Bigoted teacher

Saga around Indian teacher's viral video evidence for how supremacist right-wing ideologies plague the country

A segment of Indian media and the bigots it caters to have been contorting themselves in astounding ways to try and paint the viral video of an Indian schoolteacher directing bigoted comments at her Muslim student and ordering others to thrash him as being something other than a religiously motivated attack. Days after the world celebrated India — and its education system — for landing on the moon on a shoestring budget, this behind-the-scenes look at what minority students in some parts of the country must endure has shattered that goodwill. Reports say the teacher, who also owns the school, is not being arrested because she is an influential high-caste Hindu. The teacher claims she is “not ashamed” of her actions and tried to justify them as a means to “control” children. While corporal punishment from a teacher should always be inexcusable, what makes it worse is that the victim was not even misbehaving — he simply got a maths problem wrong.

However, to their credit, local education authorities sprang into action soon after becoming aware of the incident. The school was sealed over the weekend and the teacher-owner served a notice over the incident. Officials are also moving to decertify the school from the Uttar Pradesh Education Board — which would shutter the school — and accommodate the students at other local schools. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has also moved the local police and other authorities to take action on their own under the Right to Education law instead of waiting for the student’s father — who is reportedly under local pressure — to file a full complaint. While it is reassuring to note how quickly some government bodies did the right thing, the incident and attempts from certain public and private quarters to hush it up illustrate how even ‘safe’ spaces such as schools have been infected by the spread of supremacist right-wing ideologies and the efforts of the BJP and its allies to let Hindutva activists commit violence with impunity.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, August 29^th, 2023.

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