NEW DELHI: According to a new book out in India, Muslim children areincreasingly being targeted in posh schools for their religious identitybecause of the growing Islamophobia in India and across the world, BBClink>reports.
Writer Nazia Erum, who spoke to 145 families in 12 cities and 100 childrenstudying in 25 elite Delhi schools while researching her book Mothering aMuslim, says that children as young as five are being targeted.
“What I found during my research was shocking, I didn’t think it washappening in these elite schools,” Erum told the BBC. “When five andsix-year-olds say they were called a Pakistani or a terrorist, how do yourespond to that? And how do you complain to the school?” she asks.
“A lot of it is said in jest, it’s meant to be funny, to evoke a laugh.It’s subtle and it can seem like harmless banter, but it’s not. It’sactually bullying and tormenting.”
The children she interviewed for her book told her about some of thequestions and comments that are regularly hurled at them. Questions like“Are you a Muslim? I hate Muslims”, “Do your parents make bombs at home?”,“Is your father part of the Taliban?”, “He’s a Pakistani”, “He’s aterrorist”, “Don’t piss her off, she will bomb you,” are asked to thesechildren.
Since its launch, the book has started a conversation around religious hateand prejudice in schools and last weekend, #MotheringAMuslim trended highon Twitter, with many taking to social media to share their own experiences.
Nearly 80 per cent of India’s population of 1.3 billion is Hindu, whileMuslims make up 14.2 per cent.
For most part, the two communities have lived peacefully, but religiousresentment has always simmered below the surface since 1947 when Pakistanand India were carved out of a single nation. The parting was bloody –between half a million and a million people were killed in religiousviolence.
The author says while anti-Muslim slurs have been used since the 1990s,after the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu hardline groups and theHindu-Muslim riots that followed, in recent years their tone and intensityhave changed.
She became acutely aware of it in 2014, after she gave birth to her firstchild.
“As I held my little daughter Myra in my arms, for the first time I wasafraid,” Erum said, adding that she was worried about even giving the babya name that could be easily identified as Muslim.
It was a time of sharp religious divisions in India. The Hindu nationalistBharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was running a hugely polarising electioncampaign, which helped sweep Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power.
There was a rise in Hindu nationalist sentiment and some televisionchannels were presenting a distorted narrative that painted Muslims as“invaders, anti-national and a threat to national security”.
“Since 2014, my identity as a Muslim was in my face, and all my otheridentities had become secondary to that. There was a sense of palpable fearamong the entire community,” she says.
And since then, the fault lines have only widened. The polarising argumentsand debates on television have entrenched biases, which are now beingpassed around from the adults to children.
“So in playgrounds, schools, classrooms and school buses, a Muslim child issingled out, pushed into a corner, called a Pakistani, IS, Bagdadi andterrorist,” says Erum.
The stories of children she cites in the book make for grim reading forexample, a five-year-old girl is terrified that “Muslims are coming andthey will kill us”. The irony: she doesn’t know that she herself is Muslim.
Being bullied on account of one’s religion in schools is not limited toIndia, it’s happening across the world.
In the US, it’s been described as the “Trump Effect” after reports that hispresidential campaign had produced an alarming level of fear and anxietyamong children of colour and inflamed racial and ethnic tensions in theclassroom.
So can the increased bullying of Muslim children in Indian schools bedescribed as the “Modi Effect”?
She adds that schools have refused to accept that religious bullying tookplace on their premises.
That, she says, could also be since most cases go unreported – childrendon’t want to be seen as tattletales and most parents dismiss them asrandom incidents.
But what is worrying is that a form of self-censorship has crept into theirlives and many Muslim parents have begun telling their children to be ontheir best behaviour at all times – don’t argue, don’t be good at computergames that involve bombs or guns, don’t crack a joke at the airport, don’twear traditional outfits when you go out.
Erum says these are warning signs and parents and schools must doeverything possible to counter communal bullying.
“The first step is to accept that there’s a problem, and then have aconversation about it. Whataboutery is not going to help,” she says.
“If this issue is not addressed, it’s not going to be restricted to 9pmdebates in television studios or newspaper headlines, because hate swallowsall, it impacts both the tormentor and the tormented equally.”