The Youth are a Waste of Time in Modi’s India

Illustration by Gemini AI

Narendra Modi shut down about one lakh (100,000) public schools, cut down the funding to school education by 50% and higher education by 33%, and propped up the RSS to open about 40,000 schools.

Education is no concern of the Modi government. He asked youngsters more than once to start selling pakoras (fritters) instead of complaining about unemployment. It’s easy to control a nation of pakora-sellers than educated citizens. The glorious ancient civilisation of Bharat did just that with its Brahminical system which not only denied education to the majority of the population but also punished them brutally if they tried to pursue learning.

“Don’t waste our time,” the ‘honourable’ chief justice of India told a lawyer who tried to show him a video clip of the violence inflicted on the protesting young students in Delhi by Modi’s police.

The youth are a waste of time for India now.

Hitler’s Germany had the same view. In the 1930s, the Weimar public education was dismantled by Hitler because its core values of pluralism, critical inquiry, local autonomy, and democratic citizenship were fundamentally incompatible with the Nazi Party’s goal of total societal control. Modi is doing exactly the same thing in India a century later.

What happened in Germany because of that change? An entire generation was conditioned to view their neighbours as existential threat.

The Nazis believed that debate made a country “weak.” The RSS believes precisely that.  The Nazis replaced open discussions with strict discipline, military drills, and absolute obedience to authority. The RSS does exactly that. If a student asked a question that challenged state policy, they were marked as a trouble-maker. The RSS does just that with any citizen.

Before 1933, different states and towns in Germany ran their own schools – much like the states did in India until a few years back. This meant if one state or town wanted a progressive science curriculum, they could have it. But in 1934, the Nazis created a single central authority in Berlin. Suddenly, one minister decided every single textbook, lesson plan, and exam across the entire country. Modi’s India is doing just that now.

Biology became “Racial Science” in the Nazi curriculum. Instead of studying basic plant and animal cells, kids spent hours measuring head sizes, nose shapes, and hair colour with callipers to learn which races were supposedly superior. And of course the Germans were! NCERT’s new science and math textbooks do something very similar by mixing mythology with science and even math.

History became fantasy in those textbooks. They erased Germany’s past mistakes, blamed religious and ethnic minorities for all of Germany’s problems, and taught that war was noble and necessary. Go through NCERT’s new history textbooks and you’ll find a repetition of the same process.

Leaders like Hitler and Modi don’t just shut down schools, they hijack them. The Nazi curriculum ensured that children never heard a single competing idea from age 6 to 18. By the time those kids grew into adults, they didn’t need to be told by any Chief Justice: “Don’t waste our time.” They were conditioned to obey blindly.

In 1934, Bernhard Rust who was the Nazi Minister of Education said, “The whole function of education is to create Nazis.” Now India’s endeavour is to create bhakts. Those who don’t want to be bhakts are told explicitly and menacingly: “Don’t waste our time.”

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