Friday, 25 April 2025
Friday, 25 April 2025
India’s education system will be ruined if it goes into the hands of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), said leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Monday, while addressing a protest by ten student organisations at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.
The Congress MP walked into the crowd of students and said, “If the education system goes into their hands, then this country will be ruined.”
He meant the RSS and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“One organisation wants to destroy the future and the education system of the country. No one will get jobs and the country will be finished," Gandhi said at the protest organised by affiliate student organisations of the INDIA bloc.
The student organisations gathered at Jantar Mantar to voice their dissent against what they call the “saffronisation, privatisation, and commercialisation” of India’s education system.
Their demands were specific: repeal the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, conduct fair student union elections, and roll back proposed UGC faculty appointment rules.
The protest also had other concerns: Paper leaks had become a national crisis and scholarships were vanishing.
“The government has made the youth of the country unemployed,” the Amethi MP Gandhi continued. “No one is getting jobs. The government should talk about unemployment and the future.”
Gandhi also recalled that last week Prime Minister Narendra Modi made remarks on the Maha Kumbh in Parliament and asserted that the PM should have also spoken about unemployment and inflation.
The protest brought together ten major student unions, including the National Students' Union of India (NSUI), Students’ Federation of India (SFI), and the All India Students Association (AISA).
On the NEP, NSUI president Varun Chaudhary, said to The Telegraph Online: "This policy is bogus. They are trying to place non-academic people as vice chancellors. At this rate, any BJP-backed devotee could be running universities, even become vice chancellors. No academic qualification needed, just blind loyalty.”
SFI general secretary Mayukh Biswas said: "What we are witnessing is the increasing ideological infiltration of RSS in curriculums, the commercialisation of education, and the growing exclusion of marginalised communities from academic spaces.”
