Author: Bureau
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: September 8, 2011
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110909/jsp/frontpage/story_14484935.jsp
Children are not safe in school if there is
a rally in this city.
At least 45 children from a government-run
New Alipore school, some of them barely 10 years old, were herded into a Matador
van and sent to central Calcutta without their parents' consent.
Some of them thought their children had been
kidnapped when they arrived at Sahapur Mathuranath Vidyapeeth after hearing
from people in the neighbourhood that many of the students were missing.
The headmaster made it worse for the parents,
saying the students had not come to the school at all and showing them the
register that marked them absent.
He was telling a white lie. The boys had indeed
not attended classes because leaders of the student wing of Trinamul ally
SUCI had taken them away before the school began. Some of the leaders entered
classrooms to ask the boys what they were still doing there when they had
a rally to attend.
Headmaster M.M. Mansoor could not explain
how people who had nothing to do with the school could enter classrooms and
take children away. "It happened between the closing time of the primary
section and the start of the senior school. So, the school cannot be held
responsible," he told The Telegraph.
Mansoor claimed ignorance about the allegation
that some students had been picked from classrooms and some teachers had campaigned
in favour of the event.
At Rani Rashmoni Avenue, processions from
various parts of the city and Sealdah and Howrah stations converged. Students
from many other schools were made to march and join the rally.
Many parents alleged that the teachers had
made it a practice to supply children for political events. But they panicked
because most of them did not know there was a rally today, like unsuspecting
passengers stranded in various parts of the city because of a string of protests
by the SUCI's DSO and groups of labourers. (See Metro)
After the guardians lodged a kidnap complaint
with Behala police station, the organisers hurriedly put the boys in three
small vans, which dropped them at Sealdah station, outside Alipore Zoo and
at Majherhat.
The fear of mob fury may have prompted the
move to drop the students in various places far from the school, police sources
said. The parents collected the boys from there. Some students took trains
home from Sealdah.
The complaint, drafted in the presence of
Trinamul MLAs Arup Biswas and Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, accuses "a political
party" of kidnapping the boys.
"The guardians have not named any political
party but they were angry and said that no political party has the right to
kidnap their children and make them walk in political rallies," said
a senior officer of Behala police station.
The officer said it was impossible to haul
up the headmaster as the complaint "does not blame the school at all
for what happened to the children".
Could the police initiate action on its own
against a school that allows its children to be taken away by outsiders? "If
the parents are not complaining, what can anyone else do?" asked the
officer.
The SUCI is a fringe party with proven ability
to organise disruptive rallies.
Its bigger mainstream cousins are equally
skilled at herding children to rallies. SFI leaders denied the allegation
today but children at Left gatherings are a familiar sight.
A Trinamul student leader mentioned the schools
from which he was supposed to organise children for public meetings.
DSO leaders defended their action, saying
it was a students' movement. "Since our movement is against the abolition
of the pass-fail system till Class VIII, we wanted school students to participate
in today's programme," said Sujit Patra, a DSO state committee member.
The state education minister had once spoken
of abolishing the promotion system till Class VIII. But it was only his "personal
opinion" and he had clarified that the government had not even considered
introducing the change.
Ironically, most children at today's rally
said they were in favour of scrapping the promotion system.
The DSO was also protesting sex education
at the secondary level, calling it "commercialisation".
Patra said his organisation had met the headmasters
of various schools and requested them to allow students to participate in
the rally.
A Class IX-A student of Mathuranath school,
not far from the New Alipore petrol pump, said he was in classroom around
10.50am today when a dada came and asked him to join the rally. "When
I said I needed the teachers' permission, he told me that he had already spoken
to them."
Some guardians arrived at Mathuranath around
3.15pm. "Someone came to my home and said many children had been kidnapped.
We rushed here and found our children missing," said Chaitali Bagh, whose
son Samar is a Class VIII student.
Once the headmaster claimed the boys were
absent, the parents went on the rampage. Then they went to New Alipore police
station. A police team went to the school and gathered from local sources
that the students could be at the rally.
New Alipore police called the Lalbazar control
room. The control room contacted officers at the rally venue, who asked the
organisers to return the children at once.