Amidst the Everyday Bigotry of India, a Reminder of Our Constitutional Duty of Fraternity

Speaking out whenever our fellow Indians are abused and insulted, whether on a train, or in a classroom, or on a street, is the only way to ensure that we remain all one people.

We are writing about a Muslim student feeling insulted in her classroom. You’ll say that it sounds familiar. We had talked about it only last week. Why repeat the same thing again and again? We agree. We felt the same before deciding to write about it. Had we not talked about a student feeling insulted in his classroom just last week? You must have noticed that even if the act remains the same, that is, the act of feeling insulted, those who feel it are different people. One is a he and the other a she. The classrooms also belong to two different places. One in an upmarket elitist institution called the Manipal Institute of Technology in Mangalore, Karnataka, and the other in MBR College, situated in a mofussil town called Balotra in the Barmer district of Rajasthan. But the act remains the same: of feeling insulted. The first stage of action You may want to object. How can feeling insulted be called an act? Those who were insulting were definitely acting, but these two students were being acted upon. We would like you to rethink. Feeling is also acting. Even if we don’t take into account the fact that both the students reacted, they acted. Because there could be many who would just not feel the insult. Which means they are passive. Feeling is the first stage of action. Or the first action. Which can lead to other actions. The consequential actions may not be the same. Their nature may depend on their contexts. For example, in the first instance, the student, a young man, studying at the elite Manipal Institute of Technology, challenges his teacher in his classroom after being called Kasab, the name of a convict hanged for a terror act. He does not silently receive the jibe. He refuses to accept the clumsy lie and excuses of the teacher and rejects the attempt to patronise him. He is surrounded by fellow students who look slightly embarrassed. What exactly embarrasses them? Is it the ‘outburst’ of their batchmate or the obnoxious remark of the teacher? One is not sure. Would not they have felt relieved had their fellow student let go of the moment? Not persisted with it? Not made their teacher look small and also not made the situation awkward? Could he not have done without it? He acted. They did not. Because they did not feel the humiliation of their classmate. These people who are supposed to be his fellow classmates. The act is repeated in the college in Balotra, Rajasthan. Here the student is a young woman. Her gender makes her doubly vulnerable. Here, she is not insulted directly. The teacher, in a class on Buddhism, digresses and talks about the killing of Shraddha by Aaftab. Tells his class how people with such names are brutal by nature. Then he gets cautious and wants to make sure that there is no student with the same name or a similar one in the classroom. She remains silent. Does not reveal her identity. Is she scared? Or is she feeling somehow responsible for the violence by Aftab? Or is she made to feel accountable for his cruelty? When the teacher goes ahead with his diatribe against Muslims, she tries to leave. She cannot take it anymore. You can see that she cannot afford to be as courageous as the Manipal student and just wants to escape the humiliation. Also read: Kashmiris Deserve Better than ‘The Kashmir Files’, Their Tragedy Needs a Film-Maker Like Lapid Is this an action? We think it is, as the teacher and her fellow students feel threatened by her act of withdrawal from that collective. The teacher demands to know why she is leaving. It is then that she tells him that she is a Muslim and what he is saying is irrelevant to the classroom topic. Then he claims that all that he said was written in the Quran. She then challenges him to prove it. This withdrawal is seen as an act of defiance. They know that if she moves out of the college and enters the field of law, it might mean trouble for them. She overcomes her initial discomfort, reveals her identity while attempting to leave and tells the teacher that what he was doing had made her uncomfortable. He had violated his brief, he had gone beyond his mandate and indulged in hate speech. A nation as a battlefield Unlike the student at MIT, the student here is at a greater risk. She is a Muslim woman. She is also physically not equal to many others. She is not as free as the MIT student. She is forcibly confined to her college. For two hours. You can see in the video her fellow students surrounding her and threatening her. One of them reportedly crushes her feet under the wheel of his vehicle. They say that the teacher had done nothing wrong and she will face consequences if she goes to the police with her complaint. She is not so naïve as to not understand the consequences of speaking up. Yet she resists. Knocks at the doors of the keepers of the law. It is extremely dangerous for her. Should we also applaud her courage? Why has this case not been discussed as widely as the MIT one? Is there a class bias? Or since a similar case was reported and discussed only days before, does talking about it look like a repetition? It might bore the readers. There is definitely a fatigue in the reporting of hate crime. But those who indulge in it keep repeating the same act. We