Who is Raising Your Children?

Title: Who is Raising Your Children? – Breaking India Using Its Youth
Author: Rajiv Malhotra, Vijaya Viswanathan
Publisher: BluOne Ink, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9789365470673
Pages: 438

India’s education system has changed itself completely within the span of a generation. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ was the motto of parents and teachers while I was in school. Of course, there were some teachers who spared the rod but still inspired their students. But such students were generally having better academic credentials anyway. Overall, corporal punishment generally helped all categories of students to perform better. When the rod was taken out of the system and scolding itself became a taboo, the academic standards collapsed. To masquerade this fall, the rigour of exams was loosened and marks were granted liberally, and often undeservingly, to show a decent score when the student was unable even to read and write. This is the present condition of Indian schools. These so called ‘reforms’ occurred under the watchful supervision and sometimes funding by international organisations which had their own motives which did not often align with our national ethos. This book neatly summarizes the hidden dangers and deceptive threats the children and youth of the country faces. The situation is likened to the story of Aghasura in the Bhagavata Purana. Just as Aghasura disguised his lethal intent with an innocent and appealing appearance to lure the children into his mouth to devour them, many dark forces are currently cloaked in benign forms. Developing skills of literacy, reading and numeracy along with character development were the objects of traditional education. This has totally given way to an education that is used as a tool to raise a generation of children who are oversexualized, unemployable, angry at the prevailing structures and driven by a sense of entitlement. Rajiv Malhotra needs no introduction. Three of his books – Breaking India, The Battle for Sanskrit and Academic Hinduphobia – were reviewed earlier here (click on the title to read review). Vijaya Viswanathan is a mechanical engineer having global experience in manufacturing and finance. As a co-founder of Agasthya Gurukulam, she leads initiatives on an educative system centred on Indian heritage.

The authors identify Marxist ideology as the motive force behind all kinds of wayward experiments in the field of education. Marxism started out by targeting only the economic exploitation, then expanded to include cultural exploitation and now gender is claimed to be an institution of exploitation. For them, gender is not a biological characteristic but rather a social construct which is not fixed at birth. Incentives are liberally provided for those willing to explore or experiment with one’s own gender. It has become a factory to mass produce trans-people. The international agencies in this field are funded by powerful oligarchs like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and many Western governments. They psychologically manipulate the youth of the world. Marxists believe hegemonic social structures reproduce itself following the educational methods designed by the oppressors and strive to undermine them. They teach students to dismantle the existing power structures through dissent, activism and resistance. However, the authors do not clarify the discrepancy of why capitalist barons like Soros or Gates fund the Marxist ideology.

The trap set by this clique is primarily intended to change sex education into methods by which they can manipulate the content and influence the outcome. Traditional sex education handled issues such as sexual hygiene, abstinence, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and prevention of unwanted pregnancies. UN’s Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) coupled with Social Emotional Learning (SEL) anticipates on the other hand enjoyment and fulfilment of sexual desires in children, focus on treatment of sexually transmitted diseases rather than prevention, encourage abortion and disconnect children from cultural norms on risky sexual acts. Under the guise of diversity and inclusion, they want to introduce deviant sexual practices to children and de-criminalize paedophilia. UNESCO’s guideline is that human beings have sexual rights from birth! Organisations like International Planned Parenthood Federation are pressing the UN to modify the definition of human rights to include sexual right as a fundamental human right applicable equally to minors and even toddlers. They strongly oppose the POCSO Act in India which prescribes harsh punishment on sexual crimes involving minors. They deliver pornographic sex education through SEL and CSE programs to children as young as ten (p.114). These programs also try to encourage gender transition and abortions without informing the parents or mandating their consent.

The most damaging intervention made by woke educators is in confusing young children on gender issues. Woke social scientists declare that gender and sex are not biological fixities but only social constructs and therefore fluid. The dominant/oppressor group who has controlled society are responsible for the male/female binaries. They argue that this classification is wrong and children are taught that gender is a spectrum of maleness and femaleness with many combinative genders in between. Not only that, children are encouraged to explore the ways of behaviour of trans-people and are nudged to become one themselves. These organisations offer puberty blockers and create trauma in the lives of young people by pressuring them away from nature. Irreversible surgery to change sex are also dangled as carrots for young children, often keeping their parents in the dark. The author affirms that this is what is happening in the US at present and sooner or later it will arrive in India too. Women-only spaces like rest rooms are now being encroached upon with policies that permit men who identify as women in these areas. In sports, women have to compete with biological males who ‘identify’ as women. The author presents a comparison of China and India handling this UN-sponsored woke ideology. Jharkhand state in India is a willing partner of UN’s woke programs. They would do better if they look at Gansu province in China which is also mandated to facilitate these programs. China does not let global nexuses dictate how to run its health and educational institutions. UNESCO guidelines on CSE/SEL allow each country to tailor the guidelines to comply with their local laws. China quickly amended its child protection laws, added sixty new articles and made it impossible to exploit its children in the name of CSE/SEL. Numeracy and literacy skills are relegated as the most irrelevant in education of children and these skills are plummeting among school students. With such low basic literacy and math skills which resulted, the government should purge the education system of subjects that distract from basic learning, yet they are continuing to give priority to UN mandates. The woke ideologies undermine meritocracy, replace individual rights with identity politics, worsen divisiveness among groups and thwart academic freedom and free speech by adopting Cancel culture.

