Mathematics has, not only a long history in India like in any other ancient civilization, but it also carries a very high value in the present-day India, basically because of its importance in engineering education. India has made some important contributions to mathematics in the last 150 years. Yet, such a description hides the fact that ‘India’ here refers to a tiny minority of Hindu dominant caste middle-class men (and a couple of women from the same sociocultural and economic background). Though precolonial India had indigenous traditions of education, the caste and gender to which one belonged determined what kind of education one could get. It is only during the colonial rule that access to education was made independent of one’s caste and it is only as late as 2009 that India made the right to education a fundamental right, making free and compulsory education available for all up to the age of fourteen. The representation of those from marginalized castes in institutions of higher education and the public sector has been meagre and to address this the government of India introduced a form of affirmative action that reserved a certain percentage of seats in institutions of higher education and employment for those from marginalized castes and tribes. In the 1990s the union government introduced the Mandal recommendations extending reservation to the backwards castes. Though this led to massive protests by the dominant castes arguing that selection criteria should be one’s merit and not the caste to which one belonged, the post-Mandal period saw the emergence of new knowledge that critically engaged with the notion of merit and the caste question in academia. The National Curriculum Framework in 2005 internalised some of the new understandings and addressed the caste question in school education seeking to empower learners from marginalized caste backgrounds. However, over the decades, there has been a rise in Hindu fundamentalism actively fanned and supported by the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS) and in three consecutive elections held in 2014, 2019 and 2024, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu right-wing political party came to power at the centre allowing it the opportunity to introduce a new education policy in the year 2020 and make significant changes to school education and higher education. This policy and its implementation chave come for strong criticism from educationists. This paper seeks to engage with the question of marginalization, discuss how caste and gender privilege some and exclude some in mathematics, the small gains made following the Mandal recommendation in the 1990s and argue that Hindu fundamentalism seeks to restore the manuvadam65F1- the caste order which puts people in a social hierarchy based on caste right at the time of birth. The paper seeks to bring to light the systematic ways in which the RSS-BJP combine deploys manuvadam and increasing privatisation together to ‘saffronize’ school mathematics curriculum on the one hand and nullify the effects of Mandal recommendations by increasing privatization of higher education and employment in the country.