Language is only one front in a much larger battle. The NEP is not just an educational reform; it is a recalibration of caste and class hierarchies, a well-crafted mechanism to consolidate privilege while systematically locking the marginalized out of meaningful access to knowledge.
By Samyuktha Kannan
In the grand theatre of India’s – so called federalism, Tamil Nadu has once again taken center stage in what appears to be a linguistic tussle. The Centre, wielding the New Education Policy (NEP) with all the finesse of a sledgehammer, has slashed Rs. 2,152 crore in centrally sponsored education funds, citing the state’s refusal to bow to its three-language formula. This move, executed with complete disregard for the Right to Education Act, punishes Tamil Nadu for its audacity in maintaining a two-language policy – Tamil and English – without allowing Hindi an appearance in its government classrooms.
Unlike most other states, including its southern counterparts Kerala and Karnataka, Tamil Nadu has remained unwavering in its linguistic stance, much to the Centre’s chagrin. Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, in a display of rhetorical flourish, accused the DMK-led government of “dishonesty” and of “ruining the future” of Tamil Nadu’s students. Not stopping at mere disapproval, he went on to brand the state’s position as “uncivilized” and “undemocratic,” suggesting – rather ironically – that rejecting a policy imposed from above is somehow an affront to democracy. He further charged the DMK with weaponizing language for political ends, as if the Centre’s own enforcement of a “pan-India” education model were a gesture of pure altruism, devoid of any political calculation.
This dispute has played out in broad daylight for weeks, with state-backed news channels reducing Tamil Nadu’s opposition to yet another North-South culture war. The most absurd claim yet has been that M.K. Stalin harbours a “racist” agenda against Hindi speakers, a claim so outlandish that northern mainstream media, in its earnest indignation, has unwittingly turned itself into a source of comic relief. In response, Chief Minister M.K Stalin has presented this as yet another instance of northern cultural dominance underlining the colonizing characteristic of Hindi – especially because of its state backing. He cautioned that history does not favour those who underestimate Tamil Nadu’s unwavering commitment to its language.
Stalin has accused the BJP-led central government of orchestrating a broader push to impose Hindi across multiple domains, from administration to education, and has vowed to stand firm against such encroachments. He has been careful to clarify that Tamil Nadu harbours no hostility toward multilingualism – only toward linguistic coercion, which will be met with unwavering resistance. Adding weight to his argument, he has drawn attention to the stark disparity in funding: between 2017 and 2020, the central government allocated a generous ₹643 crore to promote Sanskrit, while Tamil – one of the world’s oldest and most richly documented languages – received a mere ₹23 crore. The message, as Stalin sees it, is clear: some languages are deemed more equal than others, underscoring the perceived neglect of non-Hindi languages.
The latest development has only fanned the flames further. Stalin’s symbolic proposal to replace the rupee sign (₹) with a Tamil alphabet (ரூ – Ru) sent sections of the media and political establishment into a tailspin. For many, this was the final straw, an unspeakable act of defiance that reaffirmed Tamil Nadu’s refusal to play by Centre’s script. Yet, beneath the hysteria, the controversy reveals something deeper: a fundamental unease with the idea that a state, secure in its identity, can reject the Centre’s homogenizing impulses.
Dear Mr. Stalin, you’re not mistaken. However, while it is true that we Tamils support you in resisting Hindi colonization because we too recognize it as a tactic of garden-variety right-wing dominance, isn’t this struggle about more than just language?
Because here’s the thing: even from the beginning this wasn’t just a war over language. The NEP is not simply a vehicle for Hindi imposition; it is a Trojan horse for something far bigger – a full-fledged remaking of Indian education along neoliberal and majoritarian lines. If Tamil Nadu keeps the fight confined to the symbolic terrain of linguistic identity, it risks missing the bigger crisis at hand. The NEP promotes privatization, hollows out federalism, and cements upper-caste dominance through a curriculum that masquerades as “Indianization” but is, in reality, a saffronized and exclusionary project. The Centre’s coercion is undeniable, but Tamil Nadu’s resistance must evolve beyond language politics and tackle the NEP’s deeper structural violence head-on.
The timing of this crisis is no coincidence. As Tamil Nadu fights its battle over education, another storm is brewing – the impending delimitation exercise, a political manoeuvre that threatens to drastically dilute the influence of southern states like Tamil Nadu. Thanks to their success in population control, these states now face the absurd prospect of losing parliamentary representation, while the Hindi heartland – where population growth has remained unchecked – stands to gain more seats. Currently, Tamil Nadu holds 39 MPs, making up roughly 7% of the 543-member Lok Sabha. But if the Lok Sabha expands to 848 seats, with each constituency averaging 16.66 lakh people, Tamil Nadu – projected to have a population of 7.73 crore by 2025 – would see its share shrink to just 45 seats, dropping its influence to a mere 5%. In effect, Tamil Nadu and its southern counterparts are being penalized for their governance, health, and education successes, while states with weaker developmental indicators are rewarded with greater political clout.
