New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh Police have registered a first information report against the principal and a part-time teacher after the local unit of a Hindutva organisation claimed that “madrassa-type prayers” were being recited in a government school at Bareilly.
Reports have said that the students had recited Mohammad Iqbal’s iconic Urdu poem ‘Lab pe aati hai dua‘. Iqbal is the writer of the famous song ‘Saare jahan se achha’.
The school principal, Nahid Siddiqui, of a government higher primary school located in Faridpur, has been suspended. A police investigation has been ordered against the part-time teacher Waziruddin, PTI has reported, quoting the local Basic Shiksha Adhikari Vinay Kumar. Waziruddin is a shiksha mitra or a ‘para teacher’.
Police have slapped sections 298 (deliberate intention to wound religious sentiments) and 153 (provocation with intent to cause riot) of the Indian Penal Code against the two.
Some members of the local unit of Vishwa Hindu Parishad accused Siddiqui and Waziruddin of hurting “religious sentiments” of people in “a Hindu-dominated area by reciting madrassa-type prayers in the school,” Kumar told PTI.
Times of India has reported that VHP activists took exception to the line, ‘Mere Allah burai se bachana mujhko (‘O Allah, protect me from evils’)’ and claimed students were being forced to sing it.
The VHP members claimed that the accused were also trying to convert the students and that students who protested against such prayers were threatened.
Police said there is also a video of students reciting the prayers.
2 teachers in UP's Bareilly booked — for 'causing riot' — and suspended after video of school children singing a song from their Urdu syllabus goes viral.
Objectionable part is: Mere Allah burai se bachana mujhko (O Allah! protect me from the evil ways) pic.twitter.com/xBePwhS1q4— Kanwardeep singh (@KanwardeepsTOI) December 22, 2022
Based on the complaint letter of VHP’s city president Sompal Rathore, an FIR was registered against the principal and the shiksha mitra on Wednesday.
This is not the first time that VHP has targeted the tradition of reciting Iqbal’s poems in schools.
In 2019, students of a government school in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit, in fact, protested against the suspension of their headmaster who was removed from his position after the VHP complained that he had made them recite a “religious prayer” – ‘Lab pe aati hai dua’. UP’s basic education minister Satish Chandra Dwivedi had at that time told reporters that this action had been hasty.
The Wire had earlier analysed why VHP’s suspicion is piqued by this song – in addition to the fact that it is written by a Muslim poet, it uses the word ‘dua’ – the Urdu word for supplication – and ‘rabb’ and ‘Allah’ for god.
The English translation of the song is as follows:
My longing comes to my lips as a supplication of mine
Oh God! May my life be like a flickering flame
May the world’s darkness disappear through the life of mine
May every place light up with the sparkling light of mine
May my homeland through me attain elegance
As the garden through flowers attains elegance
May my life be like that of the moth be oh Lord
May I love the lamp of knowledge oh Lord
May my life’s work be to support the poor
And to love the suffering and the elderly
My God! Protect me from the evil ways
Show me the path of righteousness.