Communal Poison Enters Classroom: If We Want A Democratic Future For India We Have To Confront The Divides In Our Classrooms
Muslim Students
Protests Against Communal Remark By Teacher
Main
Points:
1. Manipal
Institute of Technology teacher calls a Muslim student Kasab.
2. The student
said being called a terrorist was not a funny thing.
3. The teacher
not identified yet was suspended.
4. Minorities
in India have always suffered humiliation.
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By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
27 December
2022
Representative image of an empty
classroom. Photo: Thomas Galvez/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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Recently a
Dalit child was fatally beaten up by his teacher in the school for drinking
water from the pitcher especially kept for him. Such incidents of caste based
violence and racial discrimination is not new. The Muslim students too have to
swallow derogatory remarks from teachers too often. The latest incident of a communal
remark made by a teacher against a Muslim student in the classroom has sparked
a debate on the spreading communal hatred and entering school classrooms. A
teacher of Manipal Institute of Technology addressed a Muslim student as
'Kasab' to which the student protested and reminded him of his position as a
teacher and his responsibility towards his students. The teacher had expected
that the student would take it lying low and he will enjoy his silence. But to
his embarrassment, the student protested against his remark and the teacher had
to apologise. The video of the confrontation went viral after a few days and
the University suspended the teacher.
The
incident has raised many questions on public morality and on the dilemma of
minorities and particularly Muslims of India. The hatred against Muslims has
entered educational institutions. Worse, teachers are behaving in a communal
way. A similar incident also went viral where a Muslim girl was harassed after
she protested against the communal remark by the teacher.
These are
only some of the incidents of communal remarks against Muslims in every day
life. But there was no large scale condemnation of the teacher's behaviour.
This is not a matter of a remark by a teacher but it reflects our collective
way of looking at each other. Our entire social discourse is based on communal
outlook. Our religious texts and even school text books promote this communal
outlook. When the student grows up and becomes a teacher expresses what he has
learnt in the class, at home or in the society. A Sikh Urdu writer Daleep Singh
once narrated an incident. When he was a boy, he said at home that Muslims were
traitors. His father scolded him and said, "Don't say this. If a Muslim
hears this, he will be hurt.". Daleep Singh said, " But there is no
Muslim here. " His father said, "But when this becomes your habit,
you will say this outside as well."
Today, the
communal hatred has become widespread because communalism is being instilled in
young minds at homes and the elders and parents promote this at home little
realising that they are filling the minds of their children with poison and
this poison kills him before killing others. A person filled with hate is a
prisoner of his own bias and hatred and cannot think with an open mind. That
is why religion preaches man to clear up his heart and mind of negative
thoughts and ideas so that he can enjoy true peace of mind and spiritual bliss.
This practice will benefit him first and then benefit others. Hatred renders a
man blind and he cannot judge between good or bad. A few months ago, a Hindu
man lynched a Jain old man suspecting him to be a Muslim. If this communal
blindness spreads in our educational system, it will not ruin a particular
community but will harm the entire Indian society. Moral degradation is
infectious. It gradually spreads to the entire society if not curbed early.
Mr
Apoorvanand has rightly said that the students should have protested along with
their Muslim classmate but given the present situation, it was at least a
consolation that they did not support the teacher. They remained neutral. But
it was a matter of concern that the incident did not receive large scale
condemnation. The silence of the masses or of the intelligentsia emboldened him
and gave him courage to give lame excuses.
The
government schools are known for callousness and unprofessionalism. The
teachers in government schools, especially in the cow belt are known for their
unprofessional behaviour, language and manners. But that a teacher of a private
institute of repute behaves in an unprofessional behaviour rather in a communal
manner becomes a matter of concern. It speaks of the radicalisation on a higher
level. When communal discourse takes centre stage in the society, such a
behaviour seems normal. Our TV channels host shows that allow participants to
hurl abuses and used vulgar language, calling people names or making derogatory
remarks becomes the new normal. And this kind of behaviour is being promoted in
a planned way. Mr Apoorvanand has rightly detected the malaise. The cure needs
to be found collectively.
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What the Casual Hate in Our
Classrooms Says About New India
By
Farah Naqvi
24/DEC/2022
The viral
video of a Muslim student ‘calling out’ his teacher’s bigotry at the Manipal
Institute of Technology in Karnataka has led to a spate of commentary. But
let’s not treat this as a moment of epiphany – like Newton’s laws of motion or
the Archimedes principle – a sudden startling realisation; something we just
figured out. Bigotry in classrooms, against Dalit students, tribal students –
and increasingly in spate against Muslim students – is something we have known
about all along. We simply chose to be in denial, kept silent, and kept pushing
the elephant out of the room. What’s novel in the Manipal moment is the
breaking of this silence. A moment when the doors of the classroom are forced
open, giving us a glimpse of what has simmered inside for a long time. The
young man in the video is an engineering student at a university. Old enough to
muster the guts and gumption to give prejudice a pushback.
