The government is pushing the fulfilment of the long-standing ideological project of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party of indoctrinating and cultivating hatred through the education system, alleged Sonia Gandhi.Gandhi further said that the textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the backbone of the school curriculum, have been revised to sanitise Indian history. “Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and the sections on Mughal India have been dropped from curricula. In addition, the Preamble to the Indian Constitution was dropped from textbooks until public backlash forced the government to commit to mandatory inclusion once again,” she pointed out.The leadership positions in key institutions, even in the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management that Jawaharlal Nehru evocatively described as the temples of modem India, have been reserved for pliant ideologues, she alleged.“In our universities, we have seen the large-scale hiring of professors from regime-friendly ideologically backgrounds, no matter the comically poor quality of their teaching and scholarships. The UGC’s ongoing attempts to dilute the qualifications for professorships and vice-chancellorships are only the latest ploy intended to enable the influx of educationists driven by ideological considerations rather than academic ideals,” she said.Terming the proposed changes under the new UGC guidelines as one of the gravest threats to federalism in today’s times, the Congress leader said that it is a backdoor attempt to convert a subject in the Concurrent List into the sole preserve of the Central government.“In higher education, the government has brought in the draconian draft UGC) guidelines of 2025 which have fully written out state governments from the appointment of Vice Chancellors in universities established, funded, and operated by them. The Union government has given itself through the Governors who are typically designated as the Chancellor of the University-near-monopoly power in the selection of the VCs in state universities,” she said.The Congress MP further alleged that the Modi government’s commercialisation of the education system has been happening in plain sight, in full compliance with the NEP.“As a constitutional guarantee for primary school education, the RTE provided key safeguards to ensure the accessibility of primary schools for all indian children – a lower primary school within one kilometre of every neighbourhood, and an upper primary school within three kilometres of every neighbourhood. The NEP, which generally omits to mention the RTE, seeks to overturn the concept of these neighbourhood schools by introducing school complexes,” she said.
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