Quite opposite to its name, the Peace International School of Ernakulam (Kochi) branch was teaching its second standard students lessons like “How many of you are willing to die for Islam? Think”. Not only this, the children were being motivated for war with questions like “Why Islam wins the battles? The answer was Islam wins the fights because it is a sacrifice for Allah. Teachings like these were included as part of the syllabus, which is enough for one to guess the kind of education, children were getting at the Peace School. Fortunately, the school has been shut down.
The Kerala government has ordered the shutting down of the Peace International School‘s Ernakulam branch following the reports of the district educational officers who filed a complaint against the school in October 2016 and were monitoring its activities since then. The allegations against the Peace School were in the FIR filed by the police were of such grave nature that the school looked like a mini terror camp operating right in the heart of the district. Peace International school did not follow texts prescribed by the NCERT, CBSE or SCERT and apparently used textbooks drafted by a Mumbai-based Islamic educational institute ‘Burooj Realization’, publishers of which were arrested under IPC Section 153A (promoting enmity) in Kochi last year. According to Police, Peace International school taught communal, extremist, non-secular content in the syllabus exhorting students to lay down their lives for Islam. It also had lessons on how to deal with non-Muslims.
After the arrest of its several teachers, Peace International School‘s managing director MM Akbar, a man who comes across as the Zakir Naik of Kerala, has fled from India and police is trying to bring him back. Abdul Rashid, one among the 21 persons who had gone missing from Kerala last year and are suspected to have joined the ISIS, worked as a public relations officer at the school [1]. Many others ISIS sympathizers have links with the Peace school. Merin, a teacher with the school, also allegedly joined the Islamic State. The school also converted six students to Islam [2].
It is unsettling to imagine that young, gullible children were subjected to such hateful environment and extremist teachings. It is a nobrainer that a student graduating from such a hateful will grow up to be a spiteful and hateful being. Besides harboring hatred towards non-Muslim people (especially towards Hindus) and upholding terrorism as sacred duty, thereby creating a soft ground to be plowed by the likes of ISIS, such schools not only threaten the education system and country’s future but compromise with the national security as well.
Peace International School has branches in Manglore, Kasargod, Trikaripur, Payangadi, Kozhikode, Manjeri, Vengara, Kottakkal, Mathilakam and Kollam as well, and it remains to be seen what happens with them.
Last year, Mumbai Police filed a similar FIR against the Mumbai-based Islamic International School (IIS), founded by now absconding Islamic fundamentalist-preacher Zakir Naik of IRF, which is now banned under unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for its alleged involvement in terror acts. Several other Islamic educational institutions, schools and Madrassas across the country have been under the police scanner for similar reasons and more. Not even a week ago, one of the Lucknow Madrassa Jamia Khadeejtul was found involved in sexual harassment of 51 of its girl inmates and keeping them hostage.
It is not that the shutting down of the Peace International puts a definitive question mark on every school that borrow its philosophy from Qur’an (like the Ernakulam School above that borrows it’s from Qur’an 96:1-5), similarly, every Islamic school need not prove that they are running fairly but they need to ensure that they are not (unintentionally) becoming the tool of brainwashing children.
Although the shutting down of the Peace International School is a very welcome news but there is hardly a reason to celebrate until all such schools are brought to the same fate permanently and the children are freed from such toxic ideologies. For even if one children is left in the midst of these professional brainwashers, he/she could become a national threat.
References
[3] Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation, Govt. of India
[3b] http://journals.sagepub.com
[4] According to the All India Survey on Higher Education 2015-16 : Scheduled Casts students constitute 13.9% and Scheduled Tribes students 4.9% of the total enrollment. 33.75% students belong to Other Backward Classes. 4.7% students belong to Muslim Minority and 1.97% from other Minority Community. http://aishe.nic.in/aishe/viewDocument.action?documentId=227