Imagine
much younger children in pre-school, primary school or middle school. Too young
to call bigotry by its name, too tiny to fight back. And parents just too
scared about how vulnerable their children would be if matters were escalated.
Exposing
the elephants in the rooms of our lives is important for all human endeavour.
The things that are so big and dark that they cannot be said, but that we need
to confront, for our own mental health. As a society too, we have to deal with
the denial. To talk about the big things that we know we need to address, but
that make us acutely uncomfortable. Sometimes, we feel helpless to do anything.
At other times, it does not seem important in the immediate scheme of things.
Then the elephant becomes so big and so socially, politically, even personally
explosive that it seems best to just keep pushing it out, but it continually
pushes in.
We are at a
point of crisis – as a country and as educators of our children. If we want a
democratic future for India; a future where we cherish the idea of equality and
are willing to fight for it, through civilised dialogue among citizens, we have
to confront the divides in our classrooms.
That is the
elephant I want to speak about – the social divide and hate that is infesting
our society and therefore our classrooms. No classroom can be an oasis of
equality in a highly unequal world. We have lost the ability to confront
squarely the social divides in the context of the classroom. They have been
pushed beyond discussion in educational public policy. As the elephant becomes
bigger and stronger and more conspicuous, the silences in the space of
education have gotten deeper and coded social interactions in classrooms have
become endemic.
Is a
student-citizen in the constitutional scheme expected to surrender her human
rights and dignity as a precondition for accessing education? No. When they
walk into a classroom, they carry with them the full bundle of fundamental
rights. That is being violated everyday behind the closed doors of the
classroom. We need to fling those doors wide open.
On July 20,
2022, Indra Kumar Meghwal, a nine-year-old Dalit boy in Class III, got thirsty
in school and drank from the pot kept aside for upper-caste teachers. For that
sin, he was beaten by Chail Singh, his 40-year-old upper caste teacher at the
Saraswati Vidya Mandir in Surana village of Jalore District in Rajasthan. For
25 days, a desperate family travelled 1,300 kilometres, through 8 hospitals to
save their little boy’s life. He died on August 13, in an Ahmedabad hospital
(300 km away from his home).
One could
argue, in that death, a silence was broken, so there is no ‘elephant.’ We do
talk. We write op-eds. But the fact is that nothing changed in the scores of
school rooms in our country. And the rebuttal machinery is active. The
Rajasthan State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights denied any caste
discrimination in the death. I doubt very much if the ideas of Dr B.R.
Ambedkar, the caste system, and caste oppression were ever discussed in that
school, either before or after the boy’s murder.
Instead, on
August 23, 2022, came news from Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh where a Dalit girl was
beaten by a former village head, Manoj Kumar Dubey, and thrown out of class in
a government school for not wearing a uniform. She said she did not have one
because her father could not buy one. And on September 5, 2022, in a higher
secondary government school in Ballia district, an 11-year-old Dalit boy was
beaten by a metal rod and locked up in a classroom. His crime – touching the
upper caste teacher’s motorcycle. The teacher, Krishna Mohan Sharma, was
finally suspended, but the only thing the principal apparently said to the mother
was, “Don’t escalate the matter.” What does it mean to ‘not escalate the
matter?’ The elephant. The big things we’re supposed to silently accept, to not
speak about.
Perhaps we
feel relieved that the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of
Atrocities Act (POA Act) is there to deal with these daily horrors, so that we,
here, don’t have to. We outsource the fixing of a social problem that lives
amongst us to a law. Conviction rates under the act are abysmal, hovering
between 22% and 26% in the last few years. And for every case of egregious
physical violence of a school child reported under the Act, there is the
unreported, sometimes unreportable ‘death-by-a-thousand-cuts’ – of othering, of
discriminating, of making a child feel less than, robbing them of the fullness
of confidence and rights. Hectoring them instead on facile notions of duty and
covering up our silences with abstract notions of nationalism. Love the nation,
stay united and stay silent.
Dalit women carry a portrait of Ambedkar
as they block traffic during a protest in Ahmedabad. Photo: PTI/Files
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We read of
these lives and deaths and beatings and slurs, and the media calls them
‘incidents.’ The very word ‘incident’ has an isolated quality about it. A
randomness. Deliberately disguising the structural nature of the problem. It
also seems to happen in ‘far away’ places called Ballia, Bhadohi and Jalore.
