For centuries, Japanese masters have perfected the art of the miniature. They take the wild, untamed potential of a majestic tree, prune its shoots, and wrap its branches in rigid copper wire. The result is a domesticated object, an ornamental dwarf, small enough to sit on a drawing-room table without ever threatening to crack the walls.
What Japan does to flora, the modern Indian state machinery is now doing to human potential. First, the state starves the roots, allowing the physical body of the child to wither through structural neglect. Then, for those children who manage to survive, the state prunes away the capacity for critical thought, wrapping the developing mind in the copper wires of myth, conformity, and sanitised history. The ultimate goal of this political project is to transform a canopy of free-thinkers into citizens who are docile enough to never challenge power.
Let us take the case of Gujarat, a region frequently touted as an ideal developmental model. Gujarat’s Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) stands at 20 deaths per 1,000 live births, while in Uttar Pradesh, it sits at a staggering 37. Before an Indian child can even learn to read, their physical survival is a high-stakes gamble against state apathy.
For the children who beat the heavy odds of infant mortality and chronic malnutrition, the education system designed by the state acts as a massive sieve. It drops millions of students out of formal learning before they can ever develop deep roots of intellectual questioning.
In Gujarat, the secondary school dropout rate sits at 16.9 per cent. This crisis is worsened by the grim reality of over 1,600 government primary schools operating with only a single teacher. In UP, the educational cliff-edge is even steeper. Driven largely by the massive closure of public schools, a minuscule 3 per cent of Uttar Pradesh’s 2.6 lakh schools offer a continuous path of education from Class I through to Class XII. The modern state treats a child’s health as an unnecessary financial expense, and their intellect as a direct threat.
Yet, the most insidious pruning, however, is reserved for those who manage to stay in the classroom. The near-total erasure of the Mughal period from state-approved textbooks is a prime example. In doing so, the state deprives the child of understanding the phenomenal philosophical, artistic, and literary strides that defined early modern India.
Crucially, it removes the study of how a vast, multi-religious empire was held together through institutional negotiation. This history illuminated the architecture of diversity, showing how the ruling class was built as a multicultural mosaic to prevent majoritarian or singular factional capture. Removing this narrative is an amputation of the institutional memory of pluralistic statecraft.
The historical consensus on the unique, collaborative, and fiercely debated contributions of figures like Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Maulana Azad too is being systematically dismantled. Gandhi’s radical, lifelong pursuit of communal harmony has been heavily toned down. Nehru, the main architect of India’s modern scientific temper, secular statehood, and industrial planning, is routinely airbrushed out of the history of the very public institutions he built. Azad, a towering intellectual and India’s first education minister, has had his name quietly excised from key historical references.
By removing the intense debates and the absolute diversity of thought within the freedom struggle, the state ensures that a child never learns how a pluralistic democracy is negotiated.
How can we truly build a modern knowledge economy on such a foundation? The country desperately needs an educational landscape deeply rooted in what Tagore famously called the “freedom of mind”. Classrooms must actively celebrate dissent, foster rigorous comparative historical analysis, and re-establish unyielding adherence to the scientific temper. Only when we stop pruning our children’s natural curiosity and start investing fundamentally in both their physical well-being and their intellectual liberty will the next generation grow to its natural, expansive height. Only then can they cast a wide and protective shade across the future of the republic.
Encouragingly, the Gen Z movement is already reclaiming their right to grow into citizens who can think horizontally. They are connecting the dots between systemic health deficits and policy failures, whilst actively questioning the ideological rewrite of their own past. In response, the state is employing oppressive measures. This struggle highlights a defiant generation refusing to be minimised and actively demanding the space to grow.
Lal is a veteran playwright and poet. Shah is a theatre and film actor
Encouragingly, the Gen Z movement is already reclaiming their right to grow into citizens who can think horizontally. (File) 
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