Sliding from majoritarianism toward fascism: Educating India under the Modi regime

Abstract

While the Modi regime in India shares many exclusionary features in common with authoritarian populists elsewhere, one distinguishing feature is its umbilical relationship to the semi-fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose long-term goal has been the establishment of a Hindu rashtra (nation). One of the major instruments for achieving this has been education, with the RSS seeing cultural hegemony as more foundational than political control. This article examines the transformation of school and higher education under the Modi regime in an effort to bring India more in line with the Hindu nationalist vision of its parent body, and the degree to which being in government supports or creates contradictions with the RSS vision.

Duty, Discipline, and Dreams: Childhood and Time in Hindutva Nation

“…Since Independence, the organization has devoted its considerable energies and resources to establishing a national network of formal schools through front organizations 2 as well as less formal educational spaces for poor communities in urban slums and Indigenous communities in remote areas. According to Bhatty and Sundar (2020), this network currently encompasses an estimated 12,800 formal schools located in urban and semi-urban areas with approximately 3,465,600 enrollments; an estimated 4,900 informal schools for poor communities; 6,400 schools specifically for Adivasi (Indigenous) children; and free private tutoring for students in government schools (see also Iwanek, 2022). There is no room for questioning or open-ended inquiry in the schools of the Hindu right (Sundar, 2004).…”

I Only Want Passionate Relationships: Are You Ready for That?

“…This contribution is particularly relevant to our understanding about how discourses and meaning are developed by diversity of agents, including educational leaders addressing gender issues ( Samul, 2020 ) or school principals responding to cultural diversity ( Parthenis and Fragoulis, 2020 ), direct or indirectly involved in a particular situation and interaction. Furthermore, there is evidence of how in concrete regimes and contexts, schools, and educators impose the dominant hegemonic masculinity in students ( Bhatty and Sundar, 2020 ).…”

Routledge Handbook of Autocratization in South Asia

“…The BJP itself is culturally and socially an expression of Brahminical authority and Modi has assiduously cultivated his image of religiosity (Sircar 2020) and virile asceticism. Most notable, as in all hegemonic cultural projects, has been the BJP's educational policies which have not only focused on re-writing textbooks but have also included direct assaults on the autonomy of the university that have specifically taken the form of targeting liberal rights and secular values as corrosive of traditional social and cultural practices (Bhatty and Sundar 2020). Taking these three prongs together, we can say that to the social contract rooted in the constitutional rights and secularism once associated with the Congress, Hindutva counterposes an organic contract embedded in ethnic solidarity and traditional social structures.…”