The 29-year-old chess player and child education advocate played in part to raise money for underprivileged children.
A Nigerian chess champion has broken the world record for the longest chess marathon after playing unbeaten for more than 58 hours in New York City’s Times Square to raise money for underprivileged children.
Tunde Onakoya, 29, embarked on his marathon session on Wednesday, hoping to raise $1 million for children’s education across Africa through the record attempt.
He had set out to play the royal game for 58 hours but continued until he reached 60 hours at about 12:40am (04:40GMT) on Saturday, surpassing the current chess marathon record of 56 hours, 9 minutes and 37 seconds, achieved in 2018 by Norwegians Hallvard Haug Flatebo and Sjur Ferkingstad.
“I can’t process a lot of the emotions I feel right now. I don’t have the right words for them. But I know we did something truly remarkable,” he told the AFP news agency.
“[At] 3am last night, that was the moment I was ready to just give it all up… but Nigerians travelled from all over the world. And they were with me overnight,” he continued.
“We were singing together and they were dancing together and I couldn’t just give up on them.”
The Guinness World Records organisation has yet to publicly comment about Onakoya’s attempt. It sometimes takes weeks for the organisation to confirm any new record.
Onakoya played chess for 60 hours, from Wednesday, April 17 to Saturday, April 20, 2024 [Yuki Iwamura/AP]
‘The audacity to make good change happen’
Onakoya played against Shawn Martinez, an American chess champion, in line with Guinness World Records guidelines that any attempt to break the record must be made by two players who would play continuously for the entire duration.
For every hour of game played, Onakoya and his opponent got only five minutes’ break.
The breaks were sometimes grouped together, and Onakoya used them to catch up with the enthusiastic crowd of Nigerians and New Yorkers cheering him on.
Onakoya is well known in Nigeria, where he launched the Chess in Slums project in 2018 in Ikorodu, on the outskirts of Lagos.
The organisation offers often-marginalised young people, many of whom are not in school and work to help their families, a space to learn to play chess.
More than 10 million school-age children are not in school in the West African country – one of the highest numbers per country in the world.
A total of $22,000 was raised within the first 20 hours of the attempt, said Taiwo Adeyemi, Onakoya’s manager. “The support has been overwhelming from Nigerians in the US, global leaders, celebrities and hundreds of passersby,” he said.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu congratulated Onakoya in a statement for “setting a new world chess record and sounding the gong of Nigeria’s resilience, self-belief, and ingenuity”.
Onakoya, he added, had “shown a streak customary among Nigeria’s youth population, the audacity to make good change happen … even from corners of disadvantage.”
Leaders from Columbia University have appeared before a committee in the United States Congress to face questions about alleged instances of anti-Semitism on campus.
The hearing was a sequel of sorts to a similar panel held in December, featuring the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
But on Wednesday, Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik sought to avoid the same pitfalls that made the previous hearing go viral.
She pledged firm action to combat anti-Semitism, even engaging in discussions about specific Columbia professors and disciplinary measures during the hearing.
“We have already suspended 15 students from Columbia. We have six on disciplinary probation,” Shafik said, laying out her actions before the Committee on Education and the Workforce, part of the House of Representatives.
“These are more disciplinary actions that have been taken probably in the last decade at Columbia. And I promise you, from the messages I’m hearing from students, they are getting the message that violations of our policies will have consequences.”
Still, Republicans on the committee sought to hold Columbia University to account for what they considered failures since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7.
On that date, the Palestinian group Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing upwards of 1,000 people. In the subsequent war, Israeli attacks in Gaza killed more than 33,800 Palestinians, prompting widespread protest.
But the university has drawn particular scrutiny, given its prominence as a prestigious Ivy League school and its attempts to crack down on unauthorised gatherings.
Some critics have argued that the suspension of pro-Palestinian students and groups has put a damper on free speech on campus, while others allege the administration has allowed a hostile atmosphere to thrive.
The president of Columbia University, Nemat Shafik, speaks before the House Education and the Workforce Committee on April 17 [Ken Cedeno/Reuters]
Partisan divide over campus activity
Committee chair Virginia Foxx opened Wednesday’s hearing with a statement championing the view that campus administrators have failed to create a safe learning environment for Jewish students.
She pointed to pro-Palestinian activism as evidence that Columbia and other campuses “have erupted into hotbeds of anti-Semitism and hate”.
“Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best — and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people,” she said in prepared remarks.
Her statement referenced an incident on October 11 when an Israeli student was allegedly beaten with a stick while hanging posters of the captives taken by Hamas.
