In the North-East district of our city, Delhi, many lives were lost, houses and shops were burnt, religious places were damaged in the violence that was unleashed in the last week of February, 2020. During this time, the common citizens came forward to contribute essential items for the displaced and injured families, college students assisted them in filling up the forms for compensation and distributing items in the relief camp, doctors set up camps for treating the injured and counseling those suffering from post-violence trauma and lawyers provided legal help to the needy. What role do we see for ourselves as teachers in this context?
1. What effect would this violence have had on the hearts and minds of children, especially in the North-Eastern and East Delhi districts? In the words of the affected children -
"We would get messages on WhatsApp that there was going to be an attack from the other side, we could hear sounds of bullets and sloganeering, elders would keep watch throughout the night, shops were burning and plundered, milk and other things were not available .. they stole our 13 buffaloes, threw the dog alive in the fire, burnt the egg cart .. Had our neighbors not saved us, we .. What did they gain by doing all this? .. "
Are we ready for such experiences and questions of our students? Should we silence them or let them express their fears and questions? Will our own prejudices not come in the way of listening to them and letting them speak? For example, at Mustafabad Relief Camp for the people rendered homeless by this violence, the DCPCR (Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights) had also organized a camp for the affected children. Doctors from AIIMS did post-trauma counseling for such children and youth for several days here. Children were encouraged to express themselves/vent out their trauma through art (drawing, painting) and stories. A volunteer shared how small children were reproducing the images of burning cylinders in their drawings. In schools, should we be carrying forward this work so that on the one hand the children can overcome a feeling of suffocation and on the other hand they may not form biases against a whole community based on their personal bitter experiences? After all, who knows it better than us as to how stingingly unfair it feels when the entire teacher community is condemned on the basis of the misdeeds of some among us.
2. We will have another big responsibility - to document and reach out to those children whose families have gone back to their villages as a result of the violence or who have ‘dropped out’ for any other reason. We cannot let our children disappear silently. About 10 – 12 teenagers, from the violence-affected area, reported that they would now leave schools. If it was a decision driven by family responsibilities, there was also a glimpse of a loss of trust in the society in their words.
3. A teacher of the North-East district remarked -
“Now a few Muslim families living in Hindu-majority neighborhoods and some Hindu families who used to live in Muslim-majority areas will also shift their homes. It is already happening that people are selling their houses built with love and hard work at throwaway prices. Although, many Hindus and Muslims saved each other’s lives and properties, but the fear of organized violence is not easy to forget and forego. ”
This segregation will have a direct impact on our schools as well. Once the neighbourhoods become predominantly unicultural, then our schools will also lose their diversity. Government schools are by definition those places where children of all religions and castes learn to live together and respect each other's ways of living. Two years ago, a primary school in Wazirabad was in the news because its students had been segregated into different sections on the basis of their religious identity. It was then that the parents and the local people came together to oppose this move and ensured that this segregation was undone. But after such communal violence, the segregation of the localities will automatically put an end to the multicultural character of our schools,
In 2011 when teachers in London were working with children after incidents of violence there, they too had voiced concerns about the damaging effects on children living in ghettoes. If children are living in an environment where their only exposure is to people coming from their own race, ethnic and class backgrounds (caste and religion, in the context of India), it will lead to an increase in social distances and cultural misunderstandings. This situation calls for a greater need for multicultural schools where children from different backgrounds learn together and broaden their perspectives. www.theguardian.
4. Under these circumstances, we will have to create new ways of preserving and strengthening fraternity and sisterhood in our schools and education. We will have to infuse the values of solidarity and secularism into our respective subjects. For example, a woman teacher shared how a visit to the Digambar Jain Temple, Gauri Shankar Temple, Seesganj Gurudwara, Baptist Church and Jama Masjid, all situated at and around Chandni Chowk provides an opportunity to class 12 students to have a first-hand experience about various religions and challenge many prejudices they may be having. We will have to shatter the communal and casteist myths prevailing in our society in a manner similar to how an education in science has exposed the falsity of the centuries-old anti-woman myth that the sex of the new-born is determined by the mother.
5. But this can only be made possible when we as teachers ourselves do not succumb to communal prejudices and hate. If people take to viewing each and every incident and phenomenon around them through the prism of religion, then it should be clear to us that such a society is getting communalised. It is precisely the objective of communal politics to make people understand that a) their religious identity is their most important identity and b) this identity is under threat by the 'other'. Any group can be targetted as the 'other' and India is neither the first nor the last country to fall prey to this politics of 'threat of the other'.
Is it not an unfortunate fact that our whatsapp groups are mostly associated with our own caste and religious circles, thereby limiting our access to a single kind of source of information? According to a recent study by the BBC, 72% Indians are unable to discriminate between valid information and fake news. It is we who have to take the call whether we want to become a part of this gullible mass or play the role of teachers who take down the wall of fake news brick-by-brick. We believe that teachers have a definitional responsibility to be intellectual workers, and cannot be narrow-minded beings. In the words of a woman teacher working with the Directorate of Education - During the days of the violence, I came across a hateful and violent message sent by a student, which she herself must have received from somewhere else, on the whatsapp group of the class. I was very disturbed as to how I could talk to them on this issue during the period of examinations. Then I decided to send them a letter. I wrote,
''In order to differentiate between right and wrong, you must understand the language of these messages...After all, who can know better than you children how to distinguish the language of love from that of hate? You must become alert whenever you feel that a message is indicating hatred for the people of another religion, because hatred generates inhumanity and not humanity and love...! If you feel that a message is instilling fear of the people of other faith in you and emotions of hate and fearfulness towards them are growing within you, then you must immediately distance yourself from that message.''
6. We have a proud legacy of teachers and educationists like Savitribai Phule, Gijubhai, Begum Ruqaiya. Together we can-
i. Make all efforts to strengthen the ideal of secularism in our schools. As a teacher does not discriminate among her students, likewise a country's government cannot discriminate between citizens in providing them education, employment, police security etc. For a people, democracy comes alive only when they experience the police, courts, teachers, doctors etc working in a non-discriminatory manner.
ii. Make efforts to identify and break our prejudices. All abusive language and sly comments on gender-caste-religion are rooted in biases. We will have to analyse their socio-political history. We can take help from factcheck websites but the most urgent task is to build the culture of reading together and discussing issues (in study circles).
iii. Will teach students to resolve differences peacefully and with mutual respect. It is a given fact that when children in our schools get into physical clashes, our first response is to stop the violence. Thereafter, we try to convey to them that no conflict can be big enough to justify physical violence and attacks. We make them understand that it is the seemingly small incidents of violence that lay the ground for large-scale violence in the future.
TEACHERS UNITED AGAINST PREJUDICE, HATRED AND VIOLENCE
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