Blog RSSTryst with English medium
Original article by Kancha Ilaiah via Deccan Herald.
The Government of Andhra Pradesh has introduced English medium from Class 6 in 6500 Government high schools starting this academic year. All these high schools have also been upgraded to be multi-purpose high schools where all students can complete their Class 12 at their village high school itself. These high schools offer several electives depending on the choice of the students so that they can choose the direction of their higher education after Class 10 in the same school.
On an experimental basis the schools will run the English medium section parallel to the Telugu medium section so that students can choose their medium of education at that school itself. The government has also adopted the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) syllabus in all the schools since this mode gives scope for continuous education up to Class 12.
Among the grants given for education, AP is likely to get about Rs 750 crore, under the SUCCESS school education programme. About one crore, the government says, will go towards establishing a new English medium section in each school. By introducing this novel mode of education system, the Rajasekhar Reddy Government has taken a bold initiative.
When the government order was issued, there was opposition by some teacher organisations and mother tongue lovers to this scheme. But after seeing the support coming for English medium from parents and even the poor living in rural areas, the teaching bodies came around.
Of course, the so-called proponents of the mother tongue who put their own children in private English medium schools realised that the government was firm about its decision. By the end of the first week of July some newspapers reported that 1,50,000 students joined the English medium in Class 6 across the state, which means, that on an average, about 23 students joined each school. Most of these students came from Telugu medium background and in terms of their social background, most of them were from SC/ST/OBC. Thus, the scheme has overcome the initial hiccup of students not opting for English medium and that too with CBSE syllabus.
If this experiment succeeds, the entire education system in the state will undergo a sea change. Already, there are forces that demand introducing English medium right from Class 1. Although after a lot of debate, the government introduced teaching of one subject in English from Class 1, the mother tongue theorists were of the opinion that at least primary education in government schools must continue in Telugu. As a result, the idea of introducing a parallel English medium section in primary schools took a backseat. But that demand will increase now.
There is a lot of demand for English medium education even in the rural areas. Even the lower middle class rural families send their children to urban residential schools at a huge cost of Rs 25,000 per annum. This kind of investment starts from the tenth year of the child itself. Many families are entering into huge debts because of this hunger for English medium school education. In fact village folks want their children to be put in English medium schools right from the level of kinder garden, similar to their urban counterparts. This is a welcome desire and that desire must be respected by the state too.
Within a short time the same convent kind of school education would be preferred by all parents across the country. Should the State say that they should not desire quality English medium education for every child, whether they are poor or rich?
Any modern democratic state must aim for uniform quality of school education for all children across the board. And gradually, we must move towards school education, where all private schools are nationalised. This will give the poor and the rich the right to get the same quality of English medium education. And this choice should be made the fundamental right of every child.
The debate in Andhra Pradesh has reached to a meaningful stage and the linguist jingoistic forces who educate their own children in English medium but were forcing Telugu on the poor and the oppressed castes as part of their linguistic nationalism has come to a dead end.
The problem with private English medium school education that caters to the needs of the rich is that it closes the option of allowing the child learn through the medium of its region. But that system has come into force because money is available only in English medium schools and the parental preference is also confined to just one language — English.
But when it comes to a public debate about the morality of school education, the very same parents take a moralist posture of mother tongue education being the best and most creative. When their private desire gets interrogated in public discourse every such linguistic nationalist gets upset and takes his or her dagger out to kill the agent of English education for the poor. I got killed several times and resurrected to see a day of change in my own state. And hopefully that will follow in other states too.
Posted on: July 15, 2008
Use Your Freedom to Defend Others' (Unveiling India's Apartheid, Part 4)
Original article by Benjamin Mash via God’s Politics.
Slavery in the United States did not end in a night or even a year or decade. Even now, long past slavery’s demise, the twin poisons of racism and class oppression echo as terrible reverberations from our forefathers’ horrific acceptance and perpetuation of brutal violence against their fellow humans. The whips and chains are gone, but the hatred and violence too often well up while inequitable social policies ensure the longevity of poverty for certain classes of people. Even after 150 years, we in the U.S. have a long road ahead in the abolition of racism and class oppression.
