Hey, leave them teachers alone

On a visit to Dehradun I met a woman who teaches law at one of the many private institutes dotting the city I wondered whether she in a polarised India censored herself in the classroom At the end of our discussion I asked Would her faculty invite say activistlawyer Sudha Bharadwaj for a lecture on human rights No she said Or a human rights activist like Gautam Navlakha to speak on Kashmir No Kapil Sibal ldquoHe is in the Oppositionrdquo she saidSince the Bharatiya Janata Party governs Uttarakhand lawyer Harish Salve should not be a problem I suggested She countered ldquoSalve would be invited for his legal knowledge not ideologyrdquo How about Amnesty Internationalrsquos Aakar Patel caught in the Union governmentrsquos crosshairs ldquoNo chancerdquo she responded Her replies were remarkable for their honesty because she sees herself not as a professor but as ldquofacilitator to alternative realityrdquoStudents come to college with a sense of reality largely inherited from parents A sense schools do not teach students to question She said her mission was to expose them to the multiple realities comprising India to skill them into distinguishing between prejudices and ldquoevidencebased realityrdquo She cited examples of how she would teach different topics of which I choose one heremdashthe laws some states have enacted against religious conversionAlso Read Why Modirsquos Brazil tweet worriesShe said she would lecture on the laws framed in the past against apostasy and compare those with the new legislations the Constitutional provision on the right to propagate onersquos religion the idea of secularismhellip ldquoBut I would not tell them which party is saying whatmdashand why If students ask for my opinion I would say I am too young to have onerdquo she saidIt would seem fear has seeped into classroomsBlame it on the mobile she said for sentences taken out of a lecture and posted out of context on social media could create a furore Wary of displeasing the government a private institution would sack a teacher accused of hurting public sentimentNext I approached a sociologist for whom the fraught sociopolitical ambience implies responding creatively to the sensitivity of students For instance diving deep into history to explain why certain social groups eat beef His students in another university where he had taught before coming to Dehradun would frown seeing him tuck into chicken burgers on Navratri He explained to them that the rules of Vaishnavism were different from those of Shaktism and advised them to visit a Bengali colony on Durga Puja Surprised to see Bengalis gorge on mutton delicacies they realised that Hindus were not culturally homogeneousWould it have been imprudent of him to justify his dietary choice as a democratic rightThe sociologistrsquos students justified their jubilation at the reading down of Article 370 in 2019 because the Kashmiris never ldquoidentified with usrdquo He responded ldquoWhat is this us and themrdquo He told them to go to Kashmir to fathom the process of othering Five of them did They returned a week later to express their horror at the ubiquitous presence of security forces there found Kashmiris hospitable and realised that the media narrative on the valley was tendentious The sociologist however admitted ldquoCompared to the past there is now a greater political negativity in classrooms Students are reluctant to listen to the views they opposerdquoI turned to a young lecturer of media studies in a public university which is socially more diverse than private institutes because of reservation How would she teach caste discrimination or the meaning of Brahminical Hinduism Before every class she asks students whether they think caste discrimination exists Different views are expressed inevitably sensitising the classroom to listening to ideas some may find grating She remembered a fiery debate on whether reservation should have been extended to the Economically Weaker Sections ldquoBut largely students are very conscious of not hurting their matesrdquo she said Some relief thatIn a spiffy cafeacute I met a group of educationists Railing against social media a historian said students cite dubious sources from the internet to contradict him during lectures Once he was asked what he thought of ldquothat Asmani Kitabrdquo The historian admonished ldquoWhy that term Why canrsquot you say the Quranrdquo He and others cribbed about schools not skilling students to question narratives emanating from myriad sourcesA young school teacher said that during a discussion on demonetisation he cited Reserve Bank of India figures to counter some senior students who insisted ldquoModijirdquo had successfully tackled the menace of black money Following this it was whispered in Doon that the school was opposed to the BJP An educationist spoke of the pressure on schools to show students Modirsquos Pariksha Pe Charcha programme Data is demanded on caste religious and gender composition of students ldquoThe same government refuses to conduct the censusrdquo he saidI asked them whether any of the private universities here would invite historian Ramachandra Guha who did his schooling in Dehradun to lecture on say democracy ldquoNo wayrdquo they said for universities would fear offending the governmentTime to rewrite the rock band Pink Flyodrsquos iconic line thus Hey leave them teachers aloneThe writer is a senior journalistSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper