https://thewire.in/rights/casual-hate-classrooms-new-india
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.
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.
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.
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.