By Pragya Singh / News Click
A teacher asking her students to beat their Muslim classmate while she makes disparaging remarks about his faith shows how far communitarian hate has spread.
In late 2017, author Nazia Erum’s first book, ‘Mothering a Muslim’, published by Juggernaut, stirred much discussion for exposing systemic abuse and discrimination against Muslim students in elite schools across the country. Last week, a video of a teacher instigating students to slap their seven- or eight-year-old Muslim classmate “hard” revived debates on the damage done to children by polarisation politics. In the video, this teacher, in a rural school in Uttar Pradesh, also makes offensive remarks about her student’s community. NewsClick asked Nazia Erum to recollect what she discovered during research for her book about the nature of discrimination in Indian schools and the implications for students, teachers—and the country. Excerpts from a phone interview.
Pragya Singh: Your book highlighted, through experiences of Muslim children, their teachers, parents and experts, that communitarian abuse is systemic in elite Indian schools. After watching the video from a school in Muzaffarnagar, do you think it could have been prevented? What explains the teacher’s hostility?
Nazia Erum: One of the things I discovered while writing my book was that mostly, the parents of abused children find out what their young ones are facing in schools when it is already too late. Second, I found the schools and teachers didn’t fully comprehend the full impact of such behaviour and often clubbed it as yet another bullying incident. Many a time going unaddressed or pushed under the carpet. Parents often struggle to find ways to challenge what their children get exposed to at school. It is also an uphill battle to control what some students hear at home, which they then carry with them to school.
As for solutions, I spoke with 125 families in 12 states in 2015 and 2016 for my book. A staggering 85% said they had been ostracised for their religion. Many of the parents I met had devised tactics to deal with abuse towards their young ones. Say a toddler came home and reported that his classmates were asking him to ‘go to Pakistan’, which was a very regular slogan we then heard on Indian TV debates. One parent told her child to take it in the same spirit as being asked to go to other countries in the neighbourhood—Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, etc. So, she neutralised an offensive remark in that way.
But I do not think having such ‘tactics’ ready will work today because the hatred is in the air now.
This story was originally published in newsclick.in. Read the full story here
