Student Protests in a culture of authoritative and state-driven school governance

• In Event: Coalition Building, Activism and Education in South Asia

Proposal

In August 2022, my (one of the co-authors) students shared with me, over WhatsApp, a photograph of a half-page news article published in Patrika, a Hindi-language daily newspaper in India. It was titled ‘We do not get good food; teachers pass time in the Potacabin.’ There was a photograph of a group of students along with the text, and I could identify all of them. These were middle and high school students, some of whom I had taught during my tenure in a Potacabin (portable cabins colloquially called potacabin) residential school in South Bastar, India. The news highlighted the demands made by seventh, eighth and ninth-grade students. Students had walked out of the school to protest at the District Collector’s office. They filed a complaint against the school superintendent and brought attention to the alarming condition of hostel accommodation and academic sections. The students demanded basic amenities such as bathing soap, detergents, and hair oil, among other objects, and nutritious food like meat and eggs in the meals.

Additionally, a large part of the complaint was against teachers and teaching in the school. Students claimed that, firstly, there was a shortage of teachers in the school, and secondly, the teachers had not been regular with the classes. The students complained that teachers came to the school and “passed time sitting on a chair in the staff room” but did not teach. Having voiced their concern that the “absence of teaching would push their futures into the darkness,” the students successfully negotiated their demands with the district administration. This resulted in the replacement of the superintendent of the school. Teachers had also received a warning from the District Education Officer to take their job seriously.

Earlier the same year, the authors participated in a protest rally where many students and graduates from different boarding schools across the Bastar region came together to commemorate the extrajudicial killings of four Adivasi (Indigenous) people, including a high school student, at the hands of paramilitary forces deployed in the area. The rally was part of an ongoing youth movement against militarization and decades-long violence against the indigenous people of Bastar. Bastar has been the centre of strife between the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Indian state. Being rich in natural resources, the region has also been a site of contestation between the indigenous communities and state-supported mining firms. This has resulted in an increased militarization of the entire state and, in turn, an experience of multitudes of state violence for the Adivasi people. It was against this violence and ecological disaster resulting from mining that youth movements erupted. They called upon the state to stop the construction of paramilitary camps and the forced extraction of resources. The movement was led by the students and graduates of the public boarding schools. Although their demands are yet to be met, even after two and half years, the students assert that with their ‘educated’ (school-graduate) status, they are better equipped to sustain the movement and demand accountability from the state.

Based on our experiences of working as a teacher and as a researcher (respectively) in education in Central India, we analyze the role of school and formal education in youth movements, both within and outside of schools. We locate the students’ protests in Central India as a part of a historical legacy of the culture of Adivasi resistance against external dominations and authority. Specifically, in this paper, we highlight the complex relationships between boarding schools, state authorities, and students as subaltern populations. The questions we address in the paper are: What does protest mean for the students? What motivates them to organize and resist injustice? What opportunities and space does the school provide for the protests to take shape? What compels students to take the protest outside of schools?

In recent years, student protests in South Asia have been studied in the context of higher education (Chaudhuri 2018; Mazumdar 2019; Chatterjee 2019). Historically, such demonstrations have been traced in the context of caste-induced tensions within schools (Constable 2000). However, contemporary protests by school students are underexplored. This is mostly due to their relative invisibility in the larger public discourse and their limited impact on education policies. Further, in the Bastar region, most media reports and scholarly writings are focused on the ongoing conflict. And the role of younger participants and agents of protest, like the school students, is often overlooked.

Moreover, we observe a unidirectional adult authority over students as a subaltern population in government schools (Suresh Babu G. S 2019, Anand and Dalal 2022). Yet, many of these schools implement the Bal Panchayat (student governance) to improve children’s participation in the school’s governing as per the UN Convention on Children’s Rights (1989). This model encourages democratic decisions taken by the people. While protest is embedded within a democracy, schools’ paternalistic practices limit children’s participation in its governance. Despite the presence of student governance as a formal structure “theoretically intend(ing) to improve children’s views on the issues affecting them, the position of these children remains merely formalistic” (Kumari 2022, 8).

The ethnographic work with children in the two protests provides us with schools’ paradoxical and unintended role in youth movements. We analyze the centrality of schools and youth in both the protests, one initiated by middle and high schoolers in a boarding school to change the management perceived as corrupt and inefficient, and the other in a rally against the normalization of violence against Indigenous people of Central India. We find that the boarding schools are a crucial site of organizing in both these protests despite modern education’s hegemonic role in erasing indigenous languages, culture, and religion (R Maithreyi, Prabha, and Viknesh 2022; Padel and Gupta 2018). We find that the schools, although unintended, provide a space of organizing, mobilizing, and peer support for the students to learn and voice out against perceived injustices.

Authors

• Rashmi Kumari, Rutgers, The State University of NJ

• Neeraj Naidu