New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh’s biggest, 166-year-old Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband recently asked its students not to learn English. A number of institutions reacted to this — from the state education officials to Uttar Pradesh Commission for Minorities.
So did India’s newly-aggressive National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. In the past two years, the NCPCR has a new mojo and mission. It’s grown in power, reach and veto power and swung into action on a whole lot of domains — from taking on the formidable edtech behemoth Byjus for predatory sales practices to religious conversion of Hindu children, opposing under-age marriage of Muslim girls to same-sex marriages, pulling up Bournvita over its advertisements to Amazon over NGO funding. It even accused AAP of using children to canvass for the jailed Manish Sisodia.
It is no longer the toothless body that it was in the pre-2014 era. It is now a swashbuckling do-gooder with a super-saviour complex.
Earlier this month, NCPCR’s activist-y, eager-beaver chairperson Priyank Kanoongo shot off a letter to the district magistrate of Saharanpur, where the madrasa is situated. In his letter, Kanoongo drew the officer’s urgent attention to the ‘unlawful and misleading notices being issued by Darul Uloom’ that disregard children’s rights. He also called it a violation of India’s Right to Education law.
“I know my predecessor may not have been interested in dealing with such issues, but we have started taking cognisance of it because it is against the UNHCR guidelines,” Kanoongo, an RSS member from Vidisha, told ThePrint.
He has been called out for carrying out the government’s Hindutva agenda, stepping beyond his brief and playing politics.
The 42-year-old has also trained his lens on NGOs. According to him, the welfare of children should not be handled by these organisations. “NGOs receive money from foreign countries to defame our nation and spread an atmosphere of anarchy,” he said.
Also Read: BYJU’s founder to appear before NCPCR as it probes claims of ‘parents lured to buy courses’
On a mission
The NCPCR was part of the group that filed petitions against same-sex marriages before the Supreme Court. The constitutional child rights body contended that same-sex couples are unfit to raise a child and should not be allowed to adopt.
Kanoongo stated that the organisation’s intention was solely to protect the rights of children who may be affected by such marriages. He refused to comment further as the matter is subjudice.
In recent months, the NCPCR has become the go-to statutory government body to deliver a vigilant warning shot against controversial critics of the government. The range of its actions and targets has been unprecedented, wide and often counter-intuitive. Set up under an act of parliament in 2007, it has only now become one of the most formidable bodies of the government reading the riot act.
Those who have observed a pattern in its recent proactive interventions say that the child rights body should instead be assisting courts to ensure the continued protection of the rights of children.
This is especially important with the changes that may take place with the legalisation of the Juvenile Justice Act and other such acts, said Avaantika Chawla, assistant professor, OP Jindal University, who is also the assistant director of the university’s Child Rights Clinic.
But the NCPCR has other matters on its plate. The latest in the series of its interventions is Kanoongo’s letter to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to initiate an inquiry against a gaming platform for its alleged involvement in the conversion of a minor boy. “The minor boy was lured into conversation through the said gaming platform, Fortnite, and then brainwashed into religious conversion over another social platform, Discord,” the letter read.
On 14 April, Kanoongo shared a video he received on WhatsApp to his social media. Allegedly from Madhya Pradesh’s Damoh, the video shows a child being baptised. Kanoongo urged the state administration to check whether it was a violation of the Freedom of Religion Act.
Similarly, the NCPCR pulled up the Uttar Pradesh government in January for not taking action regarding an earlier commission direction in which it had asked the state government to investigate allegations that Hindu children were being taught at madrasas.
Opposition leaders like Asaduddin Owaisi have criticised the NCPCR for pushing a soft Hindutva agenda, and said the body had become a “den for promoting Hindutva ideology on its intervention in religious conversion”.
But as per Kanoongo, the commission does not discriminate between religions while dealing with these matters.
He cites the rights given to the children in the Constitution and the UNCRC and says he is following his duty by taking action on conversions.