Generally, in government schools.
So, shift
to Delhi, Noida, and Gurgaon. Shift to private schools where millions of our children
study (35% according to one estimate). Look at elite schools. Go to the schools
the people in this room send their children.
A recent
book by Nazia Erum (Mothering a Muslim) captures some of this reality. For
example, a day after a bomb blast in Europe (in 2018), a teacher at a popular
Noida school read out headlines to her Class VI students. A student loudly
called out the name of the only Muslim boy in class. ‘Yeh kya kar diya tumne?’
he asked. The teacher heard the exchange, but did not say a word. Some of the
things that kids are apparently calling their Muslim peers in primary schools
are ‘Osama’, ‘Baghdadi’, ‘Mullah’, and are asking them to ‘Go to Pakistan.’
Katuwa, Jihadi and Mussallah are other kid favourites I have come across.
From the
violence to the name-calling to the everyday, seemingly benign, othering – it
falls along the same arc, the same continuum. It’s part of the same problem.
And it’s not new.
Thirteen
some years ago, a friend’s son was in a fancy Delhi pre-school, voted by a leading
education journal, as “the best preschool in India”. It decided to schedule its
annual PTA meeting on Eid-ul-Fitr – the ‘big’ Eid, a joyous celebration at the
end of the month-long Ramzan fast. I don’t have to tell this audience that it
is the biggest Muslim festival of the year, on par with Diwali for Hindus and
Christmas for Christians. She gently chided the principal and teacher but went
for the PTA.
But there
was more to come. One day, a phone call came from the principal. “You know, it
was Eid on November 17, and now December 17 is Muharram. Is that important to
you? Because, you see, due to the Commonwealth Games, we lost a lot of working
days and there are only three children who observe this religion, and one of
them is a Pakistani diplomat’s child, and they are out of town anyway. None of
our teachers observe it, so I will speak to the one remaining parent to keep
the school open, if it is OK with you?” My friend was in fury. The same
preschool had declared Karva Chauth a holiday because all the teachers were
busy fasting. She ranted. She raved. But she ‘did not escalate the matter’. “I
don’t want my 3-and-a-half-year-old to be singled out as the one with the
troublesome mum,” she said.
From upper
class South Delhi mum to poor Dalit mum – from everyday othering to physical
violence, neither could ‘escalate matters.’ Their vulnerable child’s well-being
was at stake. This is one reason why this elephant grows so fat. Children in
preschool or primary school are too young to take up cudgels on their own
behalf, and parents are too scared to ratchet things up.
You could
say this is an overreaction. The preschool was, after all, being nice by asking
my friend to give permission to keep the school open on Muharram. But they were
not. They were telling her she was different and asking her politely to conform
to the cultural mainstream. Holidays on religious occasions are not matters of
personal favours between a parent and a school; it is a social contract between
educational institutions and the ethos of the secular nation they flourish in,
even if there isn’t a single child who observes ‘this’ or ‘that’ religion.
Another
example of the ‘everyday stuff’. A geography teacher in a leading private
school in Delhi started discussing the exam result of the wrong child with a
confused Muslim mother in a PTA meeting. The teacher then looked at her notes
again, and laughed, “Oh sorry! I get so confused between Azaan and Farhaan and
Rehaan.” (These children, by the way, were three different boys in three
different sections.) I doubt she ever made the same mistake with Rajesh, Rakesh
and Suresh. It was offensive, but the kind of power imbalance moment when both
parties in an interaction choose to pass things off as cute/silly. It was not
cute. Muslim names were odd to her. And she made it clear.
Prejudice
in schoolrooms is not always obvious to an onlooker. Anyone of us could walk
into a classroom in rural or urban India and find ourselves unable to see it.
No visible
signs of wounds on any child. They are all in some kind of uniform. They all
put on their most docile and obedient face. They stand up and chant ‘good
morning, ma’am’ in unison. They sing ‘Jana Gana Mana’ on cue. They sit down. We
all feel pleased with this performative unity.
What we
don’t see, because it is normalised and invisible is the many forms of
difference each of these children will encounter through their day in school,
across multiple sites.
There are
the obvious things we occasionally read about: separate drinking water pots,
toilets and places to eat mid meals, the name calling, bullying, teasing,
beating, kicking, slapping and spitting. But there is the other stuff,
invisible to our eyes wide shut.
