Exam paper in Bihar’s Kishanganj mentions KASHMIR as separate country, BJP slams

Bihar: A question on a Class 7 exam question paper in a Bihar school supposedly distinguished Kashmir from India, igniting a new dispute. Midterm exams for students in grades one through eight were conducted by the education department of the Bihar government from October 12 till October 18. It came to the fore when the students of class seven were asked in their English exam: “What are the people of the following countries called? One is done for you.”The paper setter cited the example of China and asked “As the people of China are called Chinese, what are the people of Nepal, England, Kashmir, and India called? Subhash Kumar Gupta, the district education officer, firmly declined to address the issue in front of the camera. Educationists and Bharatiya Janata Party officials claim the situation is a conspiracy, and they are asking the Union Education Minister to look into it.

Sanjay Jaiswal, the BJP’s state leader in Bihar, uploaded a picture to his social media and shared the image of the question paper alongside captioning it as” “…Bihar government is still silent on my concern that they feel Kashmir as not a part of India. He wrote in a Facebook post in Hindi,” This question itself advocates that the officials in Bihar government consider Kashmir as a different country as Nepal, England, China, and India. 

Kishanganj, Bihar | Class 7 question paper terms Kashmir as separate country

Got this via Bihar Education Board. Ques had to ask what are people from Kashmir called? Mistakenly carried as what are people of country of Kashmir called? This was human error: Headteacher, SK Das pic.twitter.com/VVv1qAZ2sz

— ANI (@ANI) October 19, 2022

Nitish Kumar is “so restless with his desire to become the Prime Minister that they are forcing anti-national question papers on the children of class 7. Notably, an identical question was posed in Bihar in 2017 as well, and a student in the Vaishali region caught the error. The BJP reacted by slamming the Nitish Kumar government. JD(U)-RJD together was attacked by Sanjay Jaiswal, who claimed they were supporters of the Popular Front of India (PFI).