IMPACT: Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation (Ekal-USA) is a Houston, Texas-based non-profit organization with over 70 chapters across multiple U.S. cities. It serves as the sister organization of Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of India (Ekal-India), a Hindu nationalist group that operates single-teacher schools in India. Ekal-India has been accused of promoting hatred towards religious minorities.
Ekal-India was formally registered in New Delhi between 2000 and 2001. Both Ekal-USA and Ekal-India are part of the broader Ekal Abhiyan or Ekal Movement.
According to the Ekal Global website, the movement was started in the 1980s to provide “education to tribal children,” which has since become a project for the “holistic development of children.” According to a 2014 piece in the Hindustan Times, the schools also include “Hindu prayers, Indian values and promoting nationalism.”
Ekal-India operates on a “one-teacher school” model, where a single instructor teaches a curriculum designed by the organization to students in rural and tribal areas of India. According to a 2020 piece in Caravan Magazine, Bhaurao Deoras, a full-time worker with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the younger brother of the third RSS chief, Madhukar Dattatreya Deoras, first developed the concept of these single-teacher schools.
RSS, a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization and the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has been deeply involved in stoking communal tensions and promoting anti-minority hate and violence, particularly against Muslims.
In Odisha state, Pratap Chandra Sarangi, a senior leader of the BJP, played a crucial role in promoting Ekal schools. A 2019 piece in the BBC noted that in 1999, Sarangi was the State convener of the Bajrang Dal, the militant youth wing of the RSS, which was accused of leading a Hindu mob that killed the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two children. However, according to the piece, “an official inquiry found no evidence that any one group was behind the attack.”
This story was originally published in bridge.georgetown.edu. Read the full story here.
