When Saffiyah was in her second year of MBBS at Basaveshwara Medical College in Karnataka’s Chitradurga, she and her classmates spent a significant amount of time studying the clinical relevance of different body organs in the Anatomy class. In one such class, the Anatomy professor was teaching the students, gathered around a cadaver, the clinical relevance of a uterus. The importance of an intrauterine device or IUD, a popular contraceptive tool, came up.
“The professor said, ‘We use IUDs for Muslim women commonly, because they have too many children.’ He then turned to a student, a Muslim boy, and said ‘Make sure that when you get married, your wife gets an IUD inserted, because Muslim women have many children.’ Everyone just stood there in shock,” Saffiyah recalled.
The next day, the boy, the only Muslim student besides her, skipped the class.
“I think he got overwhelmed and couldn’t mentally handle coming to the class,” Saffiyah says. This was early 2015, months after the Narendra Modi-led BJP had come to power. Saffiyah says that as time passed by, teachers and students, all became more vocal in their bigotry.
She was reminded of this incident last month when a teacher’s video from a Muzaffarnagar school went viral. In the video, the teacher, Tripta Tyagi, can be seen asking the children in her classroom to take turns to hit a Muslim student one by one. She is also seen talking about how Muslim mothers don’t take care of their children, leading to them score poorly in class. Later, Tyagi told the media she has “no regrets” about the incident.
In the following week alone, two separate incidents of a teacher’s Islamophobic speech emerged from Delhi and Karnataka. In a Delhi government school, Hema Gulati, teaching the flagship ‘Deshbhakti’ curriculum, was accused of telling Muslim students that “Muslims have no role to play in India’s independence... you cut animals and eat them... you have no mercy.” In Karnataka’s Shivamogga, a class five government school teacher asked two Muslim students to “go to Pakistan”, following which she was transferred by the education department.
While these particular incidents have made it to the news, many students say things like these have become commonplace in the last few years. The Quint spoke to Muslim students from different parts of the country, about their experience in their schools and colleges post 2014, and many said that the Islamophobia and bigotry they faced from their peers as well teachers has only “worsened over time.”
'Wake Up Hindus' — Fake News Shared By Teacher
In February 2022, Anjum received a screenshot of a chat of a WhatsApp group of class nine of her alma mater, the Dev Samaj Modern School 2, in Delhi’s Sukhdev Vihar. As per the screenshot, the class teacher shared a video of a murdered woman, with the text accompanying it which said that a “Hindu girl in Surat was beheaded by a Muslim with knife in broad daylight.”
The second half of the message said, “Wake up Hindus, time to get united...save & fight for our children...”
As it turned out, the news shared by the teacher was fake, as the accused wasn’t a Muslim. After the students expressed outrage over the message, the teacher deleted the message, but accidentally deleted it for herself only, instead of deleting it for everyone. Anjum, who passed out from that school a few years ago, said that incidents like that hadn’t occurred in the school in her time. “There was a lot of outrage even among us alums after this incident. The principal had to apologise. But that teacher is still very much teaching in the school,” she said.
'Jai Sri Ram' Sloganeering, With Tacit Approval From Teachers
Other students spoke about how certain sloganeering has become ‘normal’ in schools.
Umar, who went to the coveted Dinbai Vidyalaya, an all-boys school in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal, said that there was always an unspoken “distancing” that the five Muslim students in his class, including him, were subject to. “For instance, the other classmates wouldn’t drink water from our bottles or eat food from our tiffin boxes. It’s not like we carried non-veg food, no one carried non-veg in that school. But it was just an unspoken thing that Hindus won’t eat or drink from Muslim student’s containers,” Umar said.
However, post-2014, things became much starker. “The students would in unison start chanting ‘Jai Sri Ram’ as a recreational activity after the morning assembly, after the last period, or after a guest speaker’s session. It was so blatant because they would chant it aggressively all around us...it’s not like we (Muslim students) could chant ‘Allahu Akbar’ if we wanted to,” said Umar, who is 22 now. “The worst part was that all the teachers would just see this, and smile, or just ignore it. So there was a tacit approval of sorts for this behavior from the teachers,” he added.
Soon after the “tacit approval” came the more overt prejudice from the teachers’ end.
When he was in ninth grade, Umar’s Sanskrit teacher was getting the students to chant the shlokas along with her. One Muslim student, who was weak in all language subjects, was struggling to keep up with the chanting, recalled Umar. “She turned around, looked at him and at another Muslim student sitting next to him and said ‘why do you boys refuse to chant the shlokas.’ She singled out the two of them and humiliated them in the class, even though the other Muslim student was very much chanting the shlokas. Many Hindu students did poorly in her subject, but she didn’t care about that. I was a topper in Sanskrit, but I don’t think she liked that very much,” he said.