I begin with the U.S. because the timeline of our own struggle means everything when examining the hopes of India’s Dalits. Yes, India is changing, but how quickly can a nation change social mindsets that have endured for well over 2,500 years, longer than any known form of human oppression? How do we even begin to dislodge a system … ... so thoroughly entrenched that the “matrimonials” section (for Indians do not date, they marry) of every newspaper is divided quite clearly by caste?
The hope of change lies in the minds of Dalits themselves. “Educate us,” they have cried out. “Teach our children that they are human beings of worth and dignity, that their suffering is not required by any true God. Teach them English that they might find and open the door to the new global market. Free our minds.” And so we do. The Dalit Freedom Network, partnering with Operation Mercy Charitable Corporation, has built 80 schools serving more than 10,000 children. Our goal within the next decade is to build 1,000 schools across India, bastions of freedom where Dalit children learn that their humanity is intertwined by their creation by God, that God loves them, and that they need not bow to any other man or woman for fear or threat of violence.
With these schools comes economic development, as Adam has mentioned in his previous posts, and health care clinics. Our aim is holistic transformation of entire villages, and already we have seen the miraculous transformation of spirits. The smiles on Dalit children as they recount their hope for the future is a fresh gift from the grace of God. We see India changing from the bottom up.
But even as India changes and the Dalits change, there are those who would use fear and tension to promote their agendas, who would divide villages and set brother against brother in vociferous anger in order to build new identities of hatred and fear. The right-wing agenda of India’s Hindu nationalists, represented by the BJP party, the VHP social organization, and the Bajrang Dal, a national Hindu mafia, cultivates fear in the hearts of India’s Hindu majority, especially within the middle class.
Like our own war hawks, these nationalists tell their fundamentalist followers that the future of India lies in the past, in a nation with renewed faith in the old religion and in the effective enforcement of caste distinction. They believe in caste, believe that caste should be kept as the rule for social order. Moreover, they believe that any religion but Hinduism is non-native and therefore a spot on an otherwise pure people. To purify their nation, they set Hindu against Christian and Muslim, the result being attacks like the one Adam detailed in Kandhamal.
Our goal at the Dalit Freedom Network Social Justice Department has been to combat these destructive political aims of Hindu fundamentalists by any means available:
We pursue justice against Indian leaders who perpetuate violence against minorities, including working with the State Department and leaders of Congress to ensure that Hindu leaders who have used their public office to promote and allow violence within their states, such as Chief Minister Narendra Modi of Gujarat, are persona non grata in the U.S.
We raise awareness via hearings and briefings about the rise of anti-conversion legislation in several Indian states, legislation that in its very nature is antithetical to the freedom of the will necessary for the proper practice of democracy.
We combat Hindu fundamentalists who would change America’s textbooks, as they tried in California two years back, to reflect their version of history, one that says that caste was and is not a problem in India and that women have not suffered violence in India’s social system.
Our next step is to ensure that the U.S. government is properly taking the Dalit issue into consideration when they develop their India policies. How are the Dalits being treated in our international giving and foreign development investments? Are we being equitable? Are we setting a positive example? We must answer these questions with a “yes” if we are to assist India in its long-term development lest we, through a combination of negligence and shadowy political manipulation in our own electoral politics, completely ignore India’s downtrodden people and perpetuate the world’s oldest oppression.
I invite you to join with the Dalit Freedom Network, as Adam and Sojourners have joined with us, to pursue justice and create a new world for India’s Dalits. To support our schools, we’ve developed a simple child sponsorship program at http://www.dalitchild.com. Our goal in this program is accountability and trust, and I hope that if you support a child you can one day visit him or her, as so many of our donors have.
I also encourage you to become involved in our social justice work. Contact the presidential campaigns and ask them to speak freely of caste and untouchability in India. Were candidates Obama and McCain to even mention the freedom of India’s Dalits in passing, their words would resonate on the front pages of every Indian newspaper.
Also contact your senator and ask her or him to take a look at House Concurrent Resolution 139, currently in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Ask them to support this important public statement about caste and untouchability. The house passed the resolution in July 2007.
Finally, please contact me personally if you would like to be involved in an ongoing way in the struggle to free the Dalits. We may not see the end of caste and untouchability in our lifetime, but our children and our children’s children will be blessed by the word we pursue on behalf of justice and peace in the name of God.
Benjamin Marsh () is the State Department Liaison for the Dalit Freedom Network.
Posted on: July 4, 2008
Dalit Converts to Christianity Face Persecution and Violence (Unveiling India's Apartheid, Part 3)
Original article by Adam Taylor via God’s Politics.
As you were singing carols, placing the last presents under the tree, and worshiping at a Christmas Eve service this past year, Indian Christians halfway across the world were being victimized by the largest attack on the Christian community in India’s democratic history. The complex and combustible layers of caste-based oppression and religious persecution came to a head on Dec. 24, 2007, through a spate of violence in the Kandhamal District of Orissa state. During the course of a four-day campaign of terror, more than 100 churches were damaged, at least 700 homes were destroyed, and thousands of Dalit and tribal Christians were forced from their homes.
As preparations were being made to celebrate Christmas, Christian leaders approached the police …
... seeking to delay a strike organized by Hindu radicals designed to disrupt their celebration. In the town of Brahminigaon, Dalit converts to Christianity have enjoyed greater social and economic empowerment, which threatens the social order put in place through the Hindu caste system. These Dalit and tribal Christians were beginning to own shops and repudiate their inferior status. According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, the violence was rooted “in a long-term campaign to Hinduise a tribal population, which involved the vilification of religious conversions to Christianity.” Hindu nationalists and extremists had been fomenting violence in the region, pitting the majority Hindu population, who are from the lower castes but still maintain a higher position in the caste order than Dalits and tribals, against tribal and Dalit Christians. The police, siding with the non-Christian community leaders, decided to allow the strike to proceed. The stage was set as tensions between the Christian and non-Christian communities reached an apex. On the day before Christmas, the rampage began after a dispute in a local market. Churches and homes were targeted with impunity. The people of Kandhamal awoke on Christmas Day gripped by fear as the attacks escalated and spread across the district. Reportedly, no churches held worship services for several weeks.
I prayed with a tribal leader who recently converted from Hinduism to Christianity. Because of his conversion he was given a choice by Hindu extremists to either re-convert to Hinduism and be spared or have his home destroyed and be killed. He courageously chose his Christian faith and fled his village. Five months later, after having rebuilt his home with his own meager resources, his report filed with the police remains unanswered and his community continues to face intimidation and threats.
The state of Orissa is one of seven states in India that have passed anti-conversion laws, which severely curtail conversions. In most of these laws, there are particularly severe penalties if Dalits or Tribals change their religion without prior permission from a district magistrate. Even though these laws arguably violate the Indian Constitution’s protections for religious freedom, they remain in place. Under India’s constitution, Dalits are entitled to affirmative-action benefits, including 15 percent of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. Tribals who convert to another religion maintain their affirmative-action privileges. In contrast, Dalits that convert to a religion other than Sikhism, Buddhism, or Hinduism are stripped of these affirmative-action benefits, called reservations. India’s Supreme Court is currently reviewing several challenges filed by Christian and Muslim Dalits that could result in an overturning of the affirmative-action exclusion. A separate bill to remove the restriction is pending in Parliament. Government members, influenced by India’s 150 million-strong Muslim community, have indicated their cautious support.
The Dalit struggle and Christian persecution is inextricably tied to a broken and biased justice system that fails time and time again to prosecute perpetrators of crimes. Just as all politics are local, all justice seems locally administered in India. According to local leaders, six months after the attack not a single perpetrator has been brought to justice. While dozens were arrested, most have been released and no leaders were implicated. Meanwhile, many communities live under the constant specter of intimidation and fear. Women in one village described being threatened and chased by Hindus living in adjoining villages anytime they tried to bathe or wash clothes in a nearby lake.
Dalit Christians who assert their rights and claim their equality pose a direct threat to the established caste system. Many Dalits are turning to Christianity, attracted by the message of a God who made everyone equal. A cover story in The Wall Street Journal last year reported that, to the dismay of Hindu nationalist groups, the number of India’s secret Christians has climbed in recent years to an estimated 25 million, about the size of the officially registered Christian population. According to Dr. Joseph D’souza, AICC president and DFN international president, “Conversion is the way of revolt taught to the Dalits by their champion and liberator, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a lawyer educated in the U.S. who turned to Buddhism himself. His writings are well-known all over India among the Dalits. Amdedkar clearly called for the Dalits to convert in order to escape caste-based humiliation and discrimination. In response, some Dalits probably convert due to a motivation to simply protest, but the Christian faith demands that the church receive all—including Dalits—who want to follow Christ.”
While the vast majority of Hindus in India are friendly or ambivalent toward Christians, Hindu fundamentalist groups led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, the World Hindu Council) are instigating violence and exacerbating tensions. Most Rev. Raphael Cheenath, archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, offered a critical insight into how the church must respond, saying the “church needs to open itself up to all sectors of society,” arguing that the future security of the church rests in its ability to build real relationships throughout the Hindu community.
During our sojourn through Khandhamal, we stayed at a Catholic training center that was spared during the attack, in large part due to Hindus in the area who protected the center. The center had opened its doors to Hindu organizations, allowing Hindus to sponsor trainings, events, and conferences. According to Archbishop Cheenath, “the church must learn to teach the gospel without demeaning Hinduism and serve the community without proselytizing.”
Other acts of violence targeting Christians are much more sporadic and smaller in scale, lacking the gravity and scale to grab headlines both in India and across the world. Catholic lay leader and AICC Secretary John Dayal said that, unfortunately, “the conscience of the world is driven by numbers.” On the other hand, attacks each year on Dalits are around 25,000. And there are probably thousands that are unreported. Yet Hindu religion casts a protective shadow over the plight of the Dalits. The Western world is reluctant to fully engage in the Dalit struggle due to fears of being accused of religious intolerance, cultural insensitivity, and sheer ignorance. However, a pernicious distortion of the Bible was used to sanction the systems of Jim Crow in the South and apartheid in South Africa. However, the world can’t escape the harsh reality that oppression against Dalits is inextricably linked to the Hindu-based caste system within India. Indians must ask whether Hinduism can survive without caste? Prayerfully, the answer is yes.
Posted on: July 3, 2008
Seeds of Liberation (Unveiling India's Apartheid, Part 2)
Original article by Adam Taylor via God’s Politics.
As our motorcade approached the Dalit village of Nayagarh, we could see the bright and brilliant image of 500 Dalit women gathered to welcome us, their saris forming a kaleidoscope of color. Cheers and whistles erupted from the crowd of women as we approached. I felt like a presidential candidate as I passed through the crowd, shaking as many hands as I could reach, wanting to make human contact with women whose dignity is so often demeaned and whose worth too often dismissed. These women had formed 130 self-help groups composed of 10 other women in villages across the region to invest in entrepreneurial projects that generate income and create a better life for their families and villages. They had come to show off their products and seek additional assistance from Operation Mercy Charitable Company (OMCC), an initiative supported by Operation Mobilization India (OM) and the All India Christian Council (AICC) that provides training and micro-loans. The women proudly showed off their products, ranging from beautiful saris to rice and roti. Access to loans are providing the keys to emancipation from bonded labor and careers of doing the most degrading work, such as cleaning latrines.
