The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have promised India and Indians that they will decolonise the Indian educational system and celebrate Indian culture, history, languages, and local knowledge traditions—all to shape young minds within the Hindutva framework by saffronising the educational curriculum to dehumanise young minds to subscribe to the Hindutva politics of hate . Hindutva politics has promised to promote cultural nationalism within educational curricula in India and has opposed the imposition of the English language. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, under the BJP government, promised to Indianise the country’s educational system, but in reality, it facilitates the privatisation, marketisation, commercialisation and commodification of education. For the rent seeking Hindutva government, education is no longer a public good but a commodity for sale. This is concomitant with the ethos of World Bank policies shaped in Washington.
Since the BJP, under the leadership of Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi, came to power in 2014, there has been a continuous assault on scientific and secular public education. The BJP promised in its election manifesto to allocate 6% of GDP to education, but in practice, it has been consistently reducing the budget allocation and expenditure on education over the years. The Modi government has reduced the budget outlay for the Department of School Education and Literacy from 3.16% in 2013–14 to just 1.53% in 2024–25, and the higher education budget from 1.6% in 2013–14 to 1% in 2024–25. These reductions reveal that education is not a priority for the Modi government. Student scholarships and research funding are declining on a regular basis. Funding allocations for Merit-cum-Means Scholarships, as well as other scholarships for lower castes, the working class, women, and minorities, have declined on a massive scale. As a result, state, central government, and government-aided schools have been merged or shut down. As a result, the number of government schools decreased by 61,885, while 47,680 private schools increased in the country in 2021–22. Universities, IITs, and IIMs are plagued by a large number of vacancies and a shortage of staff to carry out teaching, research, and academic administration, revealing a sorry state of affairs in higher education. The majority of schools, colleges, universities, and institutions of higher learning lack modern infrastructure to provide quality education.
Ideologically, Hindutva is fundamentally opposed to any form of secular and scientific education. It is opposed to the diversity, decolonial, and democratic spirit of Indian educational and knowledge traditions, as defined by the Odia proverb “Naana Muni Naana Mata” (different sages have different opinions)—traditions that fundamentally differ from the Eurocentric European and British knowledge traditions that Hindutva is trying to promote. The Hindutva government’s assault on public education reconfirms that Hindutva has no real ideology or principles; rather, it is a project of crony capitalists. It serves their purpose by supporting the marketisation and commercialisation of education, weakening public educational systems in India, and facilitating privatisation. The recurring examination paper leaks under the Modi government further facilitate the destruction of public education by eroding people’s trust in state-led education, which in turn deepens the reach of private educational institutions—from schools to universities.
Privatisation and commercialisation not only destroy the conditions of accessibility of education for all—as guaranteed by the Constitution—but also transform education into a commodity for sale in the educational market. Such a framework reduces students ability to understand the world with the help of critical consciousness shaped by scientific education. Private education is not only fundamentally discriminatory but is no real education at all. It offers education in the form of mere transfer of information and does not produce and disseminate knowledge. Classrooms in private educational institutions are designed for profit, not to produce and promote emancipatory knowledge. Private educational institutions offer essentialist degrees in the name of employability and destroy the role of education in emancipating human beings from the conditions of poverty, inequality, and exploitation. The privatisation of education produces compliant minds as per the requirements of the market; it does not produce emancipatory knowledge to understand the forces that exploit people and nature. Buying and selling education is no education—it is merely the transfer of skills for the deepening of consumerism, where profit is god and loss is a sin. Success and failure in such a society are determined by the individual accumulation of wealth rather than by promoting human well-being, peace, and happiness. Privatisation of education does not breed confident citizens, but compliant minds with the ideals of Taylorism.
Such a Eurocentric, colonial, and capitalist framework of education is promoted by the BJP government, and it is concomitant with the requirements of the global education market. It does not serve Indian students, their future and interests of India. The BJP government under Mr. Modi has opened up the global education market in India, allowing American, Canadian, Australian, British, Scottish, and European universities to establish their satellite campuses. Nine British universities are opening campuses in India: the University of Southampton in Delhi, the University of Liverpool in Bengaluru, the University of York in Mumbai, the University of Aberdeen in Mumbai, the University of Bristol (Enterprise Campus) in Mumbai, the University of Lancaster in Bengaluru, Queen’s University Belfast, Coventry University, and the University of Surrey in GIFT City, Gujarat. Some of these campuses are already operational. Most of these universities are funded by Indian investors. As it appears now, these universities are not going to send their trained teachers and researchers to their Indian satellite campuses. Instead, private companies are recruiting unqualified, underqualified, and untrained teachers to instruct in these teaching factories that operate like supermarkets selling all kinds of degrees and qualifications. It serves neither the purpose of employability nor the emancipatory logic of education.
These universities have done nothing in their history to promote Indian knowledge traditions. Their profit-driven lineages have not only exploited students at home but have also destroyed educational systems by exploiting both staff and students within the university in their home countries. The profit-driven, colonial origins of these universities and their operational values continue to undermine Indian knowledge traditions by reducing them to mere ethnography, while European knowledge traditions are treated as science. These universities are bastions of Eurocentric knowledge traditions and shape eveyday operations of these universities, which promote colonial and dominant knowledge traditions and oppose all forms of diverse, decolonial, and democratic knowledge traditions. These universities are not going to promote and practice different knowledge traditions, nor will they work differently in India. “Profit, not education” and “diversification of business, not internationalisation of education” are what drive these universities. The Government of India, led by the BJP, facilitates these universities at the cost of the Indian educational system, Indian students, and interest of their families. The BJP government is destroying the Indian educational system and Indian knowledge traditions internally in order to create a market for foreign universities.
Hindutva, as a Eurocentric political project influenced by European fascism and Nazism, and inspired by Mussolini and Hitler, is repaying the debt it owes to its European colonial masters, who patronised Hindutva politics during British colonial rule—a patronage that ultimately led to the partition of India. The wounds of partition continue to breed profit for the British, European, and American military-industrial complex at the cost of the people of South Asia. Universities in Britain, America, and Australia have produced the knowledge traditions that uphold the war-mongering business of the military-industrial complex by promoting the neoliberal security state, which has undermined democracy and citizenship across the world to serve the interests of capitalism and its violent imperial infrastructure at cost of peace, people and planet.
In this context, Hindutva and its European lineages are creating conditions not only to facilitate brutality of profit-driven British, American, and Australian universities and their sausage-factory systems of certificate-printing education, but also to create conditions for the deepening of capitalism, imperialism, and their violent infrastructure of the security state—which will further marginalise and disenfranchise citizens from education, and undermine progressive consciousness and constitutional democracy in India. Therefore, the struggle against all forms of marketisation, commercialisation, and commodification of education is a struggle to uphold secular, scientific, and humanitarian education as a public good that promotes emancipatory skills and scientific knowledge for global citizenship, peace, harmony, and prosperity.
Let the Indian ideal based on the principle of Sa vidya vimuktaye (knowledge is that which liberates) shape global education to empower people beyond the logic of the market, the state, and capitalism.
