Delhi Congress chief Devender Yadav calls RSS curriculum in schools ‘retrograde, dangerous’

NEW DELHI: Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC) chief Devender Yadav on Friday severely criticised the Rekha Gupta government’s decision to put the 100-year history of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in school curricula as a “retrograde and dangerous attempt” to indoctrinate impressionable youngsters with Hindutva ideology.

Yadav complained that the move was aimed to “poison the young minds of the students” and camouflage what he termed the RSS’s “anti-national activities, including complicity in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.

He asked what version of the history of the RSS would be imparted, alleging that the body had conspired with the British and Mohammad Ali Jinnah to partition India, betrayed the Congress-led freedom movement, and was acting on a narrow political agenda that overlooked the Indian Constitution. He further noted that the RSS did not hoist the national flag at its Nagpur headquarters for over 51 years and was banned by then Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948.

“The RSS history is not one of nation-building but of division and destruction,” Yadav added, terming the decision to make such material a part of the school curriculum in Delhi as distorting India’s multicultural and pluralist legacy.

Yadav compared the RSS philosophy with that of the Congress, stating that if the worldview of the RSS had dominated India’s future, the IITs, IIMs, AIIMS, and ISRO would not have materialised. Yadav credited the Congress governments for forming these “temples of learning” that pushed India to the ranks of the global economic leaders.

He warned that teaching RSS history in schools would “ruin the future of schoolchildren and tarnish the reputation of Delhi’s education system” by producing narrow-minded citizens. According to Yadav, “poisoning young minds in their formative years with a dangerous narrative is the most destructive strategy.” Yadav also called it “hypocritical” that the RSS, which, according to him, had conspired to kill Gandhi, now tries to redeem its name by paying tributes to the Father of the Nation on Gandhi Jayanti. “Such gestures cannot erase the blood-stained image of the communal apparel,” he said.