By Aarefa Johari with Aishwarya Iyer
A little after noon on December 6, Rahul Raghuvanshi was about halfway through writing his maths exam paper in St Joseph’s School in the town of Ganj Basoda in Madhya Pradesh’s Vidisha district.
Suddenly, loud cries of “Jai Shri Ram!” tore through the silence. There were sounds of smashing glass. Before he could react, the 17-year-old student saw a group of angry men outside his ground-floor classroom window, attacking the panes with iron rods.
Shrieking in fear, Raghuvanshi and his 13 classmates jumped from their seats and were bundled out of the room by their teacher and the external examiner who had come to conduct their mid-term Class 12 exams under the Central Board of Secondary Education. They sought shelter in an empty classroom on the first floor.
Their school seemed to be under siege by a mob of “400 or 500 people”, according to estimates by the principal and several teachers. The enraged crowd – largely members of the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad – had gathered to protest the “first holy communion” ceremony for eight local children more than a month earlier, at an entirely different location. The attackers claimed this had amounted to “religious conversion” from Hinduism to Christianity.
A section of the mob barged into the school courtyard and hurled stones at the glass façade of the sprawling, three-storey building for several minutes before police forces controlled them.
The damage could have been far worse if the inner gates of the building had not been locked, or if there had been more students in the school. But because of the ongoing board exams, the other students had left the school earlier that morning. The 14 students appearing for their maths paper were the only ones on the premises.
“It was very scary for us,” said Raghuvanshi. “We were given five minutes extra to finish our paper later, but we could not concentrate.”-
It took days for the students to overcome the trauma of the attack and feel safe in school again. When I met them in their classroom in mid-December, they were no longer afraid, but were indignant. The eight children who had allegedly been converted, they said, were not even students of their school. So why had their safety been compromised?
Ironically, the sequence of events leading to the attack can be traced back to a letter from the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights, or NCPCR.
The NCPCR is an independent statutory body, which was established under the union Ministry of Women and Child Development in 2007. Its primary mandate is to ensure that India’s child protection laws are implemented effectively, and that all other laws, policies and programmes are in sync with national and global requirements for children’s rights.
It is also specifically tasked with looking into the rights of children in need of special care, whether those affected by trafficking, violence, exploitation, natural disasters – or an unforeseen pandemic.
But under its current chairperson, Priyank Kanoongo, the NCPCR has appeared to have strikingly different preoccupations. Kanoongo is a product of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu supremacist organisation that is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. A former member of the BJP’s youth wing, he resigned from the party in 2015 to be appointed as a member of the NCPCR. In 2018, he was made its chairperson.
Under Kanoongo, the NCPCR has been transformed from an organisation that advocates for the rights of children in India to one that selectively uses them to pursue Hindutva causes and target religious minorities, as well as independent groups seen to oppose the supremacist ideology.
The Commission has done this through a well-oiled system involving Hindutva groups, propaganda websites and police and other government officials on the ground. Many of these cases spring from complaints made by organisations that are firmly entrenched in the Hindutva ecosystem. This recent shift in the Commission’s activities raises the question of whether an organisation mandated to safeguard the rights of children has acquired a distinctly communal tinge, to the great harm of those it is meant to protect.
This story first appeared on scroll.in