There can be little doubt that the intention is to reorient all state–run schools in Uttar Pradesh along the lines of the RSS–run Saraswati Shishu and Bal Vidya Mandirs. While announcing the scheme in Uttar Pradesh, the minister said that kulp was being introduced ‘to enhance the qualitative standard of education’ in schools and to ensure that ‘teachers are an intermediary between school, family and society’.

Under the new scheme, schools and their students will necessarily have to celebrate Hindu religious festivals — Raksha Bandhan, Guru Dakshina, Ram Navami, Dussera – and observe the birth and death anniversaries of stalwarts of Hindutva such as Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamevak Sangh) and Shayma Prasad Mukherjee (a protégé of the RSS who was at the helm of the initiative to launch the Jana Sangh). The singing of the national song, ‘Sare Jahan Se Achcha’ has been abandoned in favour of ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Vah Shakti hamein do e daya nidhan’.

Government schools have also been told to form committees of local voluntary organisations. This is apparently a covert move to facilitate and legitimise the selective involvement of the RSS and its activists in the education process.

It all started with education minister Gaur issuing a directive in March this year that all government schools start their day with the singing of Vande Mataram and bowing before the statue of goddess Saraswati. The firman had created an uproar among various sections — religious minorities, Dalits, backwards and progressive elements from the upper castes — who saw in it an obvious move towards saffronisation of the education system in the state.

The result of the protests has been that some minority institutions have been ‘exempted’ from this directive. This exemption raises its own problems as this will lead to further ghettoisation of an already alienated Muslim community. Secular activists engaged in grassroots work also feel that such directives could push the Muslim community towards the much–maligned madrassas in the state.

To buttress their bid to infiltrate and prejudice the education system, Muslim children are being enrolled into the RSS–run Bal Vidya Mandirs and Saraswati Shishu Mandirs. Exaggerated claims are being made about the number of Muslim students who have enrolled in such schools in the recent period. This writer was told, for example, that currently around 30,000 students from the families of "Rastra-bhakt" (Nationalist) Muslims are studying in Shishu and Bal Vidya Mandirs. The claim notwithstanding, there is little evidence of mass Muslim participation in RSS–run schools.

Meanwhile, students from the minority communities studying in government–run schools are feeling increasingly alienated. A direct fall–out of the Vande Mataram directive in March this year has been the dropout of a large number of Muslims students from government–run schools in Moradabad, Saharanpur and Meerut. Muslims form a sizeable chunk of the population in these districts.

There have been several cases of Muslims being refused admission in colleges managed by Hindus, while the attempt of some members of the minority community to start their own educational institution is being deliberately thwarted. In Morad-abad, Muslims own two intermediate colleges and one degree college out of a total 19 intermediate and four degree colleges that exist. Muslims find it very difficult to get admission in colleges managed by Hindus, ostensibly for lack of seats.

This township, renowned for its brass-work, has a sizeable number of Muslim businessmen who are ready to invest in new schools for the community. But the state- government through raising legal disputes in court has blocked every such attempt. In Meerut, the situation is even worse, especially in the old city area. Unable to finance their own institutions, the community has frequently expressed the need for educational institutions, especially for girls. However, successive governments have turned a deaf ear to the demand.

Children in UP’s schools are already being indoctrinated with the saffron version of history. Progressive thinkers from the past are either being reinterpreted and appropriated or kept out altogether. Kabir, for example, has been banished from most state textbooks. Lord Buddha has been converted into the ninth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, completely masking in the process the fact that Buddhism was a virtual revolt against the castiest Varnashram dharma. Hamare Poorvaj, a school textbook, is full of legends from Hindu mythology. There is no trace of any Muslim, Christian, Dalit or tribal influence or personage in the book.

Thanks to the narrow–mindedness and ostrich–like attitude of earlier Congress regimes, important national leaders like Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Babasaheb Ambedkar and Subhash Chandra Bose had found little or no mention in the textbooks on modern history. Such leaders have now been conveniently appropriated by the sangh parivar. The tragedy is that they are being projected as heroes who fought for the greater cause of Hindutva!

Children are thus being denied knowledge of the historical fact that Bhagat Singh, for example, was neither a champion of Hindutva, as the sangh parivar projects him, nor a mere terrorist, as the Congress would have it, but a revolutionary, an atheist and a firm believer in cultural pluralism?

That Uttar Pradesh has become a laboratory for testing out the pernicious ideology of the sangh parivar, especially through the penetration of educational and other institutions can be deduced from the increasing influence the RSS and its leadership is exercising over government institutions and personnel.

In early August, the RSS sarsanghchalak, Rajinder Singh (a former teacher by profession) visited Lucknow and gave sermons behind closed doors to a large number of his former students from the Allahabad University who today happen to be highly-placed officials in the UP government. Dalit and Muslim bureaucrats from the same Allahabad University were deliberately kept out of the meeting. How a person from an organisation with no official status can be invited to address a secret meeting of government officials only the BJP can answer. n

V.B. Rawat

(The writer is a social activist from the Rashtriya Jagriti Manch in UP)