Do a
physical mapping of the classroom. Who is prevented from sitting in the front
row, seated in isolation, or segregated into groups?
Do a
sociological study of the teaching-learning process. Who does the teacher
address; whom does she avoid; who does she make eye contact with; whose doubts
are never clarified; who is discouraged from asking questions; whose notebooks
are not checked; who is humiliated and laughed at if they give the wrong
answers; whose notebook is chucked at them in disgust; who is discouraged from
dreaming and aspiring; who gets the harsher and more frequent punishment?
Do a study
of participation/leadership experience. Who can never be selected as the class
monitor, even when they do well in studies; not invited to lead assembly; not
allowed to lead in school functions; not invited to represent the school for
important programmes; not invited to represent the class when visitors come;
not involved in cultural programmes?
Do this
across several classrooms and the patterns will become clear.
Several
years ago, Human Rights Watch did a report, foregrounding the experience of
some of the most vulnerable children in our schools. It helps validate what I
have just said. I want to share some of these children’s stories in their own
words.
Eight-year-old
Meena, from the Ghasiya tribe, attends a government primary school in a village
in Sonbhadra district in Uttar Pradesh.
If we go to
drink water, or go to the toilet, and accidentally touch children from the
other community, they yell at us saying ‘You dirty Ghasiya, why are you
touching us?’ and then go and complain to the teacher. The teacher then scolds
us saying ‘Why are you touching these children?’ We are made to sit
separately…The teacher doesn’t even sit in our class, she sits in the other
class, … just tells us to write or read whatever we want.
We don’t
eat lunch with the other children. If we ever go to ask for any more food, the
cook shouts at us asking us to go away saying ‘You eat so much.’ But when there
is food left, the cook calls the children from the other community and offers
it to them. If we ever complain to the teachers, they warn us that if we go and
tell anyone they will cut our names from the school.
Sahir, is
12 years old, in grade 5 in a government school in Qutab Vihar in southwest
Delhi.
We don’t feel
like going to school because the teachers always single us out to beat us. The
Hindu boys laugh at us. The teachers don’t let us participate in any sports.
Class monitors are always chosen from among Hindu boys and they always complain
about us Muslim boys. The teachers never believe us. They insult us by saying
‘You children come to school only to eat and to collect [scholarship] money,
but you don’t want to study.’ Whenever they check our workbooks, they make
negative comments on our work and throw the workbooks at our faces.
Another
boy, Javed, from the same school said:
The Hindu
boys are allowed to go to the toilet but we are not given permission. Whenever
the teachers are angry, they call us Mullahs. The Hindu boys also call us
Mullahs because our fathers have beards.
Sahir
added:
One of our
classmate’s father came to submit a form. The teacher referred to him as ‘the
man with the beard’ and made fun of him in front of the whole class and laughed
hard. All the Hindu children laughed too and we felt terrible. … Only the Hindu
boys are happy in this school.
Twelve-year-old
Priya realized what it means to belong to the Dom community – a Dalit
population mostly working as sweepers and garbage collectors – when her
classmates in Gaya city in Bihar used the term disparagingly.
Other
children don’t let us sit with them. Some of the girls say ‘Yuck, you people
are Dom [sweepers]—dirty caste, we are good caste.’ I feel bad. I curse myself – why did God make me Dom caste
so that they can mistreat me?
Salman, 13
years old, was one of three Muslim boys in Class VIII in the upper primary
school at Nandnagri, in Delhi.
Most
children participating in cultural programs are Hindu. I want to participate in
cultural programs too. I learned a patriotic song but the class monitor in
charge of deciding who gets to participate refused to take me in the event….
Sometimes I don’t like being Muslim. I feel insecure when there are Hindu-
Muslim fights because most Hindus get together and surround the Muslims. My
mother asks me not to stray too far from home when there are communal tensions.
Sara, 14
years old, in Class VIII in a government upper primary school in Nandnagri,
regrets choosing Urdu instead of Sanskrit as her second language. All the girls
who chose Urdu sat in the same classroom.
There are
some teachers who… say things like: ‘You Muslim people have no brains, you read
the Quran, pray to Allah, but don’t respect knowledge.’
A few
months ago, we had a substitute teacher who said the floods in Uttarakhand
happened because Muslims have opened meat shops there. She said that it’s a
place of worship for Hindus but Muslims go there and treat God badly. It’s
because of Muslims, she said, the disaster happened, to pay them for their
sins. We felt really bad when she said all this about Muslims. The whole time
she kept saying Muslims do this, Muslims do that. No one in the class objected
because we were afraid of being hit by her.
