The video clipping was just a small part of the teachers attempt to teach students about other religions for their Independence Day program. In other videos, they were seen teaching Sanskrit Shlokas from the Gita and verses from the Bible too.
Karnataka: “In Congress rule at Shivmoga Karnataka, the teacher in school is teaching Namaz to Hindu children. And if Yogi Government even paints a school in Saffron colour it is communalism. That is perverted secularism in India,” this message was circulated at a breakneck speed last week on social media and travelled far and wide along with a video clipping serving as ‘proof.’
Like most other WhatsApp reports, this too was fake. The video clipping was just a small part of the teachers attempt to teach students about other religions for their Independence Day program. In other videos, they were seen teaching Sanskrit Shlokas from the Gita and verses from the Bible too.
BOOM Live, a fact-checking website, identified the school and found out that the teachers had first circulated two videos, one with the children reciting verses from the Quran and the other with them reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita.
The website found that the video was from Vidyadeep Vidyalaya, a kindergarten school in Shivamogga district of Karnataka. “For Environment Day we conducted a program where all the kindergarten students recited verses from all the three religious books. Since this was a success we thought of doing it again for Independence Day and the video shows us practising for the same,” said Arathi Janardhan, Principal, Vidyadeep Vidyalaya to BOOM.
“In the second video accessed by BOOM, it clearly shows the same children from the first video reciting a Sanskrit Shloka. The video has one teacher narrating the Shloka which the students then repeat. The teacher who taught the verses from the Quran is also present in the classroom. I was the one who recorded both the videos and sent it to a Whatsapp group that we have created for communication with parents. I sent both the videos and many parents praised us for what we were doing,” the principal said in the report.
“The school has since scrapped the program for Independence Day next month because of the backlash it has received online. “We wanted a program which showed a unified world. We did not have any ill intent but our teachers and the school has had to face a lot of backlash and anger due to that video. I cannot put my teachers’ lives in danger or bring harm to my school so we are not going ahead with the religious scriptures event,” the principal said.
The video was circulated with the message, “In Congress-JDS ruled Karnataka in Shivamogga the teacher in a school is teaching Namaz to Hindu children. If the Gita had been taught in any Madrasah, the whole media would have forced the government to apologise. Plz spread this video so that Hindus can know how our religion is been destroyed by these secular parties.”
An attempt to teach school children religious harmony and appreciate diversity was turned into such an ugly political diatribe.
The miscreants who spread hatred online don’t realise how their actions affect real people in their immediate environment. Fake ‘child-lifting’ forwards with a video clipping originally made by an ad agency by Pakistan, has resulted in the murder of more 29 people since last year.