12
Sep

The School that Failed

   Posted by: gargi   in India

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A story from the ToI about caste.
Students in a school in Bihar refusing to eat mid-day meals cooked by Dalit Women.

The incident occurred in the village of former Bihar chief minister Karpoori Thakur, a staunch socialist and champion of social justice.

Official sources said students of Laxmi Narayan Madhya Vidayalya in Thakur’s village in Samastipur district, belonging not only to upper castes, but backward castes and even Dalits, have refused meals cooked by two lowest ranked Dalit women for the last few days.

District officials are persuading:

…some students to take cooked food but a majority refused. Still we were trying to pacify them,”

Pacifying??? wtf - a) what kind of educaiton is the school providing that results in this kind of socialisation b) what kind of social justice mechanisms are in place in Bihar that allow for this kind of discrimination and c) what is the action that is going to be taken against the parents of these children for such bad behavior. After all parents’ are responsible for the behaviour of the children. A good heafty fine per household will probably do the trick a lot faster than involved legal action. Hit them where it hurts - and it hurts when it costs.

Coming soon on the heels of the Gohana atrocity - this is a wake up call for India. Everytime, some one says that caste no longer matters, get rid of reservation - look at incidents like this - and you will realise that caste is very much there. It is just not front page news because we are more interested in personality x shooting coke or personality y discussing their sexuality.

Incidentally, in Gohana the main accused seem to have political affiliation

Pradeep Sangwan and Ranvir Sangwan, son and brother respectively of Kishen Singh Sangwan, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament, have been named in the first information report (FIR) filed after the arson. The MP has denied his son’s involvement. However, as many as 15 of the 23 men booked under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act are BJP members, including the block president, a senior police officer said.

Atrocities against Dalits are on the rise across India. Politicians are so busy carving up the nation into caste & religious vote banks - recall Mulayam Yadav’s pronouncements on Imrana - that a lot of this kind of shit is excused in the name of tradition.

As i blogged earlier there needs to be some sort of concerted religious reform - with leading lights in Hinduism coming out and speaking out against caste & gender discrimination. It’s all very well for us to talk about uniform civil code and all that. But as a friend of mine would say woh to baad ki baat hai. It is a matter of constitutional reform. For now deliver what the constitution promises -t hat is equality. And there can be no apologies made for lack of equality on grounds of tradition. . There are too many people who make apologies for both caste and gender discrimination in the name of tradition. And that really needs to stop.

Maybe, it is time that we saw some concerted political action. Leaders of all parties fighting the elections in Bihar going to the school and talking about why the students’ stand is wrong. Why caste is wrong. Why discrimination is wrong. Instead of appealing for a caste vote bank, won’t this be more productive?

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 10:12 am and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

12 comments so far

Sriram Venkitachalam
 1 

We are a country of over a billion and with it a country of million societies, each moving at different pace. The diference in pace and the gap is so much that there is little to sugget Hum Sab Ek Hain. As far as Bihar is concerned I dont give a fuck about that state as I have never felt any feeling for that state. Whatever one might say about Unified Nation and all that sometimes its just unreal to give a fuck about some state some where else. I mean come on, for a 21 year old born and brought up in Mumbai there is enough shit going around here to care about even Kalyan. To find in Bihar anything of little pride (and that if i really had to) I have to go to the BC Era of Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka, and next comes JP Narayan, who i know little about, so doesn’t count, in fact neither does Chandragupta (cos he just doesnt matter in 2005). One cud be a socialist and say “But you must care about people in Bihar, if it happens to them it can happen to you”. But i still can’t care about Bihar just because if i care about the sorry state of Bihar i care for myself, thats just too selfish. The point is I dont give a fuck about Bihar and its just a joke and shame state of India. But thats not the point. The point is we allow our nation, once that we have agreed to be a nation, to be so disintegrated, disintegrated minds I mean. How can we allow that? (now my meaning is not brainwashing all to one ideology like Hitler or others.) There were people - and social instituations in a wannabe socialist country like ours like schools, temples, cultural groups, panchayats tis and that who never knew what was to be done and all they did was read the same old books and scriptures and useless nothings in the name of dharma and justice and goodness and all that. Stupid school texts teach freedom struggle and how they reblled against colonisers without ever understaidng the essence of freedom or the emotion of rebellion. Temples and cultural groups read the ramayan and mahabharat and bhagvad gita and all they can find whcih can give them a kick of myth without ever understanding the essence and the message of those texts. Its like a 70’s rock fan who wants to fight Vietnam today who just cant see the problems of today and apply it today. There is no use talking about Gandhi and Bhagat Singh and Mangal Pandey in reference with British. Its opressor versus opressed; the avtaars are many. The point is we just don’t get the point, do we?

September 13th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
Sriram Venkitachalam
 2 

Those kids need an ass whip. Or maybe, they just did not like the taste of the food and someone else made it a caste issue, maybe Aaj Tak did, they have that calibre.

Chunnu:”Teacher yeh daal kya ganda hai. mein nahin khaunga”

BADA TEZ HAI YEH AAJ TAK
AAj tak Reporter: “Children in Bihar schools reject food cooked by dalit woman”

possible.

