‘Bhagavad Gita’ In Schools: Semantic Wrangling And The Homogenisation Of Indian Culture

Religiosity seeping into schools is a growing concern in India. The saffronisation of educational institutions and curricula disregards important principles of secularism and the separation of church and state. And the narrative surrounding the implementation of religious teachings in educational institutions saffronises what “Indian culture” means. It also distorts the realities of the country’s diversity and syncretism. The growing clamour by Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states to include the Bhagavad Gita in schools is therefore concerning and betrays profound biases in the institutional understanding of secularism.

Calling a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed against the Gujarat government’s decision to include the Bhagavad Gita in the school curriculum ‘propaganda‘, the state’s High Court noted that the Hindu religious text teaches ‘moral science lessons‘ and not religion. The PIL filed by the Jamiat Ulama-E Hind Gujarat and Jamiat Ulama Welfare Trust challenged the move on the basis that the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020, allows for the principles of all religions to be taught in schools ‘in the spirit of secularism‘ but teaching only one religious text goes against this provision. The petitioners also sought a stay order. 

The Court noted that the inclusion of the Bhagavad Gita in the curriculum doesn’t go against the NEP, 2020, and said the move cannot be challenged on the basis that only the Bhagavad Gita has been introduced so far because the implementation of teachings from other religions might soon follow. Denying that the Bhagavad Gita is solely a religious text, the Court observed. ‘It [Bhagavad Gita] is not a religious document; it is a culture‘. The two-judge bench then proceeded to say, ‘It’s morality. It’s part of the culture and these are in fact moral science lessons. Bhagavad Gita is nothing but moral science.‘ Further adding, ‘This is nothing but only propaganda.’ Proclaiming that the religious text has ‘no religious preaching.’

The Court denied the request for an interim stay order stopping enforcement of the Bhagavad Gita in schools temporarily until the matter was resolved judicially and the matter is now listed for hearing after December 23, 2024. 

The Bhagavad Gita in schools

The move to introduce the Bhagavad Gita is set to be implemented in Gujarat schools in the 2025-26 academic year, wherein students from grades 6 to 12 would be taught the text and would be evaluated on it. Further, prayers from it will be included in morning assemblies and activities and competitions surrounding the text will be held. In February 2024, the Gujarat State Legislative Assembly passed a resolution endorsing the initiative to teach the Bhagavad Gita in state schools The resolution was passed unanimously, with bipartisan support. 

In December 2021, the then Union Minister for Education clarified in the Lok Sabha that states can choose to introduce the Bhagavad Gita as part of the curriculum under the NEP. Following this, the decision to introduce the religious text in schools was made by the then Bharatiya Janta Party-led Delhi municipal corporation which announced the inclusion of the Bhagavad Gita in municipal schools of Delhi in February 2022.  

This was followed by Gujarat passing a resolution in March 2022 that mandated that schools introduce the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. This had a domino effect, with several other BJP-governed states announcing the intention to include the religious text in school curricula, including Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, and Uttarakhand that year. Madhya Pradesh announced its intention to do so as well in early 2023 and Haryana made the inclusion of the Bhagavad Gita in the curriculum mandatory last year.  

Conflating religion and values

The Bhagavad Gita is indisputably a religious text, and it’s disingenuous to suggest it has no religious character.  Whether the text is religious in nature or only spiritual and moral, is ultimately a matter of semantic wrangling. The Bhagavad Gita is generally understood as being a crucial Hindu religious text; in fact, in popular understanding, it oftentimes is the primary religious text of Hinduism. Just as adherents of Christianity or Islam believe their respective religious texts – the Bible and the Quran – are revealed by God, the Bhagavad Gita is believed to be the message of Krishna, a Hindu god, to the Pandava prince Arjun. Therefore, to suggest the Bhagavad Gita possesses no religious character would be a prevarication. 

As far as imparting values and morals goes, adherents of all religions would claim that their religious texts contain moral teachings and objective truths about the world. If the prescription of values or morals is the yardstick by which we measure whether a text is of a moral or religious character, any religious text can be distanced from religion and be proclaimed as a treatise on morality. The semantic tug-of-war regarding whether the Bhagavad Gita is a religious text or not only serves to further the introduction of religion in schools, specifically one religion. By positioning the Bhagavad Gita as solely imparting values and divorcing it from its religious character, religiosity finds a backdoor entry into schools. 

Gujarat’s Education Minister, Praful Pansheriya claimed the Bhagavad Gita isn’t an exclusively Hindu text, saying, ‘Although Gita is considered to belong to Hinduism, it is not limited to Hindus but is considered to be a scripture for the entire human society.‘ He further added, ‘Accordingly, it is essential to integrate Indian culture into students’ daily lives and school experiences so that students feel proud of being Indian.’ The initial 2022 circular issued by the state in this regard also stated the move aimed to ‘cultivate a sense of pride and connection to traditions‘.