'Muslims Don't Let Their Girls Study' And Other Hateful Remarks
Students said that even Muslim-majority schools aren’t necessarily protected from Islamophobia of non-Muslim teachers. Mahwish Asim, an AMU student, did her schooling from the Super International School in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao. She remembers in 2014, when she was in 10th grade, a teacher told her and her classmates that “Muslims don’t educate their girls.”
“Tum log toh shaadi karke chali jaaogi, tumhare religion mein aurton ko padhne hi nahi dete (You girls will get married and leave, your religion/community doesn’t let women study)”, Mahwish recalled the teacher saying.
Some also pointed out how teachers specifically singled them out in conversations about terror outfits.
In late 2014, months after terrorist organisation ISIS had taken over parts of Syria, Abuzar’s Maths teacher in his school in Sultanpur turned to him during a discussion and said “America will surely destroy ISIS.” Abuzar said he shot back asking him why the teacher only addressed him while saying this, to which the teacher had no response.
'Bloody Muslims' — Students Face Islamophobia From Their Classmates, Friends
Many said that they weren’t just subjected to Islamophobic remarks by their teachers, but also their classmates, some of whom had been their friends.
In 2016, when the movie Ae Dil Hai Mushkil was about to be released, there was a major controversy around the starring of Pakistani actor Fawad Khan in the movie. Pakistani artists were banned from working in India, after the Uri attack, earlier that year.
“A bunch of us friends were discussing that issue, when I said that artists shouldn’t be punished for something that has nothing to do with them. Just then, one girl, who was my closest friend in the class, very passionately said that “these bloody Muslims think they can come here and earn money.” She then saw the expression on my face, and immediately said, “sorry I meant Pakistanis, not Muslims.” But I knew what she meant,” a student, from an all-girls school in Mussoorie, recalled.
In Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, Aqueleema recalled that while studying BA Mass Communication at Kareem City college from 2013 to 2016, a classmate of hers started referring to her as ‘Al Qaeda’-- the terrorist organisation.
“It was right after the introduction session. She just turned around and said your name reminds me of Al Qaeda. For the next three years, she only called me Al Qaeda,” Aqueleema said.
Initially, when Aqueleema reacted with shock and silence, the classmate said she is “only kidding” but continued doing the same for the entirety of their course. “I was very young then and I didn’t have the confidence to counter her or fight back. I wish I had,” said Aqueleema.
In the last few weeks, since the Muzaffarnagar school video has gone viral, Aqueleema has considered messaging that friend.
“Each time an incident like this hits the news, all the traumatic memories from school and college get triggered. I am considering messaging her and letting her know that what she did was not acceptable. But I am afraid it might fall on deaf ears,” Aqueleema said.
Some students also reported physical manhandling. Selina, 23, did her schooling at Sonapur college near Guwahati, Assam. In 2016, when she was in 11th grade, it was a very cold day and she wrapped a stole around her ears and head, to protect herself. “A few of my classmates thought I am wearing the hijab, so one grabbed my hands, the other grabbed my legs, and the third started forcefully removing the stole. They said ‘zyada sharm maan rahi hai’ (you are suddenly practicing your religion so much). I kept resisting but they didn’t stop till they took it off,” Selina recalled.
Anti-Muslim Speech By Teachers Have Deep Impact On Students: Nazia Erum
Experts say that Islamophobic bullying that children face in classrooms is likely to have a lasting impact.
"Bullying is commonplace but when it gets mixed with religion and a young student is pushed into a corner being blamed for all the wrongs in the world - terrorism, anti nationalism, and all kinds of accusations that are often incomprehensible to young minds - it often leaves a lasting impact of being othered," said Nazia Erum, author of Mothering a Muslim.
"Throw in growing hormones, teen egos and a world filled with a cocktail of hateful television language towards minorities, and misinformation and disinformation, there is a potent mix that we would want all our kids to be shielded from," Erum added.
Erum's book was published in 2017, and during her research she found that there was a mix of bullying at the hands of peers as well as teachers, that the Muslim students underwent. "When it was the latter, students often were left with little recourse to be heard or complain. The teacher is supposed to know better as the 'guru'. When the teacher says you have no future as you will grow up to be a jihadi, the impact on the student is far deeper. This isn't just bullying," Erum said.
The onus of ensuring this anti-Muslim bullying in classroom stops, lies on everyone, she said. "Redressal can only come when we collectively take onus of the future of a generation growing up in India. This is not about Muslim children alone. This is about all children as hate spares none. Schools, while having an important role to play in making sure there is zero tolerance towards communalism, but they alone cannot fight this battle," Erum said.
"The ground zero here starts in our own bedrooms and drawing rooms. The children are only imitating the adults around them. Redressal needs to come from within us," Erum added.
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