture ministry. — PTI