The National Education Policy (2020) brought out by the Ministry of Human Resources is the first education policy of the BJP. It is a document of 29,409 words. The word culture occurs more than 50 times in it. “The pursuit of knowledge (Jnan), wisdom (Pragyaa), and truth (Satya) was always considered in Indian thought and philosophy as the highest human goal.” The Indian education system produced, says the document, 18 great scholars from Charaka to Thiruvalluvar. There is no one among them who belongs to the 73 years of Independent India. This the BJP’s first education policy. They would only be eager to use education as a vehicle to promote their Hindutva policy. The great sages and inventors mentioned earlier are said to have made “seminal contributions to world knowledge in diverse fields such as mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, medical science and surgery, civil engineering, architecture, shipbuilding and navigation, yoga, fine arts, chess, and more”… “Indian culture and philosophy have had a strong influence on the world.” The leaders of Independent India like Gandhiji, Nehru, Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for literature and Amartya Sen, who won it for economics, all are blacked out.
History tells us that the Sangh Parivar was against the freedom struggle led by Gandhiji. The makers of the education policy leaped back over the independence years into ancient India. It is nothing but Hindutva’s Ghar Wapasi. We encounter in countless gurus, philosophers and propagandists simmering signs of envy and wounded pride at work. The edifice of “Vedic science” is built on such distortions. The current crop of Hindu nationalists and their intellectual enablers are the progeny of these thinkers and display similar traits. We hanker after science and pour enormous resources into becoming a “science superpower,” but we simultaneously devalue its historical and cultural significance and decry its “materialism,” its “reductionism” and it’s “Eurocentrism.” We want the science of the materialist upstarts from the West, but cannot let go of our sense of spiritual superiority, which makes us think that we are entitled to the status of jagatguru. This lethal mixture of desire, envy and a sense of innate “Aryan” superiority has characterised India’s encounter with modern science and technology from the very start. A more insidious distortion happens when modern-day science—quantum physics, computer science, genetics, neurosciences, and so on—are read back into the speculative musings of seers and philosophers from our hoary past. We can read in between the lines Hindutva’s envy, which extends beyond nationalism. It is simply an occult strategy to defend the very foundations of Hindu beliefs and practices.
The document goes behind the Independence and still speaks about the values of the constitution. Are the values of the Constitution fully drawn from ancient India’s ethos? Where did democracy come from? Is the parliamentary system an Indian invention? No. Neither are modern technology and medicine. Geometry has no colour or caste. Education is intended to enhance the man within every one. Does ancient India have a view of man devoid of race, caste and colour? What type of humanism does Hindutva ideologues profess? The policy of education is silent on the pivot of education – the man. There is no mention of any religion, not even Hinduism, in the policy text. I personally believe that from Hindu scriptures a holistic humanism can be thought out and produced, receiving light from anywhere and everywhere. No stone is left unturned to sell our culture represented by yoga, dance and literature in the global market. But we must also be open to all other cultures and languages which can teach us. The problem with the Hindutva thinkers is not that they go to the Indian tradition, but that they go to those texts that divide and spread hate instead of to what joins us and make us one. For example, Hitopadesha’s (1.3.71) vasudhaiva kutumbhakam, “the entire earth is but a family.” There is nothing wrong in teaching and studying Sanskrit, but let the country be open to Latin and Greek also. Why also shut the doors to Arabic. The minorities are part of India’s tradition and part of the culture.
Prime Minister Modi once said, “Genetic science was there (at the time of the Mahabharata).” Are we quoting Mahabharata to legitimise caste practices in eugenic terms? Every country must glorify certain events in history that are valuable for posterity, but presenting outright lies about the past as truths breeds doublethink of pharisaic self deceit. The past is remembered to enhance our future. That past that can endanger the future must be forgotten.