applauded the students for their courage. But should we have said more about the silence of their classmates? Ideally, the classroom is not supposed to be a battlefield where Dalit, Muslim and Christian students need to display exemplary courage for their presence. That even many progressives engaged in polarising debates about the lone hijab-clad school student – Muskaan – chanting Allah hu Akbar at a mob of over a dozen boys heckling her for being a Muslim tells you something. Even in the resistance of these completely cornered young people, we explore the possibilities of customising their outrage against their abuse. The hyper-focus is on the victim’s response, the action of the perpetrators is forgotten, the silence of the onlookers is forgiven. It doesn’t matter if we glorify Individual courage or scrutinise it, what matters is starting a conversation on the collective cowardice of the onlookers. This home-grown bigotry of Muslim-baiting and the public humiliation of the entire community is a sure-shot cheap success hack. It has now been incentivised and mainstreamed. We see politicians and leaders of the Sangh Parivar compete with each other daily to establish themselves as more anti-Muslim in the public eye. The same formula has been adapted by TV anchors chasing TRPs and filmmakers breaking box office records with vulgar propaganda. Let’s not be so naive as to think that words inside these classrooms won’t reflect the psyche of the outer society, or that these are the only classrooms where we’ve seen this happen. It may not come as a surprise if the humiliating experiences of the two Muslim students we just discussed were actually a routine part of the teachers’ pedagogy, a means to make the topics they were teaching more engaging. The teachers were confident that no one would object to their bigotry. These are not isolated incidents. Some come to light but most don’t. It can be an incident in Delhi university or in a progressive school. It can happen to teachers as well. Recall the bullying of a Muslim teacher for praying inside the campus, protests against another, and the public disrobing of another one by her colleagues during the hijab protests in Karnataka. Also read: Shocking Silence Around the Communal Attack on Academic Freedom at Indore Law College These incidents have made many more Indian Muslims recall their own experiences. It is casual, routine, unthinking. Recently, when I spoke to a Muslim student after the two classroom incidents, she recalled an incident of her own. The occasion was a cricket match. Children were getting the tricolour painted on their cheeks and hands. She also extended her hands. Her friend painted the tricolour on one hand and the Pakistani flag on the other hand. When she asked why she did that, the friend innocently responded, are you not a Pakistani too? I recall another story from nearly 15 years ago. A colleague told me about what had happened to her child at school. The children were asked to draw the flags of different countries. Her classmate, and this was in class 5 or 6, told her that she could easily draw the Pakistani flag as she was a Pakistani. Such stories abound. A Muslim woman recounted an experience during a train journey. She was travelling with her husband. A child sitting next to them asked him if he was a Muslim. When he said yes, the child reflexively said that he should be shot. The couple was shocked. It was so unsettling that they decided to avoid train journeys in future. The solidarity of fellowship One can say, why can’t Muslims take it in a sporting spirit? After all, there are jokes about Sikhs and they laugh at their own cost! Why can’t Muslims do the same? Why do they make a fuss about it? Mocking Muslims, insulting them is an integral part of our popular culture. Non-Muslims, most of them, who don’t indulge in it or don’t relish it, tolerate it. Allow it. It is left to the Muslims to challenge it. There are Muslims who do it. Sometimes spontaneously, as the student at MIT did. At times, after some hesitation, as the young student at Balotra did. Its price can be very high for them. Would a student be able to learn in a classroom that robs them of their dignity? Even if we discount the huge material risks, the loss of a young person’s innocence, excitement and curiosity, and the fact the person’s heart is being filled with bitter hopelessness should be enough to shake us as a people. Is it too much to expect that the young people in the classrooms will stand up and say no to the bullying of their friends? This is not the first time that such a video has gone viral and certainly it won’t be the last. Since there is relentless repetition of anti-Muslim bigotry, we should also not feel tired in repeating our opposition to it. We also need to act. As we said earlier, the first thing we need to do is to feel it. Feel the insult that is hurled at your neighbour. Then the other action starts. The young Muslim woman of Balotra should feel that she has fellows among her college mates, her town, her state and her country. This is the fellowship that Dr Ambedkar was seeking when he introduced fraternity as a constitutional duty or goal. It is also a right. Your solidarity, fellowship is my right. This alone makes us one people. We can start even now. Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University and Alishan Jafri is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.

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