It has been empirically verified that a child is likely to develop a healthy attitude of tolerance if he or she studies in a school where children of diverse socio-cultural and socio-religious groups are fully represented. The opposite is also true. Schools that are socially and culturally exclusivist are likely to lead to tendencies of social exclusivism in the children studying in these institutions. It is not without reason, therefore, that the RSS and other Hindu fundamentalist organisations are engaged in establishing thousands of shishu niketans in the country with a view to inculcating the values of Hindutva among children, or that the Muslim clergy maintains that Muslim children must study in madrassas.

The so-called elite doesn’t understand this. It demands the “modernisation” of madrassa education, when it should be demanding its abolition. The basic issue is not just the modernisation of shishu mandirs or madrassas. The source of the problem is the interpretation of Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution because “the right to profess, practice and propagate religion” has been extended to the right to establish exclusivist educational institutions. Under the impact of social reformer Jyotiba Phule, the British government in the 1930s insisted that dalit students be compulsorily admitted in schools meant exclusively for Hindu upper-caste communities and a confidential report by the commissioner to the Bombay governor mentioned that caste Hindu teachers were resisting the entry of a few dalit students. Further, in the land of ‘Periyar’, dalit children in a school cannot share a glass of drinking water with the children of the dominant Backward Castes.

Vijay Tendulkar once wrote a powerful story about his experiences of studying in a school which had stereotyped Muslim children as “butchers” and “killers” of cows and animals. If this is the reality in government schools, you can only imagine the situation in shishu mandirs and madrassas. Cultural pluralism can never survive such a setting. It is never too late to mend matters and ensure that our schools impart a secular education that recognises the multicultural and multi-religious traditions of India. The crux of the issue is that if children are exposed to high doses of Islamic theology or Hindu mythology by teachers who are, in reality, religious preachers, the future of secularism is doomed.