V.S.Pandey
In an interview, published in a prominent newspaper on August 26, 2026, Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi — the 91-year-old former Human Resource Development Minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and one of the BJP’s founding ideologues — offered a rare and unusually candid critique of the state of education, governance and public morality in India today. Coming from a man who co-founded the party, led the Ram Janmabhoomi movement’s political wing, and still commands quiet respect within the Sangh Parivar, his words carry a weight that ordinary rhetorical criticism does not.
The interview, conducted against the backdrop of continuing anger over paper leaks in competitive examinations and the raging debate over education reform, stayed largely within Dr. Joshi’s domain of erudite expertise: education policy. Asked about the root cause of paper leaks and cheating, he did not mince words. “This is why people manage to get teaching jobs or other appointments by paying bribes,” he said, adding pointedly, “When people see that there are corruption complaints even in the judiciary, that money talks everywhere, they don’t hesitate to take the same route. The fault lies with the government, not the people.”
He was equally direct on education spending, arguing that education is “no longer the government’s priority,” while budgets for road transport keep rising because private industrialisation has become the priority instead. On the New Education Policy, Dr. Joshi — who himself resisted pressure to draft an entirely new education policy during the Vajpayee years, preferring targeted correction over wholesale replacement — cautioned that “changing a policy simply because the previous government made it is not right,” a line that reads as a gentle rebuke of policy-making driven by political optics rather than substance. He also flagged the “unchecked privatisation” of education and health as areas where profit motives have crowded out public purpose, and repeated his old proposal — never fully implemented — for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing every citizen free schooling in their own neighbourhood.
This is not the first time Dr. Joshi has broken ranks.He has constantly raised questions about the government’s economic trajectory, and along with other BJP old-guards has voiced the discomfort among the party’s founding generation with the current leadership’s style . What distinguishes Dr. Joshi’s objective interview is its sober, policy-grounded tone rather than any personal broadside against the Prime Minister.
The timing is significant . With anger over paper-leaks simmering amongst students, with education budgets a firey political issue, and with the Ram Mandir trust controversy generating headlines almost daily, an interview in which a revered founding leader says plainly that “the fault lies with the government, not the people” is likely to be amplified well beyond its original, narrower context. Opposition parties can be expected to selectively quote it as validation from within the Sangh Parivar itself. Within the BJP, it will most likely be managed the way such interventions usually are — publicly downplayed as the reflections of a respected elder rather than an attack, while privately serving as one more data point for the party’s central leadership on where public patience is thinning.
For the Margdarshak Mandal generation, sidelined from active decision-making but not from public mind , such interviews remain one of the few instruments of influence left. They rarely change policy overnight, but they shape the terms of internal debate — reminding the party’s current leadership that its ideological founders are still watching, and still willing to speak out when they perceive it has strayed from first principles on critical issues, like education, that they consider foundational to the nation-building project the BJP was built to complete.
It’s time that the governments in power at the centre and states wake-up to the call and come out with a well thought out road map, with clear time lines, to completely overhaul our education system which has been in a chaotic mess for decades- consistently neglected and ignored by successive governments of all hues . No nation has progressed and become prosperous until the population becomes educated and trained in the true sense of the term. Mere slogans or jumlas are not going to transform our destiny. Let’s not forget the profound words of the father of economics Adam Smith who in his famous book “The Wealth of Nations” wrote that the true wealth of any nation are it’s educated and trained manpower and not gold and silver. The Time has come to heed this profound advise and take corrective steps and not indulge in mere sloganeering only. India was one of the richest nations on this planet for several centuries – it must regain its lost glory fast.