Many of these women also send their children to an English instruction school that has been set up by OMCC, funded in part through the Dalit Freedom Network. The majority of Dalit children are either denied access to primary education or only receive instruction in Hindi or other native languages. The public school system has become a dismal refuge for the children of the lower and middle castes, where Dalit students face daily abuse by teachers and students. According to a government report, 73 percent of Dalit students drop out in secondary school. Instruction in English represents a passport to higher education and India’s service- and high-tech economy. Already OMCC has set up 81 schools in rural villages across the country. The combination of educational opportunity and asset creation are planting seeds of social and economic empowerment.
Educational opportunities provided by the missions and churches have built a new generation of Dalit Christian leaders …
... including Rev. Sam Paul, AICC national secretary of public affairs, and Albert Lael, OMCC national director. While the Brahmin caste still dominates church leadership, caste is slowly dying within the church and is all but dead in the more recent wave of churches. During a meeting in Bhubaneswar, I had the privilege of meeting more than 30 pastors active in the All India Christian Council from across the region, including a Catholic archbishop who is leading the fight for their freedom, the most Rev. Raphael Cheenath. These leaders on the front lines of the Dalit freedom movement shared their stories of struggle, and I shared information about the American civil rights movement. According to these leaders, while the church has played an instrumental role in economic and social empowerment, the reticence of many churches to confront systemic injustice still poses a major obstacle. Many churches, particularly evangelical ones, have preferred to remain apolitical, focusing almost exclusively on saving souls. This trend started to shift in the late 1990s with the creation of the All India Christian Council, which built on earlier work by other denominationally-based organizations. The Council was created in the aftermath of a brutal killing in Orissa in which an Australian missionary and his two young sons were burned alive by Hindu radicals. With its back against the wall, church leaders united to protest persecution and advance religious freedom within India. The Council formed strong interfaith relationships. And, in the process, the Council became more engaged in politics and came face to face with the oppression suffered by Dalits. As the AICC shifts its focus to include the Dalit cause, it risks losing support from within and outside of India. Religious persecution seems to galvanize attention and incite moral indignation much more than fighting a hidden and entrenched system of caste oppression.
The struggle for Dalit freedom appears to be on the tipping point of bursting forth into a social movement. India’s free press, strong civil society, and good laws provide key ingredients for such a movement. With greater political empowerment and cohesion, the Dalits, scheduled tribes, and lower-caste Indians could form a formidable swing constituency in Indian politics. However, according to political science professor Dr. Kancha Ilaiah, of Osmania University in Hyderabad, “in the context of elections many Dalits remain disenfranchised and are bribed through money or alcohol.” Language barriers, factions in leadership, and religious differences have also stifled national unity. Despite these barriers, Dalits have made a number of historic political gains. In 1997, a Dalit woman, Mayawati Kumari, was elected to the top post in the state of Uttar Pradesh in a landslide victory in which she was able to garner support across castes, including from high-caste Brahmins. While Uttar Pradesh benefits from the largest concentration of Dalits, elements of this success story can be replicated in other parts of India. The Dalit vote was also pivotal in bringing the more nonsectarian Congress Party back to national power in 2004. In 2006 Manmohan Singh became the first sitting prime minister to publicly acknowledge the parallel between the practice of “untouchability” and the crime of “apartheid.”
Despite the encouraging rhetoric of the Congress Party, a chasm still exists between words and action to redress the Dalit plight. The weight of 3,000 years of caste precedent and tradition can feel overwhelming and intractable. However, seeds of empowerment have already been planted and are bearing fruit in the fertile soil for Dalit liberation. The upcoming national elections will provide another test and opportunity.
Posted on: July 2, 2008
Unveiling India's Apartheid (Part 1)
Original article by Adam Taylor via God’s Politics.
In the shadow of India’s economic miracle lies a people often deemed untouchable, largely impoverished, and seemingly invisible. Bubbling beneath the shimmering image of a new India is a cauldron of inequality, caste-based subordination, and religious tension that could boil over into even greater civil strife and violence. At the center of these forces lies the Dalit struggle. While Dalit rights are often denied and hopes are crushed, growing political, economic, and spiritual empowerment is fueling a movement for liberation. The emancipation of the Dalits could serve as the key to securing India’s nonsectarian, democratic future. However, this future collides with the ancient system of castes, which still confers profound benefits or burdens upon Indians simply because of their birth names.
