A poor education teaches children disdain, excessive pride, exclusionary or majoritarian thinking, outright fiction in place of facts, and an inability to tolerate dissent or to think for themselves.
Dina Nath Batra, whose devotion to education is built on a bedrock of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, "values", is best known as the octogenarian who successfully said boo to Penguin and Wendy Doniger about her book, The Hindus, (to Penguin's eternal disgrace); and to publishing house Aleph, who (equally disgracefully) agreed not to reprint Ms Doniger's On Hinduism without his consent. He's also the man who got A K Ramanujan's essay, "Many Ramayanas" kicked off Delhi University's syllabus, and a reference to Bhagat Singh as a terrorist taken out of a textbook. He currently has his eyes on publishing house Orient Blackswan.
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Having knocked a few balls solidly out of the park for his organisation, Mr Batra is now under media fire for having written some terrible textbooks that have been made recommended secondary reading in government schools in Gujarat, distributed by the education department. These textbooks are the instruments of choice in Mr Batra's, and the RSS', plan to "Indianise" (read Hinduise) education. He couldn't have done better. The schoolroom is, in fact, the only place to plant large-scale crops: sow a generation or two of these books, and you will reap a population that does your work for you - a self-perpetuating machine that runs on autopilot.
If the more secular governments of the last many decades had understood this half as well, we would have a vastly more literate and educated population, and perhaps a less polarised one. Or perhaps the more secular governments of the last many decades understood this perfectly, and didn't like the idea of facing the scrutiny and self-confidence of a vastly more literate and educated, and vastly less politically malleable population.
There is plenty of fun to be had at Mr Batra's expense. What kind of right-wing nut teaches children that Lord Ram's mythical chariot was the world's first airplane, in the hope that this will make Hindus look good? What kind of global economic player would encourage schools to eschew English? How idiotic is the idea of replacing regular maths with Vedic maths? Is service to the cow really the best way to ensure a wonderful family? Ha ha, ROFL, etc.
But while his textbooks fully deserve derisive snickers, stopping there is the stupidest, most effete possible response from liberal, secular India. Going no further than derisive snickering is, in fact, what put the ministry of hurt sentiment in place under previous governments, and what swept this Hindutva government into power. (Narendra Modi can say what he likes about being all about development - it's his foreword in those textbooks.) Mr Batra is only the noisiest version of the Modi government's commitment to Hinduising India. You can fully expect this Hinduising to happen in the most effective place: not in pointless media debates, but in the classroom. Liberal derision is very cathartic, but it is about as effective against focused supremacist projects as an egg whisk against floodwaters.
So what to do?
Mr Batra might be a nuisance, but he has been law-abiding in his fight to promote what he thinks of as Hindu or Indian values (they're interchangeable, you know). In most cases, he hasn't even had to go to court - a legal notice has been enough to turn liberal lions into mice. How many Indians are fighting fire with fire, using the law to fight for their own liberal, secular, constitutional values? How many people who disagree with Mr Batra have initiated legal proceedings to challenge the Gujarat government's educational policy?
There are perfectly good arguments to be made on the side of a pluralistic, rational, modern education for Indian kids. Those arguments can be made in court, and perhaps they would help to prevent a process that is so effective, and so dangerous, that derisive laughter simply isn't enough. Mr Batra keeps threatening legal action; it's time that he - and others like him - faced a legal challenge themselves.