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Religious education has remained largely absent from school and university curricula in India though its significance has been underlined by a plethora of government committees on education. Its absence can be traced to the imperatives of rule, both in the colonial period, and in post Independent India, and the need to balance competing claims and pressures. This paper shows how, on the one hand, the policy of religious neutrality – and later avowed secularism – and on the other, a desire for inculcation of moral, “spiritual” and “Indian” values tended to favour a natural religion approach. This idea of natural religion though comes to be inflected with a majoritarian bias.