This paper examines the recent controversies surrounding the decision to introduce sex education in secondary schools in India to combat the rapid spread of HIV and AIDS in the country. While 11 Indian states have banned it, the Left-ruled state of West Bengal has designed a teachers' manual to impart sex education. However, a close analysis of this material shows that it suffers from the same anxieties about "western licentiousness" that will affect "pure" Indian youth and delivers the same message of sexual abstinence that characterizes the arguments deployed against the teaching of sex education. Both the proponents and opponents of sex education see sex education as a part of a larger programme of globalization that is threatening Indian culture and needs to be resisted either by rejecting the programme or by using it to construct a sexually abstinent nationalist youth force. (Contains 11 notes.)