It is a most distressing sign of our communally vitiated times that a schoolteacher is seen ordering Class 2 boys to beat up a Muslim classmate in a school in Uttar Pradesh and making pejorative references to the boy’s religious identity. The video of the incident which went viral has been taken out of circulation now. The apparent reason was the boy’s failure to recite the multiplication table, but he was actually being punished for being a Muslim, too. It is not very different from the mob lynching of a Muslim person for any purported reason, such as cattle trafficking or selling beef, entering what is called Hindu territory, or just being Muslim, acts that have been normalised in many parts of the country. Such hatred is now being planted in the classroom too, in the minds of small children who wouldn’t know much about the religious and other differences that grown-ups ups are fighting over. It is injecting poison into young children and legitimising the attack on a friend for being Muslim and different.
The teacher added insult to injury by justifying her act in public and remaining unapologetic about it. She could only be the representative of a society where corporal punishment of children in classrooms and discrimination against and attacks on members of the minority community are all normal. It is unfortunate that she could not imagine the demeaning and dehumanising nature of her punishment and its impact on the Muslim child and on all his classmates. Classrooms are being infected and communal polarisation and branding is happening in schools and colleges. This is happening not only in states like UP, where it is very blatant, but in other states, too. Last December, a Muslim student of Manipal University was seen in a video questioning his teacher for comparing him with Ajmal Kasab. There have been other incidents, too. Only some of them become public. Ideas of difference and prejudice are being subtly conveyed to young minds through words, gestures, and actions all the time.
The UP police have registered a case against the teacher, and the functioning of the school has been temporarily suspended. But the sections invoked against her are weak and she has not been arrested. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has issued notices under the Right to Education Act and the Juvenile Justice Act and a state government inquiry has commenced. The country is in the afterglow of the success of its lunar mission, and that makes such blots starker and darker. There is no need for any further evidence against the teacher, especially after her defiant defence of her action, to dismiss her
from the job.