The pattern here is impossible to ignore. Whether through the NEP or delimitation, the Centre’s message to the South is clear: conform or be sidelined. Just as the NEP seeks to centralize control over education, delimitation threatens to centralize political power in the Hindi belt. These are not isolated policies; they are part of a larger playbook designed to weaken states that refuse to fall in line with the Centre’s ideological and economic agenda.
This struggle is no longer just about federalism; it is about resisting a violent reordering of power – of language, caste, economy, and governance itself. The Dravidian movement, born from the fight against Brahmanical domination and the assertion of self-respect, has always recognized that language is not just a neutral tool but a vessel of power. Hindi is not merely spreading through cultural osmosis – it is a state apparatus, a carefully deployed weapon to entrench Hindutva ideology and Hindu nationalism, erasing linguistic diversity and imposing a homogenized, Brahmanical identity under the ever-convenient guise of national unity. This is not incidental; it is deliberate. Yet, somewhat ironically, even Stalin seems more invested in the Hindi-versus-Tamil debate than in calling out the larger structural violence at play. It is as if the Dravidian movement’s historic resistance to Hindi imposition has become so central that its deeper critique of caste, class, and economic domination has been politely left in the waiting room.
To frame this battle as just another North-South linguistic standoff is to miss the bigger picture: what is unfolding is not merely a conflict over language policy, but a battle over whose identity, history, and culture will define India’s future.
Language is only one front in a much larger battle. The NEP is not just an educational reform; it is a recalibration of caste and class hierarchies, a well-crafted mechanism to consolidate privilege while systematically locking the marginalized out of meaningful access to knowledge. The delimitation exercise follows the same playbook – tilting the scales toward the politically and economically dominant, ensuring that historically progressive states, particularly in the South, wield less influence in shaping the nation’s future. These are not isolated policies; they are interlocking gears in the same machinery designed to centralize power, erode regional autonomy, and cement a corporate-driven, majoritarian state. The message is clear: fall in line or be strategically sidelined.
Tamil Nadu and its leadership must recognize that these struggles cannot be waged in isolation. There has to be a resistance against the slow but deliberate restructuring of India into a state where diversity is a liability, dissent is an inconvenience, and governance is less about representation and more about exclusion. The Dravidian movement has never been one for quiet acquiescence; it has always been a movement of defiance, of assertion, of an unshakable belief in justice. That belief must not waver now. After all, if history has taught us anything, it’s that Tamil Nadu does not take kindly to those who mistake resistance for rebellion—and certainly not to those who underestimate its resolve.
Unfortunately, even in its rebuttal to the NEP, Tamil Nadu seems determined to fight the battle on just one front—waving the anti-Hindi banner while politely ignoring the far more systemic oppression lurking beneath the policy’s fine print.
But let’s crack open the NEP just a little bit.
Draped in the reassuring jargon of “holistic learning” and “flexibility,” the NEP is less an education policy and more a demolition manual for public education. By aggressively pushing privatization, it ensures that affordable, accessible higher education in India becomes a myth. Its much-touted “light but tight” regulatory model is a master class in bureaucratic illusion – “light” when it comes to state funding, “tight” when it comes to controlling what is taught, who teaches it, and who actually gets to benefit from it. In other words, it’s not so much reform as a hostile takeover – an authoritarian stranglehold – of knowledge production, all while pretending to be a grand vision for the future.
At the heart of the NEP is the seamless integration of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, an unholy matrimony that fuses capitalist profiteering with Hindutva-driven ideological purification. The policy markets itself as a beacon of innovation while steadily dismantling the redistributive mechanisms that once made higher education even remotely accessible to the marginalized. The privatization push, far from being an accidental by-product, is central to this project. Private institutions, run by corporate moguls with political patronage, will flourish, setting exorbitant fees under the guise of ‘quality education,’ while government institutions will starve, their resources deliberately withered away.
The NEP’s obsession with vocational training is another red flag, waving frantically over the grave of critical education. Instead of expanding access to quality higher education, the NEP nudges students – especially those from marginalized backgrounds – toward skill-based, non-academic learning. This isn’t about empowerment; it’s about entrenching inequality. The message is clear: higher education is for the privileged, while the rest are to be streamlined into the labour force without ever setting foot in a university. The result is a neatly stratified society where the ruling elite monopolize intellectual spaces while the lower classes are conditioned to accept their economic servitude as a predetermined destiny.
And then there’s the ideological project. The NEP’s emphasis on an “Indianized” curriculum isn’t just about reclaiming indigenous knowledge; it’s about reshaping history and social sciences to fit a sanitized, saffronized narrative. The quiet erasure of caste, gender, and social justice from syllabi is not accidental; rather it is a deliberate act of epistemic violence. The goal is clear. Manufacture a generation of docile, “nationalist” citizens who lack the vocabulary to critique oppression. This isn’t education reform – its indoctrination masquerading as pedagogy.