For more than 3,000 years, the caste system has divided Indian society into four distinct classes, or varnas. Outside this system are the Dalits, who according to caste are not considered part of human society and are therefore less than fully human. While untouchability was outlawed in the 1950 Constitution and atrocities against Dalits are prohibited through the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act, a lack of political will and widespread corruption at all levels makes the law all but obsolete. Untouchability remains particularly acute in the rural areas of India, where 70 percent of the population still resides. While a great deal has changed in the sprawling and more tolerant cities, in rural areas people’s entire lives are circumscribed by a caste identity that suffocates their dignity and segregates their lives.
The Dalit population approximates that of the entire United States. Imagine the U.S. population living in a perpetual state of discrimination and marginalization. This should strike a familiar chord with our own recent history with Jim Crow segregation. According to Joseph D’souza, president of the Dalit Freedom Network and All India Christian Council, the government has outlawed the symptoms of untouchability but ignores the actual disease of caste that still relegates nearly 250 million people to an apartheid-like existence. Comparing the Dalit struggle to a system of apartheid may seem like hyperbole. However, the entrenched system of caste systematically subordinates a large segment of Indian society.
The name “Dalit” means “broken” or “ground down.” Approximately 25 percent of India’s vast population is Dalit. To this day, people from higher castes refuse to marry Dalits; they are relegated to occupations that are considered degrading; most caste Hindus will not eat or drink with Dalits; and the majority of bonded laborers and sexual slaves in India are Dalit. Caste is part of a Hindu belief that people inherit their stations in life based on the sins and good deeds of past lives. Despite signs of economic mobility, Dalits are often the victims of dehumanizing acts of violence and humiliation designed to keep them in their place. As I learned more about the mounting crisis of AIDS in India, it is the Dalits who are most prone to be living with HIV and most likely to die a painful death from the disease.
I first heard about the Dalit struggle at the World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Discrimination in 2001. A large contingent of Dalit activists were present in full force. Their message was that the entrenched caste system in Southeast Asia was equivalent to racism and that their voices could no longer be silenced. Unfortunately, their voices were drowned by so many other oppressed voices vying for global attention, and by the controversy around the pulling out of the U.S. delegation.
It took another six years for the Dalit struggle to capture my conscience. In a presentation about the modern-day system of slavery, Gary Haugen, director of the International Justice Mission, based in Washington, D.C., described India as the worst abuser of human trafficking in the world. During a series of meetings over the past year, Rev. Sam Paul, national secretary of public affairs for the All India Christian Council, and Dr. Joseph D’souza have brought the Dalit struggle even closer to home, asking Sojourners to become engaged in the international Dalit freedom movement.
A year later I find myself in the crucible of the Dalit struggle, spending a week with the Dalit Freedom Network and the All India Christian Council, visiting one of the provinces in India that is hardest hit by Christian persecution and Dalit oppression. In many parts of India, the Dalit struggle intersects directly with the issue of religious freedom, as nearly 70 percent of Christians in India are Dalit. While Christians constitute a small minority in India, 2 to 3 percent of the population still translates into roughly 30 million people. Many Dalits and tribal caste people converted to Christianity in order to escape religiously sanctioned inferiority within Hinduism, drawn to a new identity and equality in Christ. However, many in India cling to the notion that India is a Hindu nation and that to be Indian is to be Hindu. Dalit Christians are thus twice-oppressed, once as the outcasts, and then again as members of an often-despised faith. This series will explore the Dalit struggle based on my experiences over the past week through what has felt like a baptism by fire. I hope and pray that you will join me in learning more about this modern system of apartheid.
To learn more, read Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s “Untouchables.” Feb. 2007
Posted on: July 1, 2008