I have
shared so many children’s voices with you, one after the other, because I want
us to feel how relentless this daily brutal humiliation can be. And how
soul-destroying for a child who says ‘Why did God make me a Dom’ or ‘Sometimes,
I don’t like being Muslim.’
On July 20,
2022, Indra Kumar Meghwal, a nine-year-old Dalit boy in Class III, got thirsty
in school and drank from the pot kept aside for upper-caste teachers. For that
sin, he was beaten by Chail Singh, his 40-year-old upper caste teacher at the
Saraswati Vidya Mandir in Surana village of Jalore District in Rajasthan. For
25 days, a desperate family travelled 1,300 kilometres, through 8 hospitals to
save their little boy’s life. He died on August 13, in an Ahmedabad hospital
(300 km away from his home).
One could
argue, in that death, a silence was broken, so there is no ‘elephant.’ We do
talk. We write op-eds. But the fact is that nothing changed in the scores of
school rooms in our country. And the rebuttal machinery is active. The
Rajasthan State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights denied any caste
discrimination in the death. I doubt very much if the ideas of Dr B.R.
Ambedkar, the caste system, and caste oppression were ever discussed in that
school, either before or after the boy’s murder.
In a recent
article, Supreme Court lawyer Shahrukh Alam wrote about what constitutes hate
speech. She says:
‘Hate
speech’ is often posited against ‘free speech’, as if they were complementary
ideas. In truth, the concept of ‘free speech’ stems from the idea of equality:
from the democratic impulse; whereas the tendency towards hate mongering is
mired in the oldest, most archaic ‘bullying for power’. In that sense, ‘hate
speech’ is almost a misnomer, for it isn’t a speech problem: it is a problem of
systemic bullying with an eye towards exclusivist, political power. The
incitement is not always meant to lead to physical violence; it is in itself
violent in its persistent stigmatising and calls towards exclusion. [emphasis
added]
‘Hate
speech’ does not refer to offensive, or foul-mouthed speech directed at a
people, or even to vitriolic complaints directed at the government. It is
speech that can cause actual material harm through the social, economic and
political marginalisation of a community.
Hate speech
is “not just random vitriol: it feeds into a broader context of
discrimination”. These are “not solitary
acts of deliberate outrage, or provocation, which might result in [mere] hurt
sentiments,”
Yet, when
we discuss and fulsomely condemn hate speech, we don’t really think of all the
things being said in classrooms. I think it is time we made that shift.
Photo: Flickr/ John S. Quarterman CC BY
2,0
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So, this is
where we are today. A nation forged from the fires of partition, we promised
ourselves a secular India, and 75 years later still blame 9 and 10-year-old
Muslim children for sins their fathers did not commit. As Dalit assertion has
grown, so has the violence. Our classrooms are paying this price for the tough
conversations we never had. Why?
Because 75
years ago, when we stood on the horizon of freedom, we did promise ourselves
the end of hierarchy based on caste, religion, gender and much else. The
framers of the constitution were alive and alert to the grave harm that social
division does. We gave ourselves Article 15 (The State shall not discriminate
against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of
birth or any of them), Article 16 (There shall be equality of opportunity for
all citizens in matters of employment under the State), and Article 17
(Abolition of Untouchability). Under Directive Principles, we gave ourselves
Article 39 – which spoke of giving our children freedom and dignity. We
enshrined affirmative action for Dalits and tribals.
Our leaders
desperately hoped there was something inexorable, inevitable about the march of
modernity; the modern man/modern women would leave behind (the ‘medievalism’
of) caste and community as primary markers of their identities as we all
embraced a scientific temper, a new humanism, and our new identities as
citizens of a free land. We were expected to grow less and less attached to the
ascribed identity (the ones we were born into) and to forge instead a bond as
citizens with the larger republic and with each other. We would be a secular
state. With diversity of equals.
We boxed
the secular promise into familiar tropes. ‘Unity in Diversity.’ Looked grand,
but it was never the grand diversity of equals. Because the optics of unity was
not matched by actual justice and equity on the ground. Imagine the trauma and
plight of a Muslim child today who has to trot out his skull cap for the
national ‘Unity in Diversity’ photo-op, knowing well that wearing the same
skull cap can now get him lynched to death on a train.
And Muslim
children have for too long faithfully discharged their nationalist burden of
representing diversity, and lived out tropes of being the community of rich
kebabs, fragrant biryani and silken ghararas, while slipping deeper into the
abyss of lack of education, poverty and joblessness (making the purchase of
meat for kebabs very expensive and pure silken ghararas quite out of the
question). The Sachar Committee told us all this.