An unexpected takeaway from this book is its sharp accusation against the present government in India which is headed by a political party that is unabashedly nationalist and rightist. The authors claim that the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) was an effort to align India with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 2030) of the UN. Though it boasts of lofty ideals such as sustainable goals, the program is inspired by woke ideology and tries to make Indian children adhere to woke standards set by foreign institutions. The mandates and targets of SDGs 2030 are built into NEP 2020 (p.150). Moreover, NITI Aayog often employs foreign-funded NGOs as consultants to draft policies thereby outsourcing the government’s job to foreign entities (p.234). Programs like the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram is organized by the Health ministry and bypasses teachers to directly deliver sex education to children as part of CSE. They use mobile apps like Saathiya Salah to reach children directly circumventing parents. It also uses adolescents as peer educators for further reach which bypasses all persons of authority. Elite schools and programs follow this woke agenda and this prompts the authors to suggest declaring those educated in non-English medium as linguistically disadvantaged and a quota in jobs should be earmarked for them. The book quips that they are the oppressed and the English-educated as the oppressors, to pay the wokes back in the same coin. This book consistently urges Indians to emulate the deeds of China in resisting and fighting back the woke encroachment. China effectively strategizes proactively to protect its children, society and cultural values. On the other hand, India is scaling at a rapid pace and doing just the opposite by selling out its future generation (p.138).

The authors remind us that most major intellectual breakthroughs in history have been initiated by a small number of ultra-gifted pioneers. The obsessive focus on equity has neglected the value of gifted students. UN’s SDGs’ sole aim is to ensure that Indian children are advancing well in areas like human rights and global citizenship while literacy and math skills are deteriorating. This program intends the children to be made global citizens. However, this thrust is premature for the time being and facilitates illegal immigration to developed economies which is tolerated to an extent by people who are indoctrinated through the change in education which focussed on global citizenship. This book describes the Vedic philosophy of education as a model on which the Indian system should take root. The Vedic concepts of rtam, yajna and karma are explained in scientific terms, using the vocabulary and notions of modern science which might’ve had no resonance to the original Vedic line of thought developed several millennia ago. This is in fact a reintroduction of the original ideas borrowing or grafting on to the language of science. This exercise feels like old wine in a new bottle. Even then, there are some aspects of ancient thinking which don’t conform to modern consensus. The Vedic system’s deities are supposed to reside in other realms than space-time. In another instance, a new-born excelling in some field is suggested to be the result of a prior life’s samskaras (p.292). The author exclaims quite forcefully the need to focus urgently on the K12 (Kindergarten to 12th standard) system to arrest the rot being imported into India which is accelerating the ruin of an already failed education system for India and which will incorporate shastras and pedagogies relevant to a modern India.

The book follows a textbook-like structure with paragraph titles, bullet lists and numbered points. This becomes a drag on easy reading later on. The narrative refers to a multitude of organisations which are referred by acronyms and hence each page is filled in an alphabet soup. A large number of illustrative diagrams are included which look like salvages of a PowerPoint presentation – a number of presentations, to be precise. This would be very good if projected on to a large screen in full colour and at the same time explained by the presenter. But on a monochrome page, it looks out of place and often worthless. The authors maintain that the varna system in ancient India was based on individual talent and not by birth as in castes. So, on page 247, you’ll find a comment that ‘in India, it is the job of Kshatriyas to protect the rashtra’. If this is taken out of context, it would cause a serious allegation of casteism on the part of the authors. However, it is clearly stated elsewhere in the book that they mean the government by the term Kshatriya. The narrative is also unnecessarily elaborate and not a pleasant read. Somehow, somewhere, the authors lost their focus on external appropriation of our education system and concentrated on how a system rooted in Vedic learning is the best suited for India.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star