By Ananya S Guha
Twenty five schools have been razed to the ground in Kashmir. Day after day schools are being burnt, desecrating ruthlessly the sacrosanct concept of education. The child’s rights are ruthlessly exterminated and we are bystanders. These should be mourning days for the nation, when the very symbols of learning are being assailed, as if to say that no one can be educated. Education means learning, helps make choices between right and wrong, gather wisdom, and free thinking. Perhaps the arbitrators, don’t want all these. Such actions militate against any religious conviction.
So who are these people, who consider themselves inviolate, and who are tacitly supported by many? Who are these people out to tarnish the very innocence of children, and emasculate them from the right to education? Who are these people who take the law into their grimy hands, and assail venomously temples of learning? This is perhaps one of the worst catastrophes taking place in the country in recent times. When we talk about education for all, access, equity and education for the girl child, the poorest of the poor, people have turned the tables on education, targeting it as an enemy of truth. What more untruth could there be than this? What more anachronism, could there be in our technology besotted world, where education is favored to be a wholesome catalyst to education, talking say of e-learning and smart classrooms.
This is nothing short of a state of emergency. The violence in Kashmir has reached its nadir of atavism. One could debate on the killings, but one cannot on this systemic, cold blooded attack on schools.
What are the reasons, one may ask, why schools are reduced to pulp? The answer is difficult, if not complex but such people want to in breed more terrorism, so that children with nothing to do are brainwashed and led into a captive dullness, compelled to resort to dangerous and criminal activities. Are these people, call them terrorists or whatever, not making a mistake?
Before I answer this seemingly innocuous question, let me state that violence in the country is such a crass habit, that people tend to take it for granted. Why are people not thundering: Why Schools? And who should answer this question? Administrators, Academics, Parents of the children affected, Teachers in these schools- yes of course. And, if they are maintaining a stupid and stoic silence they will continue to suffer.
Yes the perpetrators are making a mistake. The mistake is, that they have taken their own people for granted. They maybe chortling with delight now, but they have overlooked the peripheries of time and History. One day history will point out this grotesque aberration, and show accusing fingers at the destroyers of wisdom and knowledge, the iniquitous killers of innocence. Attacking education is like attacking a child. Have we not learnt from the history of Yousufzail Malala? Did she not stand for the rights of unfettered education, unalloyed by diktats, religious or otherwise?
So such zealots are making grave mistakes. They are digging their own unholy graves. Time will bounce back upon them, in the form of intellectuals, common people or whatever, and ask the most volatile explanations from them. The government in power in Kashmir is silent witness, befuddled to say the least. But there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than those that are dreamed of in your philosophy ( a la, the great Shakespeare).
Where have ALL the educators, writers, intellectuals, poets and artists gone, when on the one hand some of them think that Bob Dylan’s Nobel Award was ill gotten, what do they have to say about children being thieved of their inalienable right- read RTE.( Right To Education).
The debates in air conditioned television rooms will continue, full of noise, signifying nothing. Intellectuals in guarded and not so guarded language will debate viciously on whether one political group is wrong, or the other. Journalist will trace history of events, professors will quote tomes, but where will the children go, even at a point in time when we have formulated a new policy on education? And even if they do go back to school, how will they behave, how will they respond to their friends and their situation? Can all the BEd and MEd syllabuses have answers to such thoughtless questions? In many ways these debates in posh rooms hold the void of times.