Sangod (Kota): Shamshu, 70, sits on a stone ledge outside her house in the narrow bylanes of Khajuri Odpur village in Rajasthan’s Kota, fiddling with the green Tasbih (Islamic prayer beads) and praying under her breath. She’s highly nervous these days and it takes very little to upset her.
She’s been like this since 5 February, when a Hindu woman from her village stormed up to her doorstep to inform her that her 21-year-old grandson Lucky Ali had eloped with the latter’s 18-year-old daughter Muskan Gaur, she tells ThePrint. Although Muskan is an adult, the elopement has stirred up a communal storm in the village.
“I had told the girl’s mother over a year ago to get her married somewhere but she didn’t listen to me,” she tells ThePrint between sobs. “We are pure-hearted people. Everyone lives here peacefully, but this incident has created a chasm between Hindus and Muslims.”
According to village officials, Khajuri Odpur has a population of 1,200 people, and Muslims account for one-quarter of this.
The elopement of Muskan and Lucky Ali only added fuel to an already existing communal fire. A school in the village — the Government Senior Secondary School, Khajuri Odpur — has been in the middle of a blazing row after allegations of religious conversion flew around on the back of a play it had staged for Republic Day.
Muskan, according to school records, was a student there until 2022, when she cleared her Class 12. To make matters worse, her admission form, submitted when she joined the school in 2019, marks her religion as ‘Islam’.
On 20 February, a local Hindutva organisation, Sarva Hindu Samaj, submitted a memorandum to the district administration alleging there were “Islamic jihadi activities such as love jihad and religious conversion” in the school.
“Love jihad” is a term that the Hindu Right uses to describe an alleged phenomenon where Muslim men use marriage as a weapon to convert Hindu women.
The memorandum, marked to Rajasthan’s Education Minister Madan Dilawar, claimed the teachers were part of Popular Front of India (PFI) — a banned outfit. This was after Muskan’s family, backed by Hindu organisations like the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and its youth wing Bajrang Dal, filed an FIR for kidnapping against the family.
For proof, Hindu organisations showed the school’s admission form — a document that the girl’s family had produced before the police at the time of filing the FIR.
On 21 February, Education Minister Dilawar, a leader with strong Hindutva leanings, suspended three Muslim teachers — Mirza Mujahid, Firoz Khan, and Shabana.
On its part, the school denies the allegations, putting down the admission form entry as a “human error” that occurred because two students shared the same name.
“All the allegations are baseless. I have been in this school since 2021 but I have not found any fault in the behavior of the suspended teachers in these years. There has never been any discrimination in the school based on religion,” school principal Kamlesh Kumar Bairwa told ThePrint, adding that the “error” was only in the admission form and on not the other school documents.
The suspended teachers, too, have denied any wrongdoing, claiming to ThePrint that they had been targeted over their Muslim identities, with one even saying that the elopement was being used to torment the school.
Meanwhile, police say they have found Muskan and that their investigation is now complete. “A case of kidnapping of the girl was registered with us. We found the girl and produced her before a Kota court. The girl is an adult and is free to make her own decisions,” Kota Rural Circle Officer Raju Lal told ThePrint.
But the Gaur family is far from appeased. Muskan is being “provoked”, her uncle Shivraj told ThePrint. “As soon as the girl became an adult, a Muslim boy abducted her. School teachers are also involved in this,” he said.
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‘Targeted because we were Muslims’
It all started with a play on Republic Day this year, meant to send a message of sarva dharma sambhav” (all religions are equal). Instead, the event stirred a communal controversy after a video circulated claiming that a Hindu boy was forcibly being made to wear a skull cap. This, in turn, led to allegations of religious conversion.
According to Kamlesh Bairwa, the school has 260 students, 40 percent of them Muslims. Of its 15 teachers, 12 are Hindus.
The school’s three suspended teachers have been asked to report to the education department in Bikaner — some 500 km from the district.
On their part, the teachers say they are being targeted because of their religious identities.