And let’s not forget the grand solution to India’s education woes: digital learning. Touted as a revolutionary step forward, the NEP’s push toward online education conveniently ignores the realities of India’s digital divide. While private universities and elite institutions flourish in this new model, rural and economically disadvantaged students are left behind, unable to afford the devices or reliable internet access necessary for participation. Education, once a means of social mobility, is being systematically transformed into a luxury good. In a cruel twist, the very students who most need education to break cycles of poverty will be the first to be excluded from it.
However, the elephant in the room of any pedagogical discourse in India today isn’t just access – or even the structural inequities that have long defined our education system – but the NEP’s aggressive privatization agenda, which threatens to reconfigure education into an exclusive club for the privileged. By strategically shrinking the state’s role in funding and regulation while tightening its ideological grip on content and pedagogy, the NEP completes a long-brewing transformation: education is no longer a public good but a market commodity. The much-lauded “light but tight” model is, in effect, a bureaucratic rebrand for a corporate takeover – where students become consumers, teachers are reduced to service providers, and the production of knowledge is measured not by critical inquiry but by its profitability. The policy’s deafening silence on caste-based reservations and its fondness for the myth of meritocracy serve only to fortify privilege, turning higher education into an elite fortress guarded by financial barriers. And let’s not pretend this is some unfortunate side effect – it is a feature, not a bug. Public institutions, the only spaces where marginalized communities have historically asserted intellectual agency, are being systematically gutted, de-legitimized, and left to wither.
Meanwhile, the increasing frequency of student suicides, the incarceration of dissenting voices, and the criminalization of academic critique are not unfortunate “incidents” but rather the logical outcomes of a system designed to prioritize ideological compliance over intellectual freedom. After all, nothing says “New India” quite like an education policy that simultaneously sells you a dream and ensures you’ll never be able to afford it.
Yet, despite this overt restructuring, much of the mainstream discourse around education remains preoccupied with superficial debates over curriculum reforms and skill development, ignoring the deeper reality of neoliberal expropriation at work. The NEP does not simply dictate what is to be taught – it determines who gets to learn at all. The shift toward online education, the proliferation of private partnerships, and the push for self-financed institutions are all part of a broader withdrawal of the state from its constitutional obligation to provide equitable access to learning. Meanwhile, universities that resist this transformation, those that still produce critical scholars and politically conscious students, are branded as sites of sedition rather than spaces of learning. The project of education, once imagined as a pathway to social transformation, is now being redesigned as a tool of social reproduction, where caste, class, and corporate interests coalesce to create an obedient, depoliticized workforce. To discuss education today without centering the NEP’s privatization drive is to deliberately ignore the most pressing crisis facing learning in India—one that will define the very nature of knowledge, democracy, and dissent in the years to come.
Tamil Nadu has long been a torchbearer of progressive education policies – from pioneering reservation policies to expanding access to higher education. But if Stalin and his government truly want to protect that legacy, they need to reframe this fight. The NEP is not just a linguistic skirmish between Hindi and Tamil; it is a battle over who gets to learn, who gets to succeed, and who is locked out of the system entirely. Reducing the opposition to linguistic nationalism alone is not just a strategic misstep – it is a distraction, one that plays right into the hands of those reshaping Indian education in their own image. The NEP itself is not just about education – it is about power. It is about deciding whether education remains a right or mutates into a privilege. It is about ensuring that the next generation of students – Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, working-class – have access to the same opportunities as their more privileged counterparts, rather than being condemned to the margins.
If Tamil Nadu’s opposition remains confined to the language debate, it risks missing the forest for the trees. The real battle is far larger: it is a fight to keep education a site of emancipation, not a playground for neoliberal profiteers and ideological zealots who would much rather see knowledge turned into a gated community.
The real limitation of the present debate is the narrow lens of identitarian politics through which it is being analysed. But identitarian politics itself has its constraints. The time has come to move beyond the confines of identity – be it class, caste, or language – because it is precisely through these categories that the NEP seeks to entrench exclusion. To effectively challenge the NEP, the opposition must not just acknowledge these structural divisions but transcend them.
So, Mr. Stalin, surely the era of performative defiance should be behind us by now? Tamil Nadu doesn’t just need a symbolic rejection of the NEP – it needs a sustained, structural challenge, one that doesn’t stop at saying no but dares to imagine an alternative vision of education – a vision that prioritizes equity over exclusion, accessibility over elitism, and critical thinking over ideological indoctrination. And if any state has the political will – and the historical muscle – to mount such a challenge, it is Tamil Nadu. Yes, the fight for language matters. But no less important is the fight for an alternative vision of education. That’s the fight that will decide who gets to dream, who gets to dissent, and who gets to resist this fascist onslaught against the South – and on what terms. And if Tamil Nadu truly wants to lead, it must ensure that this fight is waged not just in slogans, but in policy, in praxis, and in principle.
(Samyuktha Kannan is a student of O. P. Jindal Global University)