He claimed that children in orphanages are being forced into conversion. “There is no state where we have not come across such cases. Let the child turn 18, if they want to leave the religion, they will leave,” he told ThePrint.
And it isn’t just the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Income Tax (IT) departments that conduct raids, NCPCR does too. Sometimes the two raids occur in perfect choreography.
In 2021, the ED raided activist and former bureaucrat Harsh Mander’s home in Delhi. It was the result of an NCPCR raid at a children’s home run by him from the year before. The commission alleged that it found financial and administrative irregularities, after which it filed an FIR.
The cause closest to Kanoongo though is ‘rescuing’ children from the clutches of NGOs.
He claims that NCPCR has made sure that the state government does not depend on NGOs for the protection of children’s rights. He added that NGOs which are “defaming the country” while getting foreign funding should be curbed.
Apart from Harsh Mander’s Centre for Equity Studies, Amazon India was pulled up by the body for funding the All India Mission, which it accused of illegally converting children. It also sought an FIR against Christian NGO Persecution Relief in 2021 for painting a ‘dreadful image of Indian worldwide’. In 2021, it stopped the Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh governments from sharing data on children orphaned by Covid to UNICEF and in May this year, it asked all states to not work with the global children’s welfare body.
“We have filed FIRs against these NGOs. On the basis of these FIRs, agencies like ED are working. We will keep doing it in future also,” Kanoongo said.
Also Read: Byju’s to Lido, India’s Edtech sector is leaking complaints. Unchecked power, no trust
RSS man, former BJYM worker
Kanoongo belongs to Vidisha, a small district in Madhya Pradesh, and has been associated with the RSS since childhood.
He studied at a Saraswati Shishu Mandir, run by the RSS, and was also a swayamsevak (member) of the organisation. There were not many opportunities in his district, so he decided to work in the education sector.
At the age of 24, Kanoongo established the Sanjay Gandhi B.Ed college in Vidisha. Kanoongo’s father was a lawyer and his mother was a gynaecologist who founded Jeevanti Hospital in the district. Kanoongo was also a part of the BJP youth wing. He resigned in 2015 before joining the NCPCR.
He was first made a member of the commission in 2015 by Modi and went on to become the chairperson in 2018. In 2022, his tenure was extended for a second term. If he completes the tenure, he will be the longest-serving chief of the body after Shanta Kumar, who was a chairperson for six years, from 2007 to 2013.
A former associate Rupesh said Kanoongo was interested in politics and social work from his early days. Since he was in the RSS, he routinely crossed paths with BJP leaders Kailash Vijayvargiya, Sushma Swaraj, and Varun Gandhi.
“He would interact with senior leaders at meetings or a shivir (training camps) held in Bhopal,” said Rupesh.
Rupesh, who is also part of the RSS, now runs the college that Kanoongo started. “He is extremely hard working. Even before NCPCR, he worked to provide education to children of women who were forced into prostitution from the Bedia nomadic community,” he said.
But he added that they are Hindutva leaders. “We have to keep our ideology in mind.”
For Kanoongo, one of his biggest achievements is that he has given the NCPCR claws and teeth.
The commission used to receive around 4,000 to 5,000 complaints in 2018, but now this number has reached 40,000 to 50,000, claimed Kanoongo who attributes it to the trust people have in the commission now. “We should understand that affected children will not come to us, but we have to reach them,” he said.
He travels across the country with a three-member team inspecting cases of children’s rights violations. Their next goal is to bring more focus to aspirational districts and blocks. “The coming year, our target is to reach 850-900 aspirational blocks and border districts. Our team has not increased, but we have increased our efficiency,” said Kanoongo.
The team consists of Dr Divya Gupta, a gynaecologist in charge of child health, care, and welfare; Dr RG Anand, a community and preventive medicine practitioner who deals with child psychology; and lawyer Preeti Bhardwaj Dalal. The former two are members of the BJP. There are six more members in the commission as per the NCPCR website.
