Uthara U.R
“Today, the nation needs thousands of Narendra Modis,” Delhi’s new chief minister Rekha Gupta told a hall of schoolchildren and teachers on the eve of Teachers’ Day this year. She was launching Vikas Bhi, Virasat Bhi, the New Delhi Municipal Council’s latest education project.
“How long can one Narendra Modi alone keep trying to take this country forward? We all have to join hands,” she said, drawing applause.
The scheme, as its name suggests, promises to balance “development” with “heritage.” It flows directly from the National Education Policy 2020, which stresses “cultural rootedness” as the soul of learning. In practice, this means NDMC students will now be asked to see India’s “civilizational past” as inseparable from their present and future – through heritage walks, local history projects, and classroom modules framed as “values education.”
NDMC vice-president Kuljit Singh Chahal explained that the initiative places special emphasis on the Panch Prana, yoga, nature-based learning, Indian knowledge traditions, and the old guru-shishya relationship.
A New Morning
This new curriculum is set to reshape the morning ritual for the 28,000 children studying in NDMC schools. Each day will now open with mantra-chanting, Sanskrit hymns, yoga and meditation. Lessons in Indian philosophies and the traditional guru-shishya parampara will follow. Five new chapters have been designed, including one on Swachhta (cleanliness) and another called Wisdom by Sanskrit Mantras, taught in natural surroundings. The stated aim, officials say, is to weave India’s “timeless civilisational values” into the formal curriculum. To instill brotherhood, compassion and respect.
Since taking office, Gupta has rolled out sweeping reforms across Delhi’s schools—smart boards, ICT labs, digital libraries, free laptops, and the expansion of CM Shri Schools, replacing earlier AAP initiatives and leaving teachers and students in limbo. Curricula too have been recast: the Happiness Curriculum and Business Blasters scrapped for Rashtraneeti and Science of Living. While it is too soon to gauge outcomes, the direction is clear. Delhi’s classrooms are being aligned with the National Education Policy- modernisation paired with nationalism and heritage, in step with the BJP’s ideological project at the Centre.
Heritage or Hindutva
In June 2016, BJP minister Ram Shankar Katheria said the quiet part out loud: “There will be saffronisation in education and in the country. Whatever is good will definitely take place, whether it is bhagwakaran or sanghwad.” That remark was not a slip. Education, in this vision, is not neutral. It is meant to reflect what those in power define as the state’s “civilisational strengths.”
Take yoga. Once seen as fitness, it is now a political tool. Ramdev’s empire has turned it into discipline for a Hindu nation. Mass events like International Yoga Day are pitched as health drives, but opposition leaders such as Sitaram Yechury have called them- stage-managed spectacles of cultural nationalism. Academics, too, have traced how yoga’s Sanskrit chants and ritualised performance are remade into Hindutva pedagogy, erasing plural histories under the cover of “heritage.”
The Panch Prana – five resolves lifted from the PM’s speeches – may sound like civic lessons. Develop India. Shed colonial mindsets. Take pride in heritage. Foster unity. Fulfil duties. But framed as daily classroom ritual, they bind patriotism to cultural nationalism, turning citizenship into ideological training.
Language matters too. By elevating Sanskrit as the sole fountain of knowledge, the state effectively erases other traditions – Muslim histories, Tamil bhakti poetry, Dalit writing, folk and oral storytelling. The Brahmanical Hindutva canon is recast as the “universal” text, while diverse lineages are pushed out of the classroom altogether.
Historians and political scientists have been raising alarms for years. As Romila Thaparnotes that “the curriculum is being changed and placed under government control, which makes it easier to have a uniformly dictated syllabus across the country”. Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar, both former NCERT textbook authors, resigned in protest after their chapters were cut or rewritten, accusing the state of distorting history.
Sociologist Nandini Sundar put it bluntly two decades ago: the RSS/BJP has attempted a “radical departure in the existing educational ethos” by using both state power and its own vast network of schools. Educationist Anil Sadgopal, in his essay Decoding the Agenda of the New National Education Policy, was equally scathing. He argued that “the NEP’s incomplete and misperceived framework of the ‘rich heritage of ancient and eternal Indian knowledge and thought’ reveals its historical prejudices.” Sadgopal also warned that provisions such as community volunteers and new institutional structures would in effect open the door to both neoliberal capital and the RSS cadre.
Resistance has come from outside academia too. In July 2024, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind condemned the push to impose Surya Namaskar in schools, calling it unconstitutional coercion. Its chief, Maulana Mahmood Madani, said forcing minority students into Hindu rituals in the name of unity “is against the Constitution.” Love and citizenship, he argued, must come through consent– not compulsion.
