BY PRESCRIBING THE COLOUR combinations of uniforms of two municipal schools, the Ahmedabad Municipal School Board has provoked a raging controversy in the western seaboard state of Gujarat (pop. 65 million), ruled by the BJP since 1998 and hitherto the stomping ground of three-time chief minister Narendra Modi until his elevation to the prime minister’s office last May.
A complaint has been filed before the National Commission of Minorities protesting the colour of uniforms issued to class I children in two municipal schools sited in the Shahpur and Dani Limda areas of Ahmedabad.
Until the end of the last academic year, students of all Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) schools wore white shirts and blue shorts or trousers, distributed free-of-charge by AMC. But in the forthcoming academic year beginning April, students of the predominantly Hindu Ahmedabad Public School, Shahpur, have been distributed orange uniforms, while the Dani Limda English Medium School with an estimated 98 percent Muslim student population have been given green uniforms.
Unsurprisingly, this “experiment” currently restricted to class I students of the two schools, has provoked a mighty row in communally-sensitive Gujarat in which cases relating to the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom are still sub-judice in the snail-paced judicial system. According to Badruddin Sheikh of the opposition Congress party, the school board’s choice of uniforms is a blatant initiative to practice the BJP’s identity politics.
However Ahmedabad’s municipal commissioner D. Thara has an explanation. According to Thara, the colour of the uniforms in each case was chosen by the school management committees (SMCs) comprising principals, parents and donors of each school, constituted under s.21 of the landmark Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. Under the Act, SMCs are empowered to “monitor the working of the school, prepare and recommend school development plans, monitor the utilisation of grants received from the appropriate government or any other source, and perform such other functions as may be prescribed”.
“The AMC School Board has neither decided any colour code for students’ uniforms nor given any dress to them. It is decided by the respective committees of the schools,” says Thara.
However, Sheikh blames the AMC School Board for permitting SMCs dominated by parents (75 percent of members) to choose students’ uniforms. “Uniforms are meant to blur divisions between the rich and poor, caste and other societal differences,” he argues.
But, Jagdish Bhavsar, chairman of the AMC School Board, plays down the controversy. “There’s no issue at all. The decision was made by SMCs of the schools which are dominated by parents. Although this year, these SMCs chose the uniforms which will be worn, this issue can be reviewed next year,” says Bhavsar.
Yet, this is not the first instance of communalism — the agenda of the RSS and sangh parivar, parent organisations of the ruling BJP — creeping into school education. In January this year, an AMC School Board circular directed the principals of municipal schools including minority Urdu and English-medium primary-secondaries to ensure students recite the Hindu saraswati vandana in the morning assembly. Following protests by opposition parties, the directive was withdrawn.
With the BJP’s star in the ascendant in Gujarat where the party not only runs the state government, most civic governments and panchayats, such manifestations of the RSS and sangh parivar ideology are likely to recur.
R.K. Misra (Gandhinagar)