Uniformed personnel drinking at a school campus in Kashmir and assaulting a local
I am a teacher working at a school in Kashmir, and I have been living on the school campus for the past five to six months.
Today, we had a PTM for Grade 7. As is usually the case, it extended beyond school hours, and I left around 5:45 p.m. While making my way towards the residential area, a security guard stopped me from taking the usual route at the back and asked me to go through the reception instead. When I asked why, he simply told me that there was a “major” at the back and that a party was going on.
Behind the school is an open swimming-pool area. As I passed through the campus, I noticed four military/security vehicles and a considerable number of uniformed personnel gathered around the pool.
Later, while speaking to the other teachers, we learnt that alcohol and cigarettes had been brought there in considerable quantities. There were crates of alcohol. The fact that this was taking place inside a school campus, in an area that is otherwise used by our students, was deeply unsettling.
Around 9 p.m., after dinner, four of us went back towards the pool. The personnel had left only a few minutes earlier. What remained behind was an uncomfortable reminder of what had taken place cigarette butts, bottle caps and the remnants of what had clearly been a drinking session.
Two of the teachers who were with us are male teachers who also live on campus. Earlier, when they had approached the pool area, they were stopped three separate times and asked, “Who are you people?”
At another point, while they were looking around the area, one of the men asked what they were looking for. Another laughed and remarked that perhaps they were “looking for bombs.” There was also repeated use of abusive language.
What happened to a local man nearby was even more disturbing.
The pool is situated beside a stretch of hilly terrain. A man from a nearby village happened to be walking along the higher ground. When he saw the uniformed personnel, he began to run. They went after him, caught him, beat him, brought him back towards the school area and beat him again. It was only when the watchman intervened that they stopped and let him go.
I find the entire incident difficult to comprehend.
This is a school campus. It is a place where children come to learn, where teachers work, and where some of us live. The swimming pool is not merely an empty piece of land, it is a space where one of our teachers teaches students.
To see a place associated with children, learning and discipline being used in this manner was deeply disconcerting. More disturbing still was the apparent sense of impunity with which people could occupy the space, consume alcohol, smoke, hurl abuses, intimidate teachers living on the premises, and, most seriously, assault a local man.
I am deliberately writing this without turning it into a broader political argument. I am simply documenting something that happened on the campus where I work and live, because I am still struggling to understand how such an incident could take place in an educational institution.
Perhaps the most unsettling part is not that this happened, but that it happened in a place whose very purpose is to teach us better ways of treating one another.
If a school cannot remain a space where dignity is protected and power is tempered by responsibility, then what, exactly, are we asking our children to learn from us?