During the UPA-era too, there were allegations that members were close to the ruling party. Dr Yogesh Dube was accused of being a Congress candidate who lost the assembly election and another member Vinod Kumar Tikoo was connected with then minister of Women and Child Development Krishna Tirath.
Also Read: Physical punishment doesn’t improve children’s behaviour, makes it worse, study in Lancet says
Conflicts from opposition
Kanoongo claimed he was manhandled in West Bengal in April. He was in the state to investigate two cases of sexual assault in Malda and Tiljala.
He alleged that he was beaten up by the Kolkata police for protesting their recording of the NCPCR’s investigation of the cases.
The NCPCR and West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights locked horns with each other as the latter’s chairperson Sudeshna Roy accused Kanoongo of “insulting her and her colleagues” and said the state commission was not informed of the visit and investigation.
Kanoongo pointed his fingers back at the state saying that the commission only steps in when the state fails to ensure the rights of children. He added that he considers it a success when people raise questions as it means work is being done. “If we are working on anything, it is always under the ambit of constitutional provisions,” he said.
Kanoongo said the West Bengal incident, showed the failure of the Mamata Banerjee government. He added that it was the first time such a thing has happened to him.
“I was heckled physically on the government’s directions by the police. It pains me that a government can’t tolerate people working for children and human rights. She [Mamata Banerjee] has to attack to hide her own government’s sins,” he alleged.
The NCPCR wades into politics often. It complained to the Election Commission that the Congress was using children to promote the Bharat Jodo Yatra, following which the party received a letter from the EC.
Harsh Mander had also said that the raids at his NGOs were “politically motivated” and a part of the government’s “witch-hunt” against its critics.
Kannongo dismissed the charge that the NCPCR has become the new ED. But he accepted that the commission takes the help of central agencies and departments to conduct inspections and to take action if something illegal is found.
But there are quiet murmurs amid the community of children’s rights NGOs about the pushing of a specific agenda.
“The NCPCR had issued a letter to the Chief Secretary of Tamil Nadu saying all children living in a Christian home should be evicted. Such decisions are harsh directives by the NCPCR, it does not have a jurisdiction to take such actions,” said the head of leading children’s rights NGO on the condition of anonymity.
In 2020, the NCPCR had directed eight states — Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Mizoram, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra and Meghalaya, to send children in childcare homes back to their families and if that’s not possible to be placed for adoption or in foster homes.
Over 700 civil society members or those associated with various child rights NGOs, including HAQ: Centre for Child Rights, Enfold Proactive Health Trust, People’s Watch and All India Network of Individuals wrote a statement in response. It said that NCPCR’s recommendations are “contrary to the purpose, principles, and spirit of the Juvenile Justice Act”, and that these recommendations ignore the “need for preparedness of families and alternative care measures and the larger issue of systemic failures”.
“NCPCR also absurdly issued a directive that all children who participated in the CAA-NCR protests should be provided counselling, which ridicules the agency of children,” said the earlier quoted child rights advocate. They added that under the previous government, the NCPCR would monitor the implementation of the law and release relevant reports.
Under the UPA, the NCPCR would also undertake visits to states to monitor the enrollment of children in schools, the rights of the children of migrant workers, and malnourishment in tribal areas. It would review such situations and recommend action to the relevant government stakeholders. In some cases, it would also organise training workshops and events.
One of its noted recommendations was that children under the age of 16 should be barred from participating in reality TV shows, another was regarding monitoring corporal punishment in schools.
Former NCPCR chief Shanta Sinha chose not to comment on the current activities of the commission but said conversion of children was not something that it looked at during her tenure.
“There are profound issues concerning protection of children, especially post-Covid, which require a lot of attention. Many children have not been able to cope with learning loss, there have been school dropouts, abuse in the family. What NCPCR can do is recommend action,” she said.
She has a word of advice for Kanoongo — NCPCR should act as a conscience keeper to the government, as it is the only agency where children can speak and their voices will be heard.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)