Muzaffarnagar video: Are a teacher’s bigotry and impunity part of our guru-shishya tr
Muzaffarnagar video: Are a teacher’s bigotry and impunity part of our guru-shishya tradition?
m.u.h
30/08/2023388
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Written by: Shah Alam Khan
Barely 24 hours after the stupendous soft landing on the Moon, we (as a society) were brought down to the ground with literally a hard thud. A video from a private school in Muzaffarnagar surfaced on social media. It showed a teacher asking children in a classroom to come and slap another classmate of theirs as he stood crying. In another world, this information would have been enough to send the teacher to jail and for civil society to join hands in rehabilitating the eternally traumatised boy. In “New” India, the description of the incident remains incomplete unless we reveal that the boy being slapped was Muslim and the concerned teacher was coaxing her students, telling them that Muslims need to be given such treatment.
The shocking video is a testimony to the times in which we live — the times of bigotry with impunity. There are many layers of violence at play in this obnoxious video. The unpeeling of these layers should prod us to think about what gave this maddening sense of impunity to a school teacher to propagate and unleash religious hatred and injustice on a small child in a remote town. It should make us realise how deep hate can percolate and what erosion it can cause. The very fact that collective violence and identity-based hatred, whether it be in Manipur or elsewhere, can only shake up the civil society when a video gets “leaked” is in itself a serious problem for a democratic country. The impunity of the perpetrators lies in the lid that covers such violence, like creepy life under a rock.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes, “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is him/herself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught, also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.” It is clear that the teacher in the video from Muzaffarnagar is bereft of any understanding of the logic of teaching or humanity. Historically, identity-based hatred is provoked for political benefits but the agenda of bigotry is nearly always micromanaged through the most productive and vital members of the society: Teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers, academicians, etc. No wonder, the Jewish holocaust was possible because of the tacit support of the teachers in German schools and colleges as has been documented by many. A famous holocaust survivor, Gisela Glaser, describes her classmates and teachers cheering as she and her family were deported to a concentration camp. A large number of cheering school children were part of many congregations on Kristallnacht when pyres of books and other Jewish sacred items were burnt across Germany.
Besides the vile hatred against Muslims, the video is also a commentary on our approach to education in general and studentship in particular. Elementary education is a fundamental right in India. As a nation that takes pride in its guru-shishya tradition, Indian schools probably see the highest numbers and the severest of corporal punishments in the world. In 1992, India accepted the terms of the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child 1989, and legally prohibited corporal punishment in schools. Despite this, the country’s brutal schooling system is a persistent source of socioemotional trauma to its youngest citizens and their subsequent early school dropout. Many researchers have shown that the quantum of corporal punishment interestingly on an amalgam of factors and is usually most severe for socially underprivileged children like Dalits and Muslims. We have, thus, manufactured an educational infrastructure that divides, trolls and deprives its own children. On paper, we continue to strive for excellence. The new National Education Policy 2020, aims for the comprehensive development of children. If in another world “comprehensive” would mean holistic, then this video reveals that in “New” India “comprehensive” is replaceable without the flutter of an eyelid with bigoted, communal or hateful.
Videos like the one in question or those from Manipur need to be taken seriously not only because these are reflections of the classroom and times in which we live, but also because these are laments for justice. The definition of a nation is not its geographical extent but the inheritance of a common future by its citizenry. Having said that, there is no common future anyway for the poor, for women, for Dalits, and for minorities in our country. The common future we perceive is limited to a privileged, elite class of citizens — and so is justice.
The video of the seven-year-old boy being slapped by his own classmates because of his Muslim identity is not only obnoxious, it’s hurtful. It proves that we have unleashed a kingdom of night on us. The iniquitous darkness of bigotry that has come to surround us is erosive, more so when it is used as a tool for poisonous pedagogy (schwarze Pädagogik). A civilisational narrative is a landscape populated with stories of despair and hope, of hate and love, of gregarious laughter and quiet sobs. The choice of narrative is what we finally evolve and become. India, the civilisation, is at the crossroads of that civilisational narrative.
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