Source: The Times of India
On May 12, 2005 The Times of India reported, "a concerted yearlong campaign by Indian American parents in Virginia's Fairfax County has resulted in a revision of textbooks on Indian history, ensuring that children will not look at Indian culture as mere 'karma , cows and caste.' Businesswoman Sandhya Kumar, engineer Rakesh Bahadur and dozens of other Indian American parents launched the campaign to change the way their history is taught in Fairfax, the nation's 12th-largest school system, The Washington Post said in a recent report. Their lobbying prompted school officials to rethink presentations on India and Hinduism in classrooms and sparked efforts to develop a more sophisticated and thoughtful curriculum, it added. Balaji Hebbar, a George Washington University religion professor who was one of three scholars hired by Fairfax County to review the books cited by the group of Indian parents, told the Post he and his colleagues found few factual errors in the older textbooks. But the lessons boiled down a complex culture to 'karma , cows and caste.'"