Education is never neutral. It either functions as a practice of freedom – equipping students to question power, interrogate injustice, and participate in the transformation of society – or it becomes an instrument of domination, conditioning them into subservience. This is why the debate over Delhi’s proposed Rashtraneeti curriculum – which focuses on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – matters.India’s education system is already failing students in the most miserable ways possible. The recent CBSE and NEET fiascos, although just one symptom of the larger disease, has made the crisis painfully clear. Paper leaks, administrative confusion, and the absence of meaningful accountability have turned the country’s most important examinations into a source of fear, anxiety, distrust and despair for millions of our youth.One would expect the government to confront such failures by focussing on the restoration of institutional integrity, strengthening public education, ensuring transparent examinations, and expanding opportunities for students. Instead, it has chosen to prioritise ideological inculcation. Official documents indicate that the Rashtraneeti curriculum will be taught from Kindergarten to Class XII and will introduce students to the history, philosophy, and work of the RSS. Similar curricular interventions have already appeared elsewhere. In September 2021, the Madhya Pradesh government integrated lectures on RSS founder Dr. K.B. Hedgewar and Bhartiya Jana Sangh leader Deendayal Upadhyaya into the first-year MBBS foundation course. In Rajasthan, textbook revisions generated controversy over the controversial treatment of Savarkar and Jawaharlal Nehru. In NCERT text book revisions, references to the ban on RSS after Gandhi’s assassination, the Hindu extremists’ dislike of Gandhi, and the repeated attempts to assassinate him, were removed. Taken together, these developments suggest not isolated academic decisions but a wider ideological project – the Sanghification of Indian education. The question is not whether the RSS has a history. Every political movement does. The issue also is not whether RSS should be studied or not. Of course the organisation that inspired and plotted the assasination of the Father of the nation must be studied. The real question is how this history is being taught.A democratic curriculumA democratic curriculum teaches students that history is convoluted and contested, that evidence must be evaluated, and all political movements are open to criticism. What it cannot and must not do is to present a deeply contested political tradition as a civic ideal while suppressing the deeply troubling debates that surround its existence. That is precisely why the sanitisation of the RSS within the school curriculum is so problematic. The RSS was founded in 1925 as a Hindu nationalist organisation. Although it describes itself as a “cultural” body, its influence has long extended beyond culture into politics, public policy, and the institutions of the Indian state. The RSS played no role in India’s freedom struggle. It remained outside the anti-colonial mainstream while the national movement was being shaped by leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bose, Bhagat Singh and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Over the decades, it has faced bans, remained the subject of enduring historical and political scrutiny over Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, has long opposed key elements of our shared constitutional vision and has repeatedly sought to reinterpret or dilute constitutional safeguards in the name of cultural nationalism.It also has a questionable record on caste, gender and representation. Despite its constant invocation of Hindu unity, it has never had an OBC, Dalit, or Adivasi serve as its chief. Its discomfort with a caste census is equally revealing. A comprehensive caste census would place hard evidence before the public – exposing the persistent exclusion of backward classes from positions of wealth, power, and influence – and reinforce the struggle of the oppressed classes for a respectable place and proportional share in society and the country’s resources. But the RSS has refused to back it. That fact alone speaks volumes about the social hierarchy embedded within its organisational culture. The RSS has also long operated with financial opacity like an underground mafia. Even while exercising considerable influence through an extensive network of affiliated bodies, it refuses to register itself and make its accounts available for public scrutiny. It does not resemble the kind of transparent, publicly accountable institution that students must observe and learn from as a model of civic life. Yet, it is now being invited into the space where children learn what citizenship means.Act of ethical, intellectual, and moral bigotryThese disconcerting facts beg important questions: What does an organisation that is evidently steeped in murder, malice, and mystery have to teach our children? Why should an organisation that does not subject itself to ordinary standards of public decency or transparency be presented as a guide to civic responsibility? What lesson can it teach when influence is exercised without corresponding democratic accountability? Schools teach children that public institutions function through openness, constitutional limits, and responsibility. The organisations featured in civic education should be measured against those very standards. A school curriculum has a fundamentally different purpose from a political platform. Its duty is to teach students how evidence is evaluated, how history is debated, how institutions function, and how democratic judgment is formed. It cannot elevate a single political tradition into a civic ideal and expect that to pass as neutral education.That is why the controversy surrounding Rashtraneeti is not about a single chapter in a textbook or even about the RSS alone. It is about the philosophy of education, and indeed the philosophy of citizenship, that we want to pass on to the next generation.It is an act of ethical, intellectual, and moral bigotry to introduce children to the RSS without also confronting its contested relationship with the Constitution, secularism, pluralism, caste, and social justice. How can an organisation that has repeatedly challenged important features of the constitutional order be presented as an authority on constitutional citizenship?These are not peripheral criticisms; they are central to understanding the organisation’s place in modern Indian history. Nor are they incidental questions. They go to the heart of equality, representation, democracy, and the republic itself. If students are to study the RSS, they must also study the debates surrounding it – its admirers and critics, its achievements and contradictions, its claims and the challenges to those claims. To present only a sanitised catalogue of its “contributions” while omitting its ideological controversies is not education; it is indoctrination.Education should never tell students what to think. Its purpose is to teach them how to think. Healthy democracies progress precisely because its citizens are taught to question, reason, disagree, and to hold power accountable. That is why Indian schools – all schools but especially those that are funded by taxpayers – should not ask students to inherit political loyalties. They should equip them to critically evaluate political and social traditions.Pawan Khera is a Rajya Sabha MP and chairman AICC media & communications.