The guru-shishya parampara, too, is being re-imagined as a cultural model for modern schooling. Advocates praise its intimacy and moral formation. But critics point to its steep hierarchies. As Carnatic musician TM Krishna told The Indian Express: “Placing the guru on a pedestal culturally … needs to be demolished. This guru is not such a special human being.” Abuse – verbal, sexual, psychological – often hides behind the aura of the guru, as #MeToo revelations in the classical arts showed. Imported into state policy, this tradition risks institutionalising obedience, suppressing dissent, and discouraging critical thought.
Article 28 of the Indian Constitution clearly prohibits religious instruction in state-funded schools. By blurring the line between “heritage” and Hindu practice, the state risks coercing children into rituals that go against both secular principles and the freedom of conscience.
Vikas, Virasat, and the Ghost of Dinanath Batra
The phrase “Vikas bhi, Virasat bhi” (Development as well as heritage), was first popularized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It has since become a guiding slogan in his cultural-development projects. In July 2023, writing to the organizers of the International Temple Convention in Varanasi, Modi said the vision was to blend “traditional aspects with modern technological elements to make the temple ecosystem even more vibrant.”
On the ground, civic works are cast as cultural revival- whether the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, temple makeovers, or highway projects- where development merges with devotion. That framing now shapes Delhi’s schools. At the Vikas Bhi, Virasat Bhi launch, CM Rekha Gupta urged children to see patriotism and cultural values as one, even recasting waste segregation or feeding stray cows as national duty.
What appears as Modi’s innovation is in fact an older script: RSS ideologue Dinanath Batra, who died in 2024, laid out much of the blueprint Gupta now brings into classrooms.
Batra, founder of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti and Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, spent decades lobbying for an “India-centric” curriculum: Sanskrit chants, “ancient knowledge,” moral education, and Hindu epics taught as history. He also sought the removal of “alien” content, and at one point his books were compulsory in over 42,000 Gujarat schools. Many of these demands resurfaced in the NEP-2020.
Batra (via his successor) claimed that he had been working since 2012 on proposals to reform education, and that many of his suggestions were carried forward into the NEP-2020. That claim is difficult to dismiss when the echoes are so loud.
The rituals of Vikas Bhi, Virasat Bhi: mantra chanting, yoga, “heritage” modules, moral values, are lifted straight from Batra’s playbook. What was once dismissed as fringe, even mocked for talk of Vedic aeroplanes, now enters classrooms with state authority. It is less tribute than resurrection: Dinanath on the syllabus, even in death.
Saffronising the Syllabus: The NEP Effect
The National Education Policy of 2020 promised to transform Indian schools. But under its veneer of modernization and holistic learning, it has quietly opened a door for a subtle ideological project. Textbooks have been rewritten. Chapters on the Mughal era have been trimmed or removed entirely. Even celebrated secular movements get muted. As historian S. Irfan Habib notes, “Politicisation of students’ textbooks leads to the polarisation of the country by presenting a skewed past.” He further argues that these revisions aim to deny Muslims their place in India’s history and are part of an Islamophobic agenda.
The NEP’s emphasis on Sanskrit and ancient texts adds another layer. Language and tradition are presented as universal values, but in practice they privilege the Brahmanical histories over others. Non-Hindi speakers are pushed to the margins. Folk histories fade.
BJP-ruled states have carried this further. Gujarat distributed textbooks by Dinanath Batra, blending myth with history. Haryana mandated the Bhagavad Gita in schools. Madhya Pradesh added Sanskritised lessons in science and mathematics. Through Vidya Bharati’s vast school network, the RSS has pushed its methods deep into the system. In each case, “cultural pride” became the justification for narrowing curricula to a singular, Brahmanical vision. Textbook edits, state policies, and school networks work together. What is taught is one part of it. What is signalled is another. They teach children what is valued, what belongs.
Delhi’s new initiative mirrors these efforts, signaling that the capital is being folded into the same saffronised framework already tested in BJP-ruled states.
The Classroom as a Battleground
In the end, Vikas bhi, Virasat bhi is more than heritage walks and Sanskrit mantras. It is a project that recasts education as a homogenised Hindutva indoctrination. The rhetoric may be about unity, roots, and timeless values. But the practice, critics argue, edges closer to Hindutva: a school system congruent all over the state, where diversity is trimmed, obedience is rewarded, and virasat/vikas becomes another word for ideology.
Delhi’s classrooms today stand at a crossroads. Between modernization and tradition. Between heritage and Hindutva. Between education as inquiry, and education as ideology.
C. Countercurrents