We imagined
inclusive equality through familiar tropes and false representation. And
handled real inequality and prejudice in classrooms quite poorly. Yes, we gave
scholarships and reservations, and enacted multi-cultural republic day parades,
but we did not have ‘the conversation.’ The big bigotry conversation. So even
as in schools across the country, a fragile social contract was being rapidly
frayed, we remained in denial. Simply putting all children in the same uniform
does not change social hierarchy and end social prejudice. (I wish someone
would enlighten the honourable justices of the Karnataka high court of this
truth)
I now want
to speak of laws. While I do not believe that laws can solve our social
problems, it is important to examine legal protections, because if nothing else
they set a moral benchmark for what is not considered acceptable in society.
Murder and rape are not OK. Bigotry is also not OK. Have we said that in our
laws?
Well, on
rampant, widespread prejudice across spaces, sites, and sectors, from school
rooms to board rooms, from housing to shops, in public and private
establishments, companies, malls and parks – we’ve actually said and done nothing.
In most democratic jurisdictions around the world – the US, South Africa,
Australia, UK – acts of discrimination are actionable. Civil cases can be
filed, and until such time as people keep their prejudices to themselves, there
can be consequences and correctives.
In fact,
democratic nations, with far fewer endemic, deep-rooted, discriminatory social
norms, often have more than a single anti-discrimination law and multiple
mechanisms to protect against all kinds of discrimination – whether based on
gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexuality, or age and marital
status. India is of course a unique democracy in far too many ways. One is that
we never tire of calling ourselves the largest democracy in the world – as if
size is what really matters! But among its unfortunate unique features – we
remain perhaps the only modern democracy without any comprehensive statutory
framework that recognises discrimination. We may have a constitutional right to
equality, but it is not backed by a justiciable law. We have nothing like the
Civil Rights Act in the US or the Equality Act in the UK. I have always found
that strange and inexplicable. Were we not serious about our constitutional
declarations? I think, as I have just said, there was a desperate naïve hope
that “we would leave it all behind”, and a secular denial that ascribed
identities are indeed resilient and strong. Or, maybe it cuts too close to how
much our own silent privilege is the flip side of this reality, and how much it
is implicated in this structural injustice.
A
conversation was briefly started after the Sachar Committee report of 2006 –
about an Equal Opportunity Commission and Anti-Discrimination Legislation for
all categories of citizens, but it soon went on the back burner. Then over a
decade later, an Anti-Discrimination and Equality Bill, was introduced by
Shashi Tharoor, as a private member Bill in parliament in 2017, but it lapsed.
It also
took us far too many years to acknowledge atrocities against Dalits and
tribals. It was in 1989, over 40 years after independence, that we managed to
enact the POA Act, the main legal protection for Dalit and tribal children
against violence in educational institutions. But it still cannot help a Dalit
who does not get called for a job interview or is denied housing in an
upper-caste complex, or even the kids who are segregated in classrooms, unless
someone also hollers casteist slurs in full public view. Because for the POA
Act to kick in the indignity has to be ‘public’ and accompanied by visible
evidence of casteism. It does not protect against the silent, resilient,
othering.
Given these
giant gaps in our legal regime, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory
Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act), was pioneering in more ways than one. It made
elementary education a fundamental right of course, but for the first time in
Indian legislative history, ‘discrimination’ in schools was named, acknowledged
and prohibited in a universal social legislation that applies to all citizens.
Section 9 (c) of the RTE act categorically said that children belonging to
weaker sections and disadvantaged groups shall not be discriminated against and
prevented from pursuing elementary education, on any grounds. It did not
include minority children (Muslim or Christian) in the ‘protected’ category of
‘disadvantaged children.’ That was a tragic, unjust lapse, and that needs to
change.
Representative image. Credit:
Reuters/Files
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Even so,
the RTE Act raised hope; it was a historic opportunity to build an
anti-discrimination regime in schools. But, as with many social legislations,
there were no hard and fast sanctions for violations, or clear routes to
implementing its non-discrimination clause.
I am not
sure that was even the expectation, actually. The hope was that a conversation
would be triggered. That some public awareness would shift. That schools would
be mindful. That School Management Committees would have a space to talk about
prejudice and bigotry. That aggrieved parents would get assurances, even hollow
ones. It would create a moral benchmark, and be considered shameful to treat
children differently. Perhaps an ‘Equality Declaration’ would be pasted on
every school wall saying something like:
The
Constitution of India guarantees the right to discrimination-free
schooling; All students should be
treated equally and with respect; No distinction between students on the basis
of identity will be tolerated in this school;
No form of differential treatment either in the classrooms, in the
playground, or any school activity is acceptable; It is the duty of the school,
the parents, the children, and the community to ensure that we preserve and
promote discrimination-free schooling for all.
