Lessons in despair
DEEPA A.
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Nearly five years after the Gujarat riots, safety concerns and lack of facilities keep many children away from a decent education.
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PHOTO: DEEPA A.
School is a distant dream: At work in Faisal Park.
RUKSANA BANU'S life revolves around the monotonous certainties of household chores. Everyday, she washes clothes, cooks meals, cleans vessels and, occasionally, goes for sewing classes near her house. She adores two Hindi soaps on television, ostensibly centred around women. Sometimes, she remembers the dreams she had before 2002, and then, the mountainous garbage dump that abuts her house in Citizen Nagar, Ahmedabad, almost seems to represent the crash-landing of those cherished hopes.
Changed lives
She was a class VIII student in a school in Naroda when the carnage happened. Her house was destroyed, and her neighbours hacked and burnt alive. Rendered homeless, she and her family eventually secured a roof over their heads in Citizen Nagar, where a relief committee had constructed houses for riot victims. Today, her father, who owns a pushcart, finds it difficult to make a living in his new neighbourhood. There are no municipal schools in the area, and the family cannot afford to send the children — Ruksana has a 14-year-old brother — to the private school nearby. "We can't pay the fees," says Ruksana. "But I want to study and become a pilot."
There are no studies chronicling the stories of Ruksana and hundreds of others like her, silent victims of the riots that occurred almost five years ago, killing, according to Gujarat government figures, over a 1,000, three-fourths of them Muslims. (Activists estimate the number of deaths is over 2,000.) No one knows how many children dropped out of school in the aftermath of the riots, but the neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad are signposted with distressing reminders of discarded hopes. On a clear noon there are little girls sitting outside their homes, rolling agarbattis. Adolescent girls wash vessels or clothes, drying them in the sun. Several of the boys are out working. Livelihoods are difficult to find and, as house budgets shrink, children's education faces the first and almost always fatal cut.
Shakeel Ahmad, administrator of the Islamic Relief Committee, Gujarat, says that the internal displacement caused by the riots directly affected the education of several children. He explains, "Many Muslim families migrated to places that they considered safe, like Juhapura, but the schools there were already overcrowded." It doesn't help that Muslim pockets have little or no civic and educational facilities.
Practical obstacles
At Faisal Park, where riot victims have found new homes, Zahirabanu Masooq Ali, who makes agarbattis with her children's help, agrees. She lived in Millat Nagar before the riots, but fearing for her safety, sold off her house to move to Faisal Park. She offers a simple explanation for not educating her two daughters and son: "The school is far away."
In Bombay Hotel's Danilimda area, where there are no approach roads, sanitation or water, the lone municipal school should have ideally been a beacon of hope. It is anything but that. Says Dr Hanif Lakdawala, director of a non-government organisation called Sanchetana, "There are 10,000-12,000 households, all belonging to Muslims, and the only municipal school is located outside the area of habitation. The school has both Gujarati and Urdu mediums, but the Gujarati medium has only a couple of teachers. The unfilled posts stand as stark reminders of state neglect. Possibly, it is also an indicator of the reluctance of Hindu teachers to work in a Muslim area. In fact, in several localities where Muslims are in the majority, such as Danilimda, Hindu managements have shut down their schools, sold their school buildings or moved to areas that are Hindu dominated.
Strangely, these moves were expected, for, the fissures between the communities showed up in schools during the riots itself. Sharjil Khan, who was in class VIII when the riots happened, says the teachers in his school in Maninagar called him a "terrorist". "The principal was doing partition work," says Khan. "He would say, `You are from Pakistan' or that `You are not fit for an English-medium school'." Khan's parents were left with no option but to change his school. Several children, faced with such insensitivity and harassment, simply stopped studying.
Haunted by the memories of the riots, Muslim parents believe even today that it's unsafe to send their children, especially girls, to schools in Hindu-dominated areas. Such fears are echoed by Hindu girls living in localities such as Parikshit in Ahmedabad, where clashes between Hindu and Muslim families are common. Vijaya Parmar was studying in the seventh standard when her house, in Parikshit, was burnt in the riots. "My father didn't want to stay there after the mob attacked, so we went to our village. When we came back after the dhamaal, I didn't feel like going to school. I was afraid." Today, Parmar contributes to the household earnings by sewing cushion covers at home.
Disturbing trend
The ease with which tags based on religion are thrown up in discussions amongst children about neighbourhoods, education and friendships is disturbing. Fenced in by an atmosphere of fear, the children, like the elders in their families, have little to do with their counterparts from other communities, and their opinions are all too often moulded by hearsay and biases. "There is ghettoisation happening in schools," says Fr. Fernand Durai, principal of St. Xavier's High School, Loyola Hall, one of the few schools in Ahmedabad where minorities feel welcomed. "The children will grow up with prejudices, they will believe what is fed to them without any personal experience of the other. I can only say that it points to a pathetic future for our country."
This report came out of a study on the impact of communal violence on education, funded by the Prabha Dutt Fellowship of Journalism.
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