Hindutva paradox: Promising nationalist education, delivering Eurocentric system

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak 
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have long promised to decolonise India's educational system and celebrate Indian culture, history, languages, and local knowledge traditions. Their stated objective has been to shape young minds within a framework of cultural nationalism by promoting a distinctly Indian educational vision. Hindutva politics has consistently opposed the dominance of the English language and advocated the inclusion of indigenous traditions and values in educational curricula. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, introduced under the BJP government, promised to Indianise the country's educational system. In reality, however, it facilitates the privatisation, marketisation, commercialisation, and commodification of education. For a rent-seeking state, education is increasingly treated not as a public good but as a commodity for sale. This approach is fully compatible with the ethos of World Bank-inspired policies shaped in Washington.
Since the BJP, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, came to power in 2014, there has been a sustained assault on scientific and secular public education. The BJP promised in its election manifesto to allocate 6 per cent of GDP to education, but in practice it has consistently reduced budgetary allocations and expenditure on the sector. The budget outlay for the Department of School Education and Literacy has reportedly declined from 3.16 per cent in 2013–14 to 1.53 per cent in 2024–25, while higher education allocations have fallen from 1.6 per cent to 1 per cent during the same period. These reductions suggest that education is not a priority for the Modi government. Student scholarships and research funding have also witnessed a steady decline. Allocations for Merit-cum-Means Scholarships, as well as scholarships for lower castes, working-class students, women, and minorities, have been significantly reduced. Consequently, many state, central government, and government-aided schools have been merged or closed. The number of government schools reportedly declined by 61,885, while private schools increased by 47,680 in 2021–22. Universities, IITs, and IIMs continue to face large-scale vacancies and staff shortages that affect teaching, research, and academic administration. Most schools, colleges, universities, and institutions of higher learning lack the modern infrastructure necessary to provide quality education.
Ideologically, Hindutva appears fundamentally uncomfortable with secular and scientific education. It is at odds with the diverse, democratic, and pluralistic traditions of Indian knowledge systems, reflected in the Odia proverb “Naana Muni Naana Mata” (different sages have different opinions). These traditions stand in contrast to the Eurocentric educational framework that, paradoxically, Hindutva governments increasingly promote. The assault on public education reinforces the view that Hindutva functions less as a coherent educational philosophy and more as a project aligned with the interests of crony capitalism. By encouraging the marketisation and commercialisation of education, weakening public institutions, and facilitating privatisation, it serves the interests of capital rather than the public. The recurring examination paper leaks under the Modi government have further undermined confidence in public education, creating conditions that favour the expansion of private educational institutions from schools to universities.
Privatisation and commercialisation not only weaken access to education as guaranteed by the Constitution, but also transform education into a commodity traded in the marketplace. Such a framework diminishes students' ability to understand the world through critical consciousness shaped by scientific inquiry. Private education is inherently exclusionary and often reduces learning to the transfer of information rather than the production and dissemination of knowledge. Classrooms in private institutions are increasingly designed around profit rather than the creation of emancipatory knowledge. These institutions frequently market degrees in the name of employability while undermining education's role in liberating human beings from poverty, inequality, and exploitation. The privatisation of education produces compliant minds suited to market requirements rather than critical citizens capable of understanding the forces that exploit people and nature. Buying and selling education is not education in any meaningful sense; it is merely the transfer of skills to deepen consumerism, where profit becomes virtue and loss becomes sin. In such a society, success and failure are measured by the accumulation of wealth rather than by human well-being, peace, or happiness. Privatised education does not nurture confident citizens; it creates compliant minds shaped by the logic of Taylorism.
This Eurocentric, colonial, and capitalist framework of education is increasingly promoted by the BJP government and is closely aligned with the requirements of the global education market. It does not serve Indian students, their future, or India's long-term interests. Under Narendra Modi, the government has opened India's educational sector to foreign institutions, allowing American, Canadian, Australian, British, Scottish, and European universities to establish campuses in the country. Nine British universities are in the process of opening campuses in India, including 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's Enterprise Campus in Mumbai, Lancaster University in Bengaluru, Queen's University Belfast, Coventry University, and the University of Surrey in GIFT City, Gujarat. Some of these campuses are already operational. Many are funded by Indian investors. As things stand, these institutions are unlikely to send substantial numbers of their trained faculty and researchers to India. Instead, private companies are recruiting underqualified and inadequately trained teachers to staff what increasingly resemble degree-selling enterprises. Such institutions serve neither employability nor the emancipatory purpose of education.
These universities have done little throughout their histories to promote Indian knowledge traditions. Their profit-driven models have often been criticised for exploiting both students and staff in their home countries. Their colonial origins and contemporary operating values continue to privilege European knowledge traditions as universal science while reducing Indian and other non-Western traditions to objects of ethnographic curiosity. They remain bastions of Eurocentric knowledge systems and continue to reproduce dominant intellectual traditions while marginalising diverse, democratic, and decolonial perspectives. There is little reason to believe that they will operate differently in India. "Profit, not education" and "business expansion, not educational internationalisation" appear to be the primary motivations behind their expansion. By facilitating their entry, the BJP government does so at the expense of India's public educational system, Indian students, and their families. In effect, it is weakening Indian educational institutions in order to create a market for foreign universities.
Hindutva, viewed by its critics as a Eurocentric political project influenced by European fascism and Nazism and inspired by figures such as Mussolini and Hitler, appears to be repaying an ideological debt to European traditions that shaped its origins during British colonial rule. Critics argue that this historical relationship contributed to the politics that ultimately culminated in the partition of India. The wounds of partition continue to generate profits for military-industrial interests in Britain, Europe, and the United States at the expense of the people of South Asia. Universities in these countries have often produced knowledge systems that support the expansion of the neoliberal security state, contributing to the erosion of democratic citizenship in service of capitalism and its imperial infrastructure.
In this context, Hindutva and its European intellectual lineages are creating conditions not only for the expansion of profit-driven British, American, and Australian universities and their certificate-producing educational models, but also for the further deepening of capitalism, imperialism, and the security state. Such developments risk marginalising citizens from education, weakening progressive consciousness, and undermining constitutional democracy in India. The struggle against the marketisation, commercialisation, and commodification of education is therefore also a struggle to defend secular, scientific, and humanitarian education as a public good. It is a struggle to promote emancipatory skills and scientific knowledge in the service of global citizenship, peace, harmony, and shared prosperity.
Let the Indian ideal embodied in the principle of Sa Vidya Ya Vimuktaye—knowledge is that which liberates—guide global education. Let education empower people beyond the logic of the market, the state, and capitalism.