Mirza Mujahid, a 42-year-old physical education teacher at the school, learnt of his suspension on 22 February. When the WhatsApp message came, Mujahid, who’s been employed there since 2016, was recovering from a bad case of food poisoning and was on a medical leave.
He received no notice of the suspension, he said. “When I returned home from the hospital where I was admitted two days ago, I came to know about the suspension order and was shocked. How could I be suspended without any information?” he said.
The play, he said, was organised as part of Republic Day celebrations and had students playing Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs. But organisations like the Bajrang Dal were blowing up the part where a child played a Muslim, he said.
“I’m suffering for no fault of mine. And the reason for this is my Muslim identity. That’s why I am being targeted,” he said.
His colleague Firoz Khan agrees. A primary teacher, Khan has been at the school for six years. “The allegations were leveled against us in a planned manner,” he told ThePrint. “The elopement was made a school issue. This has vitiated the atmosphere of both the village and the school and has driven a further wedge between Hindus and Muslims.”
ThePrint reached the third teacher, Shabana, and the district education officer K.K. Sharma by calls. While the former’s phone went unanswered, the latter declined to comment citing a busy schedule because of the ongoing board examinations.
Asked to comment, Rajasthan’s Education Minister Madan Dilawar claimed the teachers were suspended after a “preliminary (departmental) investigation”.
“Action is being taken according to the law and teachers can also be dismissed based on what the probe finds,” he told ThePrint.
When asked about the school’s denial, he said: “There is a saying in our Hadoti (a region in Rajasthan) — koi daayin apne ko daayin nahi kahti (No witch calls herself a witch).”
‘Widening chasm’
This isn’t the first time that the education minister, Dilawar has faced the heat for his controversial decisions. On 26 January — nearly two months after his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government was sworn in — he was criticised for suspending a Dalit woman teacher who refused to pray to the Hindu goddess Saraswati at a Republic Day function.
He has also drawn some flak for his repeated remarks calling Mughal Emperor Akbar a “rapist”.
The incident from Kota comes at a time when communal tensions are on the rise in Rajasthan — a Hindu-majority state where Muslims make up a substantial 9.07 percent of the population, according to the 2011 Census.
At least three instances of communal tensions were reported from the state in 2023.
However, it’s not only the school’s principal and its suspended teachers that have rejected the conversion allegations, in a letter to the district education officer, the school’s remaining 12 teachers, too, have dismissed it.
“No member of the staff incites conversion nor teaches jihad,” the letter, written on 21 February — the day of the suspension order — said. ThePrint has seen the letter.
“If we go on like this, no programme can be organised in the school,” one teacher told ThePrint on the condition of anonymity.
Many students, too, have come out in support of the suspended teachers. Last week, more than a dozen students of the school held a protest march to demand the teachers’ reinstatement. “These are good teachers who’ve not done anything wrong. They are being framed,” Shahrukh Hussain, a Class 10 student who participated in the protest, told ThePrint.
But Yogesh Renewal, an area coordinator of the Bajrang Dal, claimed that incidents of religious conversion had been going on in the village for “too long” and that teachers had been “involved in it”.
“We had received news from the villagers that religious conversions were taking place in the village. And then when a Hindu girl disappeared, we raised the issue and talked to villagers,” Renewal said.
He added: “No action was taken on this during the Congress rule but now there is a BJP government in the state.”
The developments appear to have shaken the Muslims in Khajuri Odpur, who, like Firoz Khan, believe that the trust that once existed between Hindus and Muslims has now been ruptured. People who once co-existed are now looking at each other with suspicion, Insaf Ali, a 24-year-old resident of the village, said.
“Some outsiders gave it a political color. This incident is politically motivated, there is no truth in it. The school’s reputation is being sullied,” he asked.
Meanwhile, Shamshu now spends her time outside the house, praying for her grandson Lucky Ali’s return. The events have left her aghast.
“Is school me koi master nahi aana chahega (No teacher will want to teach at this school). Students’ future will be at stake,” she mutters, before returning to her prayers.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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