Abstract The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its project of Indian Knowledge System (IKS) have been trying to cast a sanitized and monolithic understanding of Indian culture, centered on high-caste Vedic Hinduism. In the name of curricular and pedagogical innovations, BJP is promoting myths as realities, pseudo-sciences as sciences, and erasing selective histories. This article elaborates on how the idea of “Indian tradition” is being distorted, fictionalized, and cherry-picked to align it with the high-caste Hindu ideological foundations of the BJP. Such an approach has generated problematic frameworks of sanitized knowledge-making mechanisms. The article also proposes that the Plural Knowledge Systems of India can be considered an alternative knowledge system to address the challenges posed by the IKS.
Dey et al. (2026) studied this question.