Some
version of this would have been my dream ‘Equality Declaration’ and we proposed
this along with a slew of other measures to end discrimination in schools when
I was in the National Advisory Council.
Because
public signage matters – it matters that we have ‘no sex selection’ posters in
clinics and hospitals. It matters that auto-rickshaws and taxis in Delhi bear
signs saying – ‘this taxi respects women.’ It is not the solution. What it is
is – a public acknowledgement of the problem. It creates a climate. It starts a
conversation in minds, in the larger public sphere. It sends a message.
But,
tragically, the conversation around prejudice and discrimination that we hoped
would happen post-RTE, did not. The reality today is that while there are cases
of teachers and school administrations being hauled up and suspended for graft
and corruption in disbursal of scholarships and school uniforms, for slapping,
for inappropriate behaviour with girl students, for being rude to the
principal; last year five female teachers of a government primary school in
Agra were even suspended for ‘unethical behaviour’ after a video of them
dancing to a popular film song in an empty classroom surfaced online; and yes,
teachers get suspended for egregious physical violence against Dalit and tribal
children after a case is filed under the atrocities act. But no one gets
suspended for the daily trauma inflicted by good old-fashioned bigotry.
Thirteen
years after enacting the RTE, discrimination remains the most difficult forms
of exclusion to ‘prove’ in schools, and a phenomenon least discussed in the
educational system (including in teacher training institutes). The dominant
tendency is to simply deny that prejudice exists within schools.
That is
really quite rich. And daft. In a nation that displays abiding loyalty for
caste and community on its sleeve at every election, when we unabashedly
discuss Dalit, Brahmin, OBC, Thakur, Lingayat, Maratha, Hindu and Muslim;
India, where a quick glance at any number of matrimonial sites –
Jeevansaathi.com, Shaadi.com or Bharatmatrimony.com will remind us that huge
swathes of our population embraces and values ascriptive difference; where we
learn from the very air we breathe that there is different social, economic,
political power in these layers of identity; In that India, we imagine that
children in our classrooms will be magically the same, and magically treated as
equals? So, do we acknowledge the power and privilege of different caste and
community identities because that is the basis on which marginalization and
violence takes place? Or, do we deny the very existence of all such identities
because they divide us? The latter is an argument, I have heard too often. ‘Oh!
It’s so divisive to ‘rake up’ these issues!’
I am sure someone will say that about this lecture as well.
I don’t
believe we can afford to be in denial. Not anymore.
In 2016,
the Southern Poverty Law Centre – a leading American organisation devoted to
translating the gains of the civil rights movement into practice – which has a
Teaching Tolerance programme for educators, decided to look closely at an
emerging phenomenon in American schools. The programme’s Director, Maureen
Costello, heard stories coming in from educators across the United States about
a sudden surge in bullying. She sent out a questionnaire to over 10,000
educators, and was shocked by the results.
Over 90% of
educators said the ‘school climate had been negatively affected by the [Trump]
election.’ “The elephant in the room was that Mr. Trump’s campaign had an
effect. We could not avoid the fact that children were imitating him both in
word, tone and behaviour,” said Costello. “The Trump Effect”, according to the
study, “arises from comments the President made about immigrants and
minorities, which emboldened politicized bullying in schools [emphasis added].
Muslim children, in particular, have been primary targets for hate.”
Also on the
upswing: verbal harassment, the use of slurs and derogatory language, and
disturbing incidents involving swastikas, and Nazi salutes.
A professor
at the University of Southern California who studies school violence found the
survey results unsurprising. “I get lots of calls from schools and school
districts. There’s been a two-year spike in school bullying and harassment, and
right now there is a generalized climate of permission to say hateful things to
other groups that are deemed as ‘different.’ [emphasis added]
I share
this only to point to our analogous reality – that what is out there, in the
air, all the bile and hate spouted by the politicians with mikes and foghorns,
has a profound impact on children in schools. Like the US post the Trump
election, India is also amid a generalised climate to say and do hateful
things.
Just last
month, the PTA of a leading private school in Delhi sent a letter to parents
with a range of concerns following the shift from online to a physical school.
Among the worries was “a growth in cases of bullying and displays of
‘strength'”. The letter put it down to post-COVID adjustment problems. I think
it partly reflected the violent forms of communication that have become a part
of our social fabric and media landscape. Including the daily slow drip of “Hindu-Muslim,
Hindu-Muslim” poison into the veins of our nation.
