As it is, the Muslim community in the country is lagging in the education sphere and incidents like the one which happened in a school in UP’s Muzaffarnagar district will only add to this dismal reality!
On 25 August evening, I viewed the video of a school teacher in a school in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district, ordering – provoking children of her class to come up to the centre of the classroom and slap and beat a Muslim child! It seemed so very horrific and communal, that I felt unwell…no, couldn’t sleep the entire night as images of that hapless Muslim student stood out.
What agony-humiliation and mental and emotional and physical torture the child must have gone through. To be precise: must be going through. He and his entire family… In fact, his father’s statement which came soon after the video went viral, went along the strain that he doesn’t want to pursue the case against the teacher and school! Quite obviously, he would be worried and apprehensive of the backlash and also there’d be immense pressure on him by the Hindutva groups and the political mafia to keep shut.
What strong action has been taken against the teacher, Tripti Tyagi, and also her male colleague, whose voice is coming through in the video though his face is not focused on. Shouldn’t this teacher and her male colleague get arrested and also dismissed from service. For, if this level of communally surcharged teachers are around then they would make sure to cause massive communal divides right at the junior school level. Instead of teaching ABCD, they are teaching violence and fascism and destructive tactics to young children.
And what are we doing to reach out to the emotionally battered- shattered Muslim child? Where are the Child Rights forums and Commissions and the concerned Ministries to reach out to the poor child and his family?
Needless for me to focus on the fact that this incident will leave its imprint and carry off shoots. As it is, the Muslim community in the country is lagging on the education sphere and these shameful and ugly communal incidents will only add to this dismal reality!
The worst victim of communalism is the Muslim child
Together with the Saffron strains intruding into education, there’s been an ongoing shrinkage of space for the Muslim child in school and even out of it. The already dis-advantaged Muslim child is drifting away from the classroom, because of dismal conditions he faces in schools and also the ongoing vicious communally-surcharged atmosphere spreading around.
In the early 90s, Saiyid Hamid, bureaucrat-educationist (former VC of AMU ) who had been heading the Hamdard Education Society, told me that during his work on the dismal education scenario for Muslims in North India, he stumbled upon a grim fact: In Bihar, the areas allocated to build schools for Muslim children were converted into police- chowkies and police-thanas! He had detailed several other factors responsible for the Muslim child lagging behind on the education front…He had told me, “A prime reason is that riots after riots push them away from the mainstream and each riot comes as a major setback for the community and leads to the feeling of insecurity. Also, people who set the curriculum in schools and colleges have surreptitiously introduced material derogatory to Islam and this factor scares away the orthodox from formal learning …the government has not bothered to set up schools in or near Muslim dominated areas .Instead, there are police posts! The majority of Muslims are artisans and small shopkeepers who are tempted to withdraw their children early from school so that they can learn the trade instead of the alphabet… But I would say that riots have a very adverse effect on the Muslim child; it affects him in many ways.”
From the early 90s, the situation stands worsened. There’s saffronisation of the very ABCD! Soon after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, I had done a series of writings focusing the fall-out of that destruction on school-level education. How communal bias hits the Muslim child, keeping him or her away from the school classroom. I had also been focusing on what was happening on the education scene: an increase in communal taunts heaped on the child by teachers and even fellow-students and also communal slants in the very teachings.
Many Gujarat pogrom survivors told me they stopped sending their children to school as there was fear of the Hindutva goons attacking their children, on the way to school. And I’d heard similar worries and apprehensions from riot survivors from several other riot-affected locales of the country. Hitting comments! Death of education for the children of the Muslim riot survivors!
The situation gets compounded in locales where Muslim families are forced to get uprooted and flee for their lives. In the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, entire Muslim families became refugees overnight …survivors stuffed in makeshift refugee camps. Mind you, till those Muzaffarnagar riots were ‘made to happen,’ a majority of the Muslim children were enrolled in their village schools, but then, the ‘riot manufacturers’ saw to it that education was pulled off from the reach of the Muslims of that area.
Communal unleashes and polarized atmosphere affect the Muslim child in more than one way. In these recent years, I have been meeting Muslims narrating absolutely horrifying details as to the why they have had to pull out their children from schools – details ranging from shifting overnight from their ancestral homes and villages/mohalas/qasbahs, to getting threatening calls from the land and political mafia brigades, to seeking refuge in unknown terrain.
Also, one should not be under the impression that elitist public schools would be safe for the Muslim student. One report after another emerges of harassment faced by Muslim students by school teachers. One of the reported cases was of the Kanpur teenaged student, Arsh Mohammad, who tried to kill himself after his school teachers not just taunted and ridiculed him in front of his fellow students but even ‘searched for a gun’ in his school bag! This happened on the premises of one of the branches of the Delhi Public School (Kanpur).
Today, there are new forms of bullying of the Muslim children in schools if they are not comfortable in singing Vande Mataram, doing Surya Namaskar and reciting Gayatri Mantra.
Do we realize the havoc created on the minority psyche as Muslim children are getting taunted and humiliated by school teachers – mind you, all this taking place in today’s developed India!
Well, such are the ground realities of the day! Can’t find adequate words and phrases and terms to describe these dark buildups.