But at several points during the hearing, representatives took to the microphone to point out that anti-Semitism was part of a wider problem of discrimination and hate in the US.
“Anti-Semitism is not the only form of hatred rising in our schools. It’s not the only form of hatred that is impacting our children’s or students’ ability to learn,” Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat, said from her seat on the committee.
“Islamophobia and hate crimes against LGBTQ students have also recently spiked. They’ve led to deaths by suicide, harassment. But this committee has not held a single hearing on these issues.”
Meanwhile, Representative Ilhan Omar, a prominent progressive voice in the House, sought to dispel any conflation of antiwar protests with anti-Jewish hate.
“Have you seen a protest saying, ‘We are against Jewish people’?” Omar asked Columbia President Shafik, who answered, “No.”
Omar continued by highlighting the case of pro-Palestinian students being sprayed with a foul-smelling chemical at Columbia and being “harassed and intimidated” in other instances.
“There has been a recent attack on the democratic rights of students across the country,” she said.
Committee Chair Virginia Foxx led the hearing called ‘Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism’ on April 17 [Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo]
Controversy looms over hearing
Shafik sought to walk a fine line during the hearing, pledging swift and decisive action against anti-Semitism while underscoring her campus’s commitment to free speech.
She was joined by Claire Shipman and David Greenwald, from Columbia’s board of trustees, as well as David Schizer, a member of the campus task force against anti-Semitism.
But looming over the proceedings was the spectre of December’s hearing, which led to the resignations of two university presidents.
On December 5, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of MIT faced the same committee for questions about anti-Semitism on their campuses.
During the meeting, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik pressed the university presidents to explain — with simple, yes-or-no answers — whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate their campus codes of conduct.
In each case, the university presidents sought to differentiate between protected speech and harassment, leading to convoluted answers.
“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment, yes,” Magill said. She later added: “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.”
Clips of the hearing went viral shortly thereafter, with politicians on both sides of the aisle slamming the university presidents for failing to make a forceful denunciation of anti-Semitism and genocide.
Magill resigned four days after the hearing, as the public outrage grew. Gay — Harvard’s first Black president — also stepped down in January, facing pressure not only over the hearing but also over questions of plagiarism.
Those events cast a shadow over Wednesday’s panel, and several representatives made direct references to them.
Republican Representative Aaron Bean, for instance, applauded Columbia’s administrators for giving more forthright answers than their counterparts at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
“Y’all have done something that they weren’t able to do: You’ve been able to condemn anti-Semitism without using the phrase, ‘It depends on the context,’” he said.
“But the problem is: Action on campus doesn’t match your rhetoric today.”
A standard approach to hate
On Wednesday, Shafik and the Columbia administrators were also pressed over many of the same issues as their colleagues from Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania.
Republicans on the committee asked them to weigh in on chants like, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. While some consider the chant anti-Semitic, others see it simply as a call for Palestinian statehood.
“I have received letters from our Jewish faculty who say they also don’t think it is anti-Semitic,” Shafik said at one point during the hearing.
But she also explained that she personally felt that language was “incredibly hurtful”.
One recommendation she said the campus was considering would create specific spaces for that kind of protest.
“If you are going to chant, it should only be in a certain place, so people who don’t want to hear it are protected from having to hear it,” Shafik said, relaying the idea.
Schizer, meanwhile, indicated that he advocated for a standard approach to hate and harassment, no matter who was being targeted.
“I’m a conservative. I’m close to many conservative students. There have been times they’ve gotten the signal that they should really go slow on a particular event or not articulate a particular position because it makes others feel uncomfortable,” Schizer said.
“And it’s striking how that kind of language has not been applied to Jewish students. When Jewish students have said, ‘We feel uncomfortable,’ the emphasis has been: ‘No, no, no, free speech.’”
“Now I want to be clear: I think free speech is essential, but I also think consistency is essential. We need to have the same approach for everyone.”
Representative Elise Stefanik pressed Columbia University’s president over her hiring practices [Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo]
Professors under fire
Some of the fiercest criticism, however, ultimately fell to Columbia professors who were not present at the hearing.
Committee members cited statements from professors like Joseph Massad, Mohamed Abdou and Katherine Franke as evidence of bias and discrimination among the Columbia faculty.
“We have 4,700 faculty at Columbia, most of whom spend all of their time dedicated to teaching their students,” Shafik said at one point, as she defended her hiring practices.
“I have five cases at the moment who have either been taken out of the classroom or dismissed.”
In the case of Abdou, a visiting professor, Stefanik confronted Shafik with a post he wrote on social media on October 11, saying he was “with Hamas”.
