Lakhimpur Kheri: Palia Kalan is a village of about 50,000 people located in the Lakhimpur Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh. It is 40 kilometres away from Dhangadhi, the first village one reaches in Nepal if you cross the border from Uttar Pradesh. Palia Kalan is home to the Tharu people, an indigenous tribal community. The tribe is spread across the border districts sitting on the Indo-Nepal border.
Every day around 10 am, Tharu girls and women in Palia Kalan queue up to go to a one-teacher school. This school is run by the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation (EVF), which offers general education and vocational classes free of cost for children aged five to 14 from any caste or religion. EVF USA, which runs these schools is linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), USA.
Classes at Ekal include a mix of children from all segments of the village: Hindu upper castes, lower castes, tribals, and Muslims. Since 1989, Ekal claims to have educated over 10 million students in 80,000 villages and tribal areas in India. As of June 2023, Uttar Pradesh had 17,091 Ekal schools, where more than 5,16,562 students were enrolled.
‘War against enemies of Hinduism’
In Palia Kalan, Sanju Kumari, a 28-year-old woman from the Tharu tribe, talks very fondly of “Hinduism”. She has attended various women’s meet-ups of the RSS in Lucknow. “Our people (Tharu tribe) have been away from Hinduism for decades, but now with the help of the RSS, we are realising the importance of Hinduism and the war that should be waged against the enemies of the Hindu religion,” Kumari explains.
In her class of 18 women students, Kumari teaches them Hindu prayers and morals, how to stitch clothes, and who the “actual enemies of Hinduism” are. For a year now, Kumari has been educating women up to the age of 30 about the dangers Islam and Christianity can pose. Kumari and Chandravati Rana – another Tharu woman who is also associated with the RSS – have been teaching women about ‘Love Jihad’ – an Islamophobic conspiracy suggesting that Muslim men lure Hindu women into marrying them only to convert them to Islam and to establish demographic dominance.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here .