Conflating Indian culture or traditions with one particular religion paints a picture of a monolithic Indian culture, completely disregarding the diversity of Indian cultural traditions and value systems. And for all the parroting of tired lines about cultural values, all the states that attempted to introduce Indian cultural teachings in schools have done so only using Hindu religious texts. Across states that have implemented the Bhagavad Gita or sought to include religious texts in schools, “culture” and “tradition” have plainly translated to “Hindu”. 

Primacy has long been granted to Hindu practises, texts, and value systems in schools, but this is at loggerheads with the realities of a multicultural, diverse India, which is home to several parallel cultural traditions and value systems. We must question whose culture and traditions we are imparting and teaching when we say “Indian culture” and whose is being invisibilised. To reduce the country’s diverse cultural traditions to a homogenised monolith is a disservice to a generation that will learn a saffronised reality about their country and its people.

The breadth of India’s various cultural traditions is just as vast as the country itself. If then the only cultural education that governments deem worthy of teaching is rooted firmly in Hinduism and the rejection of all other types of cultural traditions and value systems, then the majoritarian underpinnings of such a move are plain to see. 

Biased institutional ynderstanding of secularism

Two different sets of principles seem to govern the institutional understanding of secularism in India, depending on whether Hinduism or other religions are being dealt with. Arguably, when it comes to state governments, this bias is not so much unconscious or unexplained as it is deliberately positioned to favour their ideological fancies and propagate their political agenda. But across institutions, this bias is apparent. 

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), India’s apex child rights body, in October 2024 recommended that states stop their funding to madrasas and close down madrasa boards pan-India. Among the slew of concerns the NCPCR report on these Islamic institutions raised, one was that ‘madrasas while providing religious education are not following the principles of secularism.’

Even the Supreme Court questioned the NCPCR’s exclusive opposition to madrasas when it hasn’t taken such a view of other religious institutions. The Court said, ‘Has the NCPCR issued a directive, across communities, that don’t send children to any monasteries, pathshalas, etc.‘ Further adding, ‘Has NCPCR been even-handed in its treatment of all communities?‘ 

The NCPCR’s concern over secularism is limited to the selective scrutiny of Muslim institutions, while Hindu religious teachings in schools are routinely exempt from such scrutiny. In 2022, when Karnataka was mulling whether to include the Bhagavad Gita in schools, the then state education minister said the Bhagavad Gita is not a religious book and can be taught in schools while coming down on catechism classes held in Christian institutions for being violative of state laws that mandate that institutions registered under the Karnataka Education Act cannot impart religious teachings.

The Shivraj Singh Chauhan-led Madhya Pradesh government in 2023 decided to teach Hindu religious texts in government schools across the state. No provision to seek parental consent was announced. This year, Madhya Pradesh issued an order stating it would take action against madrasas that imparted religious instruction to enrolled non-Muslim students without parental consent.

The dichotomy that exists in these institutional dealings is not so much a contradiction as it is by design. However, the contradiction of Hindutva proponents resisting and rejecting secularism while invoking it against Christian and Muslim educational institutions is glaringly evident, as is the underlying political agenda. 

Even the judicial understanding of secularism seems mired in contradictions. In March 2024, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court declared the Uttar Pradesh Board of Madrasa Education Act, 2004, unconstitutional on various grounds, including for violating principles of secularism, noting ‘Since providing education is one of the primary duties of the State, it is bound to remain secular while exercising its powers in the said field. It cannot provide for education of a particular religion, its instructions, prescriptions and philosophies or create separate education systems for separate religions. Any such action on the part of the State would be violative of the principles of secularism, which is part of the basic structure of the Constitution of India.’

A position vastly different from the Gujarat High Court’s in the matter of the Bhagavad Gita in schools. The Allahabad High Court judgment was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, which took an altogether different stance on religious instruction in educational institutions. 

Arguably, a commitment to secularism in education can mean either the complete absence of religion or equal inclusion for all religious teaching. But it is important to make a distinction between teaching students about religion and teaching religion, the former involves matter-of-fact teachings about the origins, evolution, and central ideas of various religions, while the latter refers to the propagation of a religion. Ultimately, a moral, value-based education is possible without invoking religion or any religious texts, and this must be considered for the benefit of students, whose education should be fact-based and engage them critically, and ideally shouldn’t be rooted in religious beliefs or prescriptions.

When we include religion in classrooms, we must ask ourselves what we are sacrificing to make room for it. The erasure of other non-Hindu Indian cultural traditions is a tool that is often wielded by Hindutva chauvinists. While it serves a political agenda, such a false image of a monolithic, homogenised India does a disservice to a generation whose understanding of Indian culture and traditions will always remain incomplete if divorced from the country’s multicultural and syncretic realities.