And it’s
not just the content. It is the style. The aggression and jeering and laughter
when some poor sod is vanquished under blazing arc lights of national public
television. A nightly world of happy family viewing where domination is
paramount. Where the only purpose of an opposing viewpoint is for it to be shut
up and put down. Where crushing the weaker opponent is a foregone conclusion,
but an entire theatre is enacted around the kill. Children are imitating in
both style and manner this gladiator sport they see night after night on their
TV screens. It represents the end of democratic dialogue, debate and civility.
We might
well be witnessing an entire generation growing up bereft of the very essence
of a democratic way of being and communicating as a society. Forever seeking
imaginary enemies to demolish. Acting out on easy prejudice across classrooms
in ‘displays of strength.’
This is a
‘what do we do’ moment. Yes, we need an anti-discrimination law in India, and
we must campaign for one; we need to strengthen the RTE rules and guidelines to
stop this bigotry. But when it comes to schools and to vulnerable children, we
cannot privilege an adversarial ‘us-versus-them’ model that resorts to courts
and to the law alone. How many teachers can a school system suspend? How many
children can be booked under the POA Act? (Yes, there are cases of children as
young as 11 and 13 who have been booked under the Act.) Surely we must worry,
yes for the children who face prejudice, but also for those who act on it. They
are learning it from us, the adults. And hate harms the hater too. We have to
create spaces to talk inside the school system.
I know that
is a tough ask. Especially today when we are being asked to believe that we are
in some post-identity moment; when the mantra echoing through the airwaves is –
one nation, one language, one ration card, one people, one community – an
aggressive flattening of all diversity, denial of difference and therefore the
impossibility of the fault-line of discrimination. But take a leaf out of
Gandhiji’s book of resistance. And October is an appropriate month to invoke
Bapu. We remember him largely for ahimsa and satyagraha. But he was also a
masterful communicator. He knew that ideas of satyagraha would work only if
there was sufficient public opinion. He did not wait for a hostile press to
spread the word. He started his own journals. He wrote, and he walked the
streets to create public opinion for freedom.
Many more
of us need to make those journeys; enter the classrooms and study what lurks
beneath the surface; what is not immediately visible. If we want a democratic
future of equality for all, we need to engage critically with classrooms as
sites that reproduce inequality on a daily basis.
The Indian
education system is one of the largest in the world with over 1.5 million
schools, 8.5 million teachers and 250 million children. If what I have spoken
about today is affecting even 10% of these children, either at the giving or
the receiving end, that is 25 million children too many.
We need to
remember in this moment, when we are witnessing hate assemblies make calls for
violence against minorities; when an elected representative, an MP, has taken
that first unthinkable step and openly called for an economic and social
boycott of an entire community; in this moment we must remember from history,
that genocide never begins one fine day with mass killings. It begins with the
everyday othering and bigotry that I have described, which is a frightening
part of our classroom reality. If we are to regain a democratic future, we need
to do everything in our power to stem that rot in the hearts of our children.
Muslim women in hijab participate in a
candle light march during a protest rally over the ‘hijab’ ban in Karnataka, in
Kolkata, February 11, 2022. Photo: PTI Photo/Swapan Mahapatra
-----
I end with
words from a seminal judgment for equality, that was a breath of fresh air,
delivered by Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia on October 13 in a split verdict by a
2-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India on the hijab ban imposed by the
Karnataka government in schools. The matter will now go before a larger bench.
Until then, let us take from these words the hope I started my lecture with.
The
question of diversity and our rich plural culture is… important in the context
of our present case. Our schools, in particular our pre-university colleges,
are the perfect institutions where our children, who are now at an
impressionable age, and are just waking up to the rich diversity of this
nation, need to be counselled and guided, so that they imbibe our
constitutional values of tolerance and accommodation, towards those who may
speak a different language, eat different food, or even wear different clothes
or apparels! This is the time to foster in them sensitivity, empathy and
understanding towards different religions, languages and cultures. This is the
time when they should learn not to be alarmed by our diversity but to rejoice
and celebrate this diversity. This is the time when they must realise that in
diversity is our strength.
------
This
article is based on the text of the 5th Anita Kaul Memorial Lecture, 2022,
titled ‘The Elephant Outside the Classroom: Education for a Democratic India’
delivered at the India International Centre in New Delhi by Farah Naqvi on
October 19, 2022.
Source: What the Casual Hate in Our
Classrooms Says About New India
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/communal-poison-democratic-india-divides/d/128726
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