A mathematician’s concerns on the assault on education, reason, and freedom in India
By Oorna
Groundxero | Oct 16, 2025
In The 14 Characteristics of Fascism, political scientist Lawrence Britt observed that “fascist nations tend to promote and to exalt hostility to higher education and academia.”
History proves him right.
In the 20th century, the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany devastated science and academia. These regimes viewed scientific freedom and critical inquiry as threats to their nationalist and anti-intellectual ideologies. They dismantled universities, expelled scientists, and replaced knowledge with propaganda. As Britt also noted, fascist systems protect corporate power while suppressing labour — a partnership between authoritarian politics and concentrated capital.
Privatisation, Neoliberalism, and the Making of Cheap Labour
In India, the roots of educational decline stretch back to the 1980s and 1990s — though, as Albert Einstein warned much earlier in his essay “Why Socialism?”, the problem runs deeper. “Our whole educational system suffers from this evil (capitalism),” he wrote. “An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.” That same ethos now pervades academia itself, reflected in the global “publish or perish” culture, where research is often valued less for its substance than for its marketable output.
When neoliberal reforms began to privatise education in India, Einstein’s warning took on new urgency. As government jobs dwindled, thousands of young students — often taking heavy bank loans — turned to private engineering colleges or computer courses such as BCA, chasing the promise of stability. Most instead found themselves underpaid and overworked in multinational corporations.
What should have been a system to nurture intellectual growth became one designed to produce cheap, compliant workers. The result has been a massive brain drain and the distortion of education into an instrument of corporate profit rather than public good.
A Parallel Project: Building the Hindu Rashtra
Running alongside this economic transformation has been another, older project — the ideological construction of a Hindu Rashtra. Since its founding in 1925, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has pursued what its second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, called a mental revolution: a slow, deliberate reshaping of thought, identity, and behaviour.
Golwalkar envisioned “a total transformation in the very attitude, thought process, and behaviour of the whole people; taking individual after individual and moulding him for an organised national life.” The project was never just political; it was epistemic — aimed at redefining how people think and what they know.
With the RSS-backed BJP in power since 2014, now in its third term, this long-term project has reached an intensity unseen before. It proceeds hand in hand with rampant corporatisation and the privatisation of public services. Unsurprisingly, education — the sphere of free thought and critical questioning — has become one of its key battlegrounds.
NEP 2020 and the New Labour Codes: Two Sides of the Same Coin
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, read alongside the New Labour Codes, reveals a shared ideological and economic intent. On one hand, the NEP rewrites curricula to glorify Hindutva narratives — revising history, marginalising secular and critical scholarship, and displacing scientific inquiry in favour of mythicised “Indian knowledge systems.” On the other, it deepens the privatisation and digitisation of education, creating lucrative markets for EdTech corporations and private universities while undermining public institutions. By promoting autonomous institutions, private management, and self-financing models, NEP 2020 subtly sidelines traditional public schools and colleges. Public institutions are increasingly encouraged to seek private funding or become financially self-sustaining, a shift that risks deepening inequalities in an already highly stratified society. Access to quality education will be increasingly determined by class, caste, gender, and geography, as wealthier regions and students secure better resources, while marginalized communities, women, and poorer populations face shrinking public options.
Together, these reforms mark a decisive shift in how the state conceives education and labour. The NEP’s emphasis on “flexibility,” “multidisciplinarity,” and “skill-based learning” may sound progressive, but in practice these terms often translate to modular, short-term, industry-oriented training that fragments learning and reduces students to a flexible workforce. Simultaneously, the new labour codes legalise precarious employment, dilute collective bargaining, and erode hard-won worker protections. The result is a seamless pipeline from an underfunded classroom to a deregulated workplace.
The combined effect is the hollowing out of education’s public purpose. Knowledge becomes either a commodity to sell or a tool to shape minds in service of nationalism.
Mathematics under Ideological Siege
The most recent example of this distortion is the UGC’s draft mathematics curriculum. It introduces a course on Philosophy of Indian Mathematics, requiring students to study the Vedas, Vedangas, Puranas, and even the Dhanurshastra for academic credit. Learning about the history and philosophy of mathematics is, of course, valuable — but using such courses as vehicles for out-of-context cultural propaganda undermines both scholarship and academic freedom. Another course, Math in Meditation, promises to teach “mathematical concepts and techniques used in meditation and mindfulness.”
Meanwhile, traditional subjects like Analytical Geometry and Mechanics are being emphasised at the cost of essential modern foundations such as Real Analysis, Linear Algebra, and Abstract Algebra — the very building blocks of any serious mathematical education. Several mathematicians have written in detail about the grave defects in the UGC’s 2025 mathematics curriculum. More than 900 mathematicians, researchers, teachers, and graduate students from across India have signed a petition opposing the University Grants Commission’s draft Learning Outcomes Curriculum Framework (LOCF) for undergraduate mathematics, scheduled for implementation in 2025. This resulted into the centre form an expert panel to review UGC draft curriculum, although nobody knows who these experts are!
These curricular changes are not pedagogical accidents. They mirror a broader ideological attempt to recentre education around “ancient wisdom,” stripped of historical context and critical scrutiny, while leaving students unprepared for scientific research or higher studies.
When I began my undergraduate studies in mathematics in 2009, most students aspired to become teachers in government schools (the tragedy of which, in my state West Bengal, is well known). A few of us went on to pursue science—to do fundamental research in theoretical mathematics. The new draft curriculum equips students for neither. It does not prepare them for an MSc. Nor does it lay the foundation for research. Instead, it aligns perfectly with the ruling party’s dual agenda: to advance the ideological project of Hindutva while expanding the reserve army of low-cost labour for corporates under the new labour regime.
Science and Freedom: An Inseparable Pair
The crisis we face today is not limited to education policy. It is the slow death of the scientific spirit. Science demands freedom: the freedom to question, to dissent, to test, and to fail. When knowledge becomes subservient to dogma or market logic, science withers. The laboratories may still exist, but their hair grows thin.
I write this not only as a mathematician but as someone who believes that the strength of a society lies in its commitment to critical inquiry. To watch these principles being dismantled by authoritarian and anti-intellectual forces is to be reminded of what Henri Poincaré, a legendary mathematician, theoretical physicist and a philosopher of science, warned more than a century ago.
“Freedom is for science what air is for the animal. Deprived of freedom, it dies of asphyxiation like a bird deprived of oxygen. And this freedom must be limitless, because if we wanted to impose it, we would only have half-science, and half-science is no longer science. Science must never submit itself to a dogma or to a party, to a preconceived idea or to anything whatsoever, if not to the facts themselves, because for science, to submit would be to cease to be.”
— Henri Poincaré, 1909
If the universities of a nation fall silent under fear or greed, if its classrooms become echo chambers of mythology and market slogans, then its future as a space of reason dies with them.
The defence of science, today, is not only a professional duty. It is a moral imperative — the defence of freedom itself.
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Oorna is a researcher from IISER, Kolkata.