“He will never work at Columbia again,” Shafik responded. “He has been terminated. And not just terminated, but his files will show that he will never work at Columbia again.”
Massad, meanwhile, came under fire for an article he wrote in the publication Electronic Antifada, describing the October 7 attack as an act of “innovative Palestinian resistance”.
“Mr Massad is under investigation,” Shafik said, adding that she believed the professor had been removed from a leadership role within the university.
On Wednesday, Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik will face a congressional committee over allegations that the leadership of the Ivy League school has failed to protect students and staff from rising anti-Semitism on its New York City campus.
The university is one of many elite schools across the United States that have emerged as battlegrounds for protests, counterprotests and explosive allegations linked to Israel’s war on Gaza, in which more than 34,000 people have been killed, most of them women and children.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have alleged that they have been victimised by university authorities and that they have faced physical attacks in some instances. Others have accused university authorities of not doing enough to counter anti-Semitism on campus.
Amid these heightened tensions, a congressional committee has been investigating allegations that universities have failed to shield students from anti-Semitism. The stakes are high for Shafik, the first female president of the university, appointed last year. Virginia Foxx, the Republican chairwoman of the committee, has accused Columbia of “some of the worst cases of anti-Semitic assaults, harassment, and vandalism on campus”.
The House investigation has already claimed two scalps: University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) President Elizabeth Magill and her Harvard counterpart Claudine Gay, amid similar allegations against them, and criticism of their responses to the congressional committee.
As Shafik prepares to face the House panel, here is a look at what the controversy is all about, how divisions over the war have played out at Columbia, and what might happen next.
What’s the backdrop?
Three of the US’s top universities came under the unwelcome spotlight late last year when the presidents of UPenn, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were summoned for a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism.
The event was seen as a triumph for House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, a confessed “ultra-MAGA”, who ambushed the trio — UPenn’s Magill, Harvard’s Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth — at the tail end of a five-hour grilling, pressing for a “yes” or “no” response on whether protesters calling for genocide of Jews were breaking college speech rules.
Though there Stefanik and others on the House committee did not present any evidence of chants calling for genocide of Jews on these university campuses, the legalistic responses of Magill, Gay and Kornbluth in the December hearing drew bipartisan condemnation.
All three equivocated, saying in various ways that it depended on context, Stefanik’s outraged dissection of their fumbling responses going viral. The bipartisan backlash that followed led Magill to resign, and Gay followed suit after a subsequent pile-on of plagiarism allegations.
Harvard President Claudine Gay, left, speaks as University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill listens, during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, on December 5, 2023, in Washington, DC [Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo]
Days after the hearing, the House passed a bipartisan resolution brought by Stefanik, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Democratic Representatives Jared Moskowitz and Josh Gottheimer, shaming the college elders for “evasive and dismissive” testimony.
Regardless of whether heads roll this time round or not, Shafik’s hearing is likely to be gruelling. “It’s the Wild West,” says Christopher Armstrong, a partner at law firm Holland & Knight, who represents clients under congressional investigation. “With cameras in Congress and with our politics becoming more divided and heated, it’s a minefield for witnesses.”
What’s the case against Columbia?
Shortly after December’s hearing, lawmakers intensified their scrutiny of universities, opening an official investigation on learning environments and disciplinary procedures at UPenn, Harvard and MIT, which was extended in February to include Columbia.
Committee Chairwoman Foxx sent Columbia’s leadership a letter (PDF), demanding they hand over a trove of documents, alleging that “an environment of pervasive antisemitism” had been documented at the university for more than two decades before the start of the current war on Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.
“We have grave concerns regarding the inadequacy of Columbia’s response to antisemitism on its campus,” said Foxx in the letter, which outlined numerous cases of verbal and physical abuse, intimidation and harassment.
She referenced on-campus distribution of pamphlets carrying the “from the river to the sea” slogan — a Palestinian call for freedom from the occupation that Israel’s critics say it has tried to falsely portray as an anti-Semitic, or even genocidal, chant. Fox cited the display of posters with images of a blue and white skunk with a Star of David on its back, and the presence of protesters endorsing the Intifada — which is what Palestinians have called civil uprisings against Israel’s occupation of territory recognised internationally as belonging to Palestine. Fox also mentioned support on campuses for attacks by Yemen’s Houthi fighters on Israel-linked ships in the Red Sea.
By trying to punish chants for legitimate Palestinian protest and dreams of freedom from occupation, the House committee, say rights activists, is showing that it is less concerned about rights and the safety of people on campus — and is focused more on partisan politics.
Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, sees parallels with the days of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War.
