Amid a hue and cry over allegations that Marx and Engels were being forced out of textbooks in Bengal, the Centre has scrapped the plan to set up a National Textbook Council. The council, first proposed when Arjun Singh was at the helm of the HRD Ministry in the UPA I regime, was envisaged as an independent, fully autonomous body to protect school textbooks from the politics of “saffronisation” and “de-safforanisation”, and provide citizens a forum to register complaints regarding textbooks and redress them.