An investigative report by Tehelka found that over 1,600 students from Khasi-Jaintia Hills were taken by the RSS to study in Sangh-backed schools in Karnataka
SHILLONG, March 18: The death of the two students from the state in an illegal hostel in Karnataka has raised pertinent questions on the credibility of the schools where they are taken for studies.
The incidents brought spotlight back on an investigation conducted by Sanjana Chappalli of Tehelka in 2009 at the behest of two organisations in Karnataka—People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike (KKSV)—who wanted to conduct a fact-finding investigation on the “trafficking” of children from the Northeastern states to Karnataka by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Pertinently, this project of the RSS was under the scanner of the courts and the Meghalaya government.
As per the findings of the investigative new report “A strange and bitter crop” which appeared in Tehelka, at least 1,600 children from Meghalaya were taken to Karnataka and lodged at various RSS – friendly schools across the state.
This was also noted in the report of the Joint Director of Social Welfare, Government of Meghalaya in its report dated November 2009, pursuant to its visit to such schools in and around Mangalore.
The four-member fact finding team in its report had stated that for the last couple of years, newspaper reports have appeared about a large number of children from Meghalaya and Manipur being transported to the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
The report revealed that this migration of children was the initiative of RSS and its associates.
This operation was carried out at the behest of RSS by a number of individuals and organisations that contacted parents belonging to tribal and backward communities in the Northeastern states who were eager to give their children a good education but lacked the resources.
“Once the children were taken there, they were often enrolled in schools and hostels run by individuals and organisations having allegiance to RSS,” the report stated.
The Tehelka report and CWC Mangalore report found that the RSS had masterminded an ambitious social engineering project to transfer at least 1,600 children from Meghalaya to RSS-friendly schools across Karnataka since 2001.
The report revealed that 160 children from Meghalaya had arrived in Bengaluru on June 7, 2009, with thirty RSS volunteers accompanied by them on the 50-hour train journey down to the city.
Drawn from remote and often inaccessible villages across four districts in Meghalaya, the children taken by the RSS to study in Karnataka belonged to the Khasi and Jaintia communities.
The report stated that siblings were always separated to ensure better discipline, and most schools where children were studying were located in communally disturbed coastal districts of Karnataka. While most children were from poorer backgrounds, richer families who were RSS sympathisers paid up to Rs 16,000 a year, and children often forgot their native languages.
One of the RSS organizers admitted to Tehelka that the children were part of a larger mission launched by the RSS and its affiliate organisations to “protect” people from Christian missionaries active in Meghalaya. They were committed to nurturing the Hindu way of life and had a long-term plan envisioned by the RSS to defeat Christian missionary forces active in Meghalaya while expanding its base in the region.
The RSS programme brought to the fore several concerns operating within the demographic context of Meghalaya. The children used the same hall that served as their school and hostel, living and breathing, eating and sleeping, and studying on the barren floor.
A headmaster of the school where the students were studying said that if the children had stayed in Meghalaya, they would have been converted to Christianity.
The cultural values imparted to the children included familiarity with Brahminical chants, Hindu religious festivals, and a weaning away from an overwhelmingly non-vegetarian Meghalayan diet to vegetarianism.
Tukaram Shetty, who proposed the idea of educating the children in Karnataka, offered to take the children there and ultimately accompanied them.
A student from Karnataka described how 200 children travelled to Bengaluru from various villages, with older children being put in charge. They were given identification tags with mobile numbers and the Jowai address of the Lei Synshar Cultural Society. In Bengaluru, they were taken to the RSS office before being split into groups to go to their respective schools.
Despite authorities’ claims that the students from Meghalaya had integrated well with the rest, evidence suggested otherwise. Parents often handed over their children to the RSS in the belief that their kids would be well cared for, as promised. The transportation of children often followed kinship routes, with younger siblings following older ones.
When Tehelka approached schools in Karnataka seeking papers that legalized the transfers of children across states, letters signed by the village headman or the Rangbah Shnong attesting to the family’s poor economic condition were handed out along with birth and caste certificates.
Across different schools that Tehelka visited, not a single letter was produced with the parents’ signature that stated explicitly that the care of their children was handed over to that particular school. No parent that Tehelka met in Meghalaya had copies of any consent letter signed under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000.
Several parents told Tehelka that the RSS schools where their children were studying were schools that upheld their indigenous religions – a rationale that had many takers.
Most parents had no idea that the schools chosen by the RSS espoused a different ideology. Besides the forced culturisation, even the books handed out to the students were RSS publications from recognized right-wing publishing houses in Bengaluru.
For the RSS, these falsifications were part of a process—a process that is bound to add an additional layer of complexity amongst the people of Meghalaya, quite apart from the mental and social costs inflicted on young children, the Tehelka report added.
(With permission from Tehelka and Sanjana Chappalli)