There is a risk, she said, of Congress forgetting about the “law of the land” and carrying out investigations without following “the proper procedures”. “If we have Congress employing subjective standards, we run Into First Amendment concerns.”
“The threat of punishment can chill speech.”
What’s the mood on campus?
Shafik, an Egyptian-born British-American economist, has held top jobs at institutions like the Bank of England, latterly serving as director of the London School of Economics before landing her current position last year at Columbia.
While Shafik has insisted that the Ivy League school is “not an ivory tower”, it is precisely the image of universities as liberal bastions of privilege that is at the centre of the anti-Semitism allegations it faces.
Stefanik, regarded as a potential running mate for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election, went on a political fundraising blitz after going viral last December, raking in $7.1m in the first quarter of this year.
Republican Elise Stefanik, left, with presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump, listens as former Rep Lee Zeldin speaks at a campaign event in Concord, New Hampshire, on January 19, 2024 [Matt Rourke/AP Photo]
At Columbia, meanwhile, Shafik has faced criticism from both sides. Last November, the university suspended chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, saying the groups had violated university policy. The New York Civil Liberties Union and a Palestinian rights group have filed a lawsuit at the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, naming Shafik as one of the defendants.
In the run-up to the congressional hearing, the university hired a public investigation firm to nail pro-Palestinian students, who held a Resistance 101 event in March. In a statement, Shafik said the event featured “speakers who are known to support terrorism and promote violence”. The university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter said six students were suspended and evicted.
PRESS RELEASE: Last night, Columbia University suspended six students, including a Palestinian student & two jewish students with NO due process as part of an investigation into a campus event about Palestine. These students were evicted & given 24 hours to leave their homes. pic.twitter.com/t4EI247kaa
— Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (@ColumbiaSJP) April 4, 2024
Pro-Palestinian students have borne the brunt of disciplinary measures, said Morey. “[They] are definitely in the sights of many administrators. There’s pressure from funders and legislators and when there’s that pressure, there’s a pressure to censor,” she said.
The scrutiny on US campuses has also tested the ability of universities to stand up for freedom of expression, say critics.
“We see a lot of focus on inclusion and diversity which is taking precedence over core rights including free speech,” said Morey. “We’re not saying diversity is not important, but you have to have freedom of expression.”
What next?
The hearing opens at 10:15am Eastern Standard Time (14:15 GMT) on April 17. While there is no set roadmap, congressional investigations are generally aimed at ensuring compliance with existing laws or informing the drafting of future legislation.
Congressional committees have broad powers of investigation, including the ability to punish parties deemed to be obstructing progress, as was the case in February, when Foxx issued subpoenas to Harvard heads for failing to treat the inquiry into anti-Semitism with “appropriate seriousness”.
Morey said she believes December’s hearing revealed “college elders need a much more robust understanding of their role in protecting free speech”. To her, Magill, Gay and Kornbluth looked like they had only been brought up to speed on their college policies.
The pressure will be on Shafik to avoid tripping up, said Armstrong.
“If lawmakers are out to get you, it can be precarious,” he said. “I often tell witnesses that you can’t win a hearing, but you can certainly lose one.”
Dentistry student Tasneem Ahel made a dangerous journey to flee north Gaza in the hope of making it overseas to complete her education. Israel’s war has destroyed all Gaza’s universities and left thousands of students with no access to education.
US president announces renewed effort to provide ‘life changing’ debt relief, a key issue for young voters.
Joe Biden has announced plans to ease student loan debt for millions of Americans, as the United States president tries to make good on a promise to younger voters ahead of the general elections in November.
The proposal, which Biden unveiled on Monday during a trip to the state of Wisconsin, includes cancelling up to $20,000 of accrued and capitalised interest for borrowers, regardless of income.
The Biden administration estimates this step would eliminate the entirety of that interest for 23 million borrowers. And when combined with previously announced plans, the new measures “would provide debt relief to over 30 million borrowers”, the White House said in a factsheet.
“This relief can be life-changing,” Biden said during a speech in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, unveiling his plans.
“Folks, I will never stop delivering student loan relief for hard-working Americans… It’s for the good of our economy.”
Student debt relief advocates gather outside the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, in February 2023 [Patrick Semansky/AP]
He added that if he is re-elected in November’s presidential election, he would push hard to make community college free.
Progressives and younger Americans have long urged Biden to address student loan debt. Biden is expected to face a tight race for re-election, and appealing to those demographics is likely to be key.
However, Biden’s ability to galvanise those groups remains in question. Many progressives, for example, have voiced anger over Biden’s unwavering support