Bijhu Nijeni 2011 - MAADI

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Burn, with the desire to learn!
P A N K A J B U T A L I A
H
Sometimes, a small step can have
the impact of a giant leap. A school set up
by a refugee community in the North-East
is one such step. Like many other tribal
groups in the area, the Chakmas didn’t really
have much say in their destiny post-Partition.
They would have been content to be
left alone, but when the line was finally drawn
in 1947, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where
the Chakmas and the Hajongs lived, went to
East Pakistan. As if this were not enough,
the Pakistan government decided to build the
Kaptai dam on the river Karnaphuli soon
after. Over the next decade or so, between
75,000 and 100,000 tribals from both groups
were displaced from their land and, as was
the norm those days, without any compensation.
Wilfuly uprooting the rural poor has
been a routine pastime if not sport for South
Asia’s policy planners.
Large numbers of the evacuees set
off for India in 1964 because of Nehru’s decision
to offer them shelter. About half of
them settled in Mizoram and the rest were
shunted around till they finally nestled in a
small corner of Arunachal Pradesh. There
they lived, stateless, but that at least ensured
survival even though the locals wanted them
out. But it’s not easy to throw out 40,000
people and so they stayed, in the face of local
hostility, without roads or electricity for
the refugees. Ironically this spurred many of
them to seek education in other parts of India.
So young Chakma men went to Mumbai,
Guwahati, Kolkata and Delhi. It was this
exposure to the outside world which led to a
desire to provide education to their own children
back in Changlang district in Arunachal.
In a few thatched cottages, on land
loaned by a local landowner, this group of
young men set up a school in 2003 with some
financial assistance from the National Foundation
of India, a Delhi NGO. No roads led
to the school, nor did it have electricity. The
initial ambition was limited — to provide
basic literacy to sons and daughters of peasants
who could not even imagine that education
was supposed to be on their horizon.
But the founders of Sneha School, as it was
called, had miscalculated badly. They had no
idea of the latent desire amongst the poorest
of the poor for education. Within a few days,
word spread and peasants trooped in from
distant villages carrying children on shoulders
or on dilapidated bicycles and, lo and
behold, the school took off with more than
150 students on its rolls.
The energy this generated
revolutionised the area. Within two years,
the number of students had jumped to over
300. The few educated Chakmas in the area
all moved into teaching at the school. Their
a good forty years.
motivation level was high. They had not
The nineties saw anti-Chakma riots imagined their deprived community would
in Arunachal. One consequence of this was have such a strong desire to pull itself out
the closing down of educational avenues for from the depths of misery. The school
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