By Alishan Jafri and Quratulain Rehbar
New Delhi, India – Every morning, Mohammad*, 32, watches his 12-year-old daughter, Fatima*, waking up with the same enthusiasm – putting on her worn-out uniform, neatly braiding her hair and sprinting to the government school in New Delhi’s Khajuri Khas area in the northeast, where they live with about 40 other Rohingya families in cramped rented rooms.
Fatima is among a handful of Rohingya children in Khajuri Khas with access to formal education in a government school. Many other children like her, including her younger brother Ahmed*, have been denied school admission for years.
As a new academic year begins next month, Fatima fears she may suffer the same fate.
On Christmas Day in December, as tens of thousands of Delhi’s pupils looked forward to a winter break, the national capital territory’s Chief Minister Atishi, who goes by her first name, posted on X: “Today, the Education Department of the Delhi Government has passed a strict order that no Rohingya should be given admission in the government schools of Delhi.”
Atishi, a former Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford, is a leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party or AAP), a relatively new political force in India that owes its foundation in 2012 to a popular “pro-poor” and anticorruption movement.
The AAP, which has been governing the national capital territory of Delhi for more than a decade, is seeking a return to power in the provincial assembly elections to be held on Wednesday. The results will be declared on Saturday.
But this year, AAP faces a serious challenge from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which controls 20 of India’s 36 states and federally-run provinces (called Union Territories) – either directly or through coalition partners – but has been out of power in the national capital for more than 25 years.
This story was originally published in aljazeera.com. Read the full story here.