September 13th, 2005 at 12:55 pm
Harsh
 3 

Well the reservation policy which was supposed to harbinger equality is serving the exact opposite purpose according to me.. First and foremost it is not properly implemented.. and then if one looks at the student community , i have known quite a few who feel deprived coz of the reservation quotas of the dalits and OBC’s.. and thus develop this unfavourable attitude towards them .. when i see this happening amongst educated city youth .. i can imagine the state of the communtiy in the villages of india besotted by age old tradition .. where a child learns to diff between castes before he even comes to his senses

September 14th, 2005 at 12:36 am
Charu
 4 

Harini, this is crazy! the mid-day meal scheme has been so good in getting kids to school - some motivation to trudge all the way - but this is ridiculous. clearly the parents - most of whom are illiterate, I guess, and administration - with an eye on the votes are responsible for this…
wonder what ‘education’ will ever do for these kids…

September 14th, 2005 at 9:42 am
Sunil Laxman
 5 

In cases like this, the administration should step in and take a firm line. It should either be “you’ll eat what you’re given” or “you can go home without attending school.” Then, reluctantly, the troublemakers will fall in line.

And if any one gives the “it’s the local culture” bullshit, (s)he should be horsewhipped..

September 14th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
gargi
 6 

wow Sriram. that was quite a rant and fairly accurate at that!
how do we allow -whether it is genocide in Rwanda or discrimination in Bihar - how we do we tolerate it.
but we do. as you your self put it - most people care about their basic needs. once they are fulfilled, they are interested in their wants. then in their luxuries and so on.
if we leave it to the market - this is what will happen. which is why u can’t leave it to the market
we have left it to the state - and it has still happened. that is because the market is not the way we perceive it in terms of goods and services. It is a market of voters and vote banks. It is the economics of power and land holding. And with apologies to Darwin, in this market the fittest is the most powerful.

September 16th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
gargi
 7 

The kids definitely need to be taught a lesson Sriram. i am not sure about violence. Probably being led by example would be a good idea. And i think that is where the system is fucking up. we talk about equality and all these wonderful things in the abstract without practising it.

when i was making this docu, dalit workers would tell us about how kids at the balwadi level were discrimiated against. Dont’ sit here, sit here level of discrimination. may be the grown ups who teach the discrimination need to be horse whipped

September 16th, 2005 at 5:01 pm
gargi
 8 

Harsh there are two different things here.
a) reservations and are they needed. i would think that they are. compare your marks with someone who lives in abject poverty, doesn’t have money to buy books, or go for tuitions. doesn’t have the comfort of their own room, a study table or any of those things that we take for granted. if you can get 80% with everything that you have - how can you expect someone who doesn’t have all the basics to achieve the same marks. so reservation is an equaliser
b) how is it implemented. how should it be implemented. as a matter of fact how should any social justice policy be implemented so that those who are to benefit from it end up doing so
my suggestion is go to a village - it isn’t too far from mumbai and check out hte Dalit Basti - yes they are kept apart even today. the resentment is not because of reservation. if anything, the resentmnt should be the other way around

September 16th, 2005 at 5:14 pm
gargi
 9 

Hi Charu/Sunil
it is apalling. i am not sure what the solution. a very Stalinist term comes to mind “Re education”
But, how much and to what level.
my mom (she is a political scientist and a prof) and i were discussing this the other day in the context of a Patel Motel in the US that got penalised for racial discrimination. It simply got its license revoked.
i think that we seriously need to start looking at economic penalties for caste offences. Not jailing. but forfiet of money, property, job, - things that truly hurt. Jail simply makes martyrs of bigots.

September 16th, 2005 at 5:32 pm
Sriram Venkitachalam
 10 

as far as reservations is concerned I have no doubt that its time to get on the next gear, and de associate reservation with caste.
If that is not done, you can be sure caste will be an issue 100 years from now. Reservations have become the fuel of the caste issue vehicle, it keeps it alive. The basis and parameters of reservations should be different.

I have never discriminated against anyone on the basis of caste or gender and for that i would not like to be categorised as a nieche rare group, cos that makes practicing equality extraordinary, which is not how it should be. Thats how I am doing my bit. There is no reason why i should feel the guilt for what my grandfather and his ancestors did (and they did).

I only discriminate against people who like Punjabi Bhangra music a lot.

September 16th, 2005 at 11:18 pm
Sriram Venkitachalam
 11 

but i like aloo parantha, so i’l eat if punjabi women cook.

September 16th, 2005 at 11:22 pm
harish bihari
 12 

discard bastards sriram and gargi,
you motherfuckers need to be taught a lesson, people like you bastards are ruining the image and situation of bihar, there are here and in other prts of india.
Rascals, you are preaching lessons on casteism and descrimination i am sure you people never hesistate in fucking and rapeing ur own sisters and closeones.
bastards u preaching about reservation u find poor people in reserved community only.
sshame tto that moment when ur mothers were fucked by some degradded uppercaste male to give u birth.

go musterbate in ur sis.and moms dream and dream of becoming najayaz aulaad of ambed…..

January 6th, 2008 at 8:13 pm

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