Known for being vocal on the need for a “nationalist” system of education infused with “spiritual values”, educationist Dinanath Batra who served as the principal of the first school of the Vidya Bharati, an RSS-allied organisation dedicated to education, in Kurukshetra from 1965 to 1990 passed away at his home in Delhi on Thursday. He was 94.

Born on March 5, 1930, Batra was ailing and bedridden at his home for some time. His body will be kept at the office of the Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, with which he was associated, from 8 am to 10 am on Friday. His cremation will be performed in Nigambodh Ghat in New Delhi at 11.30 am.

Batra made news repeatedly for filing lawsuits against books that he deemed offensive, including Wendy Doniger’s book Hindus — An Alternative History in 2011. The petition accused Doniger of having an anti-Hindu mindset. In 2014, the publisher, Penguin India, agreed to pulp the book, leading to an outcry among intellectuals.

In 2008, Batra moved the Delhi High Court against A K Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas being on Delhi University’s history syllabus. In 2011, the university’s academic council voted for the removal of the essay, with 111 votes against it and just nine votes in its favour.

In 2017, Batra’s Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas wrote to the NCERT, which had sought suggestions from the public on reviewing school textbooks of all classes, to remove from the textbooks English, Urdu and Arabic words; a poem by the left-wing poet Avatar Singh Pash and a couplet by Mirza Ghalib; the thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore; extracts from painter M F Husain’s autobiography; references to the Mughal emperors as benevolent, to the BJP as a “Hindu” party and to the National Conference as “secular”; an apology tendered by former PM Manmohan Singh over the 1984 riots; and a sentence that “nearly 2,000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat in 2002”.

Batra wrote about 15 books on subjects ranging from the “Indianisation” of education and against painting nationalists as “terrorists”, and on a curriculum for character building.

“His entire life was dedicated to education. He never desired anything for himself. He made demands only for education. His life was the message he wished to convey. Even in the last days, he would ask me about whether the national education policy was being implemented. Since 2012, we were working on it, and many of his suggestions were included in it. He went to meet former Cabinet Secretary T S R Subramanian, who was heading a committee for the new education policy, to his second-floor home with our support despite not being able to walk at that time,” Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas’s national secretary Atul Kothari, who has been closely associated with Batra, told The Indian Express.

Batra was born on March 5, 1930, in Rajanpur in Dera Ghazi Khan, now in Pakistan. He taught from 1955 to 1965 at DAV school in Dera Bassi, Punjab. He was also the national joint secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Shiskhan Mandal, an organisation associated with the RSS. He also served as the national general secretary of the Vidya Bharati Akhil Bharatiya Shikshan Sansthan.

Batra wanted a blend of spirituality and science in education. He also advocated for the integration of ancient and modern knowledge, saying that those who study Newton should also be made to study Aryabhata. He wanted every university to adopt 10 villages and every secondary school to adopt one village or slum. He also argued in favour of a balance between theory and vocational training.