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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

When you send your kids to school, pray they aren’t forced to become rally cattle

-The Telegraph

 

Children are not safe in school if there is a rally in this city.

At least 45 children from a government-run New Alipore school, some of them barely 10 years old, were herded into a Matador van and sent to central Calcutta without their parents’ consent.

Some of them thought their children had been kidnapped when they arrived at Sahapur Mathuranath Vidyapeeth after hearing from people in the neighbourhood that many of the students were missing.

The headmaster made it worse for the parents, saying the students had not come to the school at all and showing them the register that marked them absent.

He was telling a white lie. The boys had indeed not attended classes because leaders of the student wing of Trinamul ally SUCI had taken them away before the school began. Some of the leaders entered classrooms to ask the boys what they were still doing there when they had a rally to attend.

Headmaster M.M. Mansoor could not explain how people who had nothing to do with the school could enter classrooms and take children away. “It happened between the closing time of the primary section and the start of the senior school. So, the school cannot be held responsible,” he told The Telegraph.

Mansoor claimed ignorance about the allegation that some students had been picked from classrooms and some teachers had campaigned in favour of the event.

At Rani Rashmoni Avenue, processions from various parts of the city and Sealdah and Howrah stations converged. Students from many other schools were made to march and join the rally.

Many parents alleged that the teachers had made it a practice to supply children for political events. But they panicked because most of them did not know there was a rally today, like unsuspecting passengers stranded in various parts of the city because of a string of protests by the SUCI’s DSO and groups of labourers. (See Metro)

After the guardians lodged a kidnap complaint with Behala police station, the organisers hurriedly put the boys in three small vans, which dropped them at Sealdah station, outside Alipore Zoo and at Majherhat.

The fear of mob fury may have prompted the move to drop the students in various places far from the school, police sources said. The parents collected the boys from there. Some students took trains home from Sealdah.

The complaint, drafted in the presence of Trinamul MLAs Arup Biswas and Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, accuses “a political party” of kidnapping the boys.

“The guardians have not named any political party but they were angry and said that no political party has the right to kidnap their children and make them walk in political rallies,” said a senior officer of Behala police station.

The officer said it was impossible to haul up the headmaster as the complaint “does not blame the school at all for what happened to the children”.

Could the police initiate action on its own against a school that allows its children to be taken away by outsiders? “If the parents are not complaining, what can anyone else do?” asked the officer.

The SUCI is a fringe party with proven ability to organise disruptive rallies.

Its bigger mainstream cousins are equally skilled at herding children to rallies. SFI leaders denied the allegation today but children at Left gatherings are a familiar sight.

A Trinamul student leader mentioned the schools from which he was supposed to organise children for public meetings.

DSO leaders defended their action, saying it was a students’ movement. “Since our movement is against the abolition of the pass-fail system till Class VIII, we wanted school students to participate in today’s programme,” said Sujit Patra, a DSO state committee member.

The state education minister had once spoken of abolishing the promotion system till Class VIII. But it was only his “personal opinion” and he had clarified that the government had not even considered introducing the change.

Ironically, most children at today’s rally said they were in favour of scrapping the promotion system.

The DSO was also protesting sex education at the secondary level, calling it “commercialisation”.

Patra said his organisation had met the headmasters of various schools and requested them to allow students to participate in the rally.

A Class IX-A student of Mathuranath school, not far from the New Alipore petrol pump, said he was in classroom around 10.50am today when a dada came and asked him to join the rally. “When I said I needed the teachers’ permission, he told me that he had already spoken to them.”

Some guardians arrived at Mathuranath around 3.15pm. “Someone came to my home and said many children had been kidnapped. We rushed here and found our children missing,” said Chaitali Bagh, whose son Samar is a Class VIII student.

Once the headmaster claimed the boys were absent, the parents went on the rampage. Then they went to New Alipore police station. A police team went to the school and gathered from local sources that the students could be at the rally.

New Alipore police called the Lalbazar control room. The control room contacted officers at the rally venue, who asked the organisers to return the children at once.