Examine how marketisation of school education can enable majoritarian ideological preferences to bypass formal state mechanisms in a pluralistic society.

Private schooling now anchors urban Indian education — private schools form 22.5% of institutions but enrol 32.6% of students within a system of 24.8 crore learners [1]. Where parents act as fee-paying consumers, cultural preference can travel into classrooms as ordinary market demand, not state directive.

How the market becomes an ideological channel

• Demand-side transmission: schools compete for clientele, so assembly prayers, festival calendars, dress norms and hiring shift towards what the largest paying block prefers — recent scholarship terms this "bottom-up Hindutva" [4].
• Asymmetric responsiveness ("hyper-accountability"): the majority community is structurally the bigger customer base, so competitive pressure never pushes a school towards minority preference [4].
• Reputational pressure: institutions and brands have visibly retreated before majoritarian public criticism, showing responsiveness operating outside formal authority [4].

Why formal state mechanisms are bypassed

• The State's statutory handle is largely financial and admissions-based — RTE Section 12(1)(c) reserves 25% of Class I seats in private unaided schools, upheld in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan v. Union of India (2012) [2]. It governs who enters, not school culture.
• No rule is broken, so nothing is justiciable; Article 30(1) protects institutions minorities run, not minority children inside majority-run schools [2].
• Exit is the only remedy, and readmission costs fall hardest on poorer minority parents — so the school hears least from those most affected.
• Evidentiary gap: NCERT's All India School Education Survey last ran in 2008 [3]; staff composition data is unpublished, leaving hiring patterns unmeasurable.

Calibration: motives may be aspirational or fear-driven rather than ideological — yet the asymmetry of pressure persists regardless.

Marketisation thus creates an accountability paradox — schools over-responsive to a dominant constituency while serving a plural public. Reviving a comprehensive school survey and attaching non-discrimination conditions to State recognition, while preserving the Article 30 carve-out, can align private provision with constitutional fraternity.