Kashmir’s Class of 2016 up in flames

On the 120th day of unrest in Jammu and Kashmir, the 30th school went up in flames on Saturday. The situation is gloomy, people are aghast and the tales of destruction heartbreaking. But those behind these cowardly acts seem to be losing the game fast. Apart from evoking widespread condemnation, all political parties, including separatists, social and religious groups and the civil society has risen up against what it sees as a deliberate attempt to keep their children out of school.

On Friday, in fact, it was the timely intervention of local residents who saved a government-run primary school at Dugpora, in the northern district of Ganderbal, from being gutted completely. There have been a couple of other instances when locals battled to save schools from being harmed by unknown arsonists.

The J&K police said earlier this week that it had arrested five persons who set ablaze a government-run middle school in Tapper, Pattan area of north-western Baramulla district in the last week of October and that the “conspiracy’ to target the building was hatched at a local pharmacy. It has also claimed that more than 30 other people involved in such incidents elsewhere have been identified and efforts are on to arrest them. But the efficiency of the police and other security forces is being questioned openly.

Security forces are deployed in every nook and corner of the Valley in view of the turbulence triggered by the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani on July 8. This and the fact that in a security situation officially described as “tight”, even an Army goodwill school and a few of those run by the government located in close proximity of security forces’ camps have been targeted, setting off a firestorm of reaction on social media where some have even hinted at “connivance” in causing the ruin.

Authorities have rejected the disparagement as “wild guesses” and also ridiculed the separatists’ charge that targeting schools is actually a “deep-rooted conspiracy” hatched by the Indian official agencies to “defame our just freedom struggle”.

Chief minister Mehbooba Mufti has been saying, since the street protests began, that certain people are using school-going children for their vested interests by keeping them away from schools. Now, expressing pain and anguish over the burning of schools, she alleged that the separatists were “instigating poor children and misguiding them to violence”.

Kashmir Valley has 10,851 government and 2,508 private schools with 921,398 and 570,322 enrolments, respectively. The literacy rate among males is between 68.18 and 78.01 per cent, and females between 57.82 and 71.21 in the 10 districts of the Valley as per the 2011 census. The overall literacy rate in the state is 68.74 per cent.

This is not the first time schools are being burnt. Schools were targeted during the initial years of militancy in Kashmir because they were being requisitioned as temporary barracks for the security forces being brought in to combat the rebellion. However, authorities and political opponents of the separatists had at that time alleged that those behind the “game plan” wanted the local youth to join the militants’ ranks rather than attend schools and colleges. But the situation is different this time, and thus the gutting of schools more mysterious.

Schools have remained closed for nearly four months due to shutdowns and curfews. And the fire incidents have taken place at a time when the government’s decision to hold the final examinations of Classes 10 and 12 from mid-November has evoked stiff opposition from some mainstream Opposition parties, separatists and other sections of the society apart from select student and academics groups. They say that in the present circumstances it is risky to move students to examination centres. They have also said that hundreds of students have been maimed and even blinded in shotgun pellet firings while thousands are languishing in jails.

Further, students have not been able to complete their syllabi. In response, the J&K Board of School Education (J&KBOSE) has curtailed the syllabi for the students scheduled to appear in these examinations and announced that the question papers will be framed with a 50 per cent relaxation. The BOSE chairman, Zahoor Ahmad Chatt, asserted, “The only purpose to hold exams in November is to save the academic career of the students who have to appear in other national and international level competitive exams.”

G.N. Var, president of Kashmir Private Schools Association (KPSA), has asked all sections of the society to keep their politics aside and find a middle ground for the benefit of lakhs of children. But he also added, “In current situation where we saw dozens of school children getting killed, students are in no way ready for exams. The extreme stress will give birth to suicidal tendencies among them and in the longer run it will create behavioural problems among children.”

Modus operandi The J&K police earlier this week arrested five persons on charges of torching a school in north-western Baramulla district. It said the conspiracy was hatched at a local pharmacy. The owner Ajaz Ahmad Parra with locals Omar Parra, Shabir Pandit and Bashir Ahmad Hajam arranged petrol from a filling station and stored it in plastic bottles. These were later given to Naveed Ahmad, Adil Ahmad Parra and Usman Parray, also local residents, who at around 1.30 am on October 27 emptied these bottles on the Government Middle School Tapper, Pattan, and set it on fire. “The motive behind this act by these miscreants was to create an atmosphere of fear and to ensure that schools continue to remain closed”, the police said in a statement. It added that one of the accused had earlier threatened the school staff, which thereafter had shifted school records to some safe location without though informing the police (sic).”