When the State Steps Back, the Market Doesn't Stay Neutral

When the Market Becomes the Message

For thirty years, the conversation about ideology in Indian education has had one shape: an activist state, using its control over curriculum and regulation, pushing a particular vision of the nation into classrooms. This is what scholars call saffronisation - deliberate, state-led, traceable to a textbook committee or a policy circular.

The Argument That Inverts This

A new study by researcher Ritika Arora-Kukreja, published in the Economic and Political Weekly in August 2026, argues that this story is incomplete. Drawing on interviews across private schools in Delhi-NCR, she describes a second, quieter channel: "bottom-up Hindutva." Here, the state is barely present.

Instead, parents - as fee-paying customers - express preferences and schools, competing for enrolment, accommodate them.

• The mechanism: Delhi's private-school enrolment at the primary and middle level rose from roughly 30% in 2014-15 to over 46% in 2019-20, following the 1991 liberalisation of the economy. As the state's direct grip loosened, market demand filled the vacuum.
• The "Hindu customer": In markets with a dominant religious demographic, schools become "hyper-accountable" to that majority - celebrating its festivals, restricting non-vegetarian food, resisting the hijab, hesitating over hiring minority staff - because alienating the majority carries a real economic cost that alienating a minority does not.
• Depoliticisation: These preferences rarely announce themselves as religious. Bans are justified as hygiene, restrictions as security - private choices, not political ones.

Why This Matters Beyond Schools

The pattern is visible elsewhere. When a jewellery brand withdrew an advertisement this August after backlash over an actress's attire and when a West Bengal police officer was transferred this September after online outrage over an Islamic greeting, both were institutions responding not to a government order but to organised public pressure.

The mechanism is the same one Arora-Kukreja found in schools: a majoritarian preference, expressed through consumer or public pressure rather than state command, that institutions find cheaper to accommodate than to resist.

Where This Leaves Us

TAN's position is that this matters more than state-led saffronisation in one specific way: it is far harder to regulate. A textbook policy can be challenged in a courtroom or reversed by the next government. A thousand individual parental preferences, each dressed as an apolitical consumer choice, cannot be legislated against without appearing to restrict parental rights themselves.

The market doesn't just fail to neutralise ideology - for a majoritarian society, it offers a channel for enforcing it that is more resilient than the state's own machinery, precisely because no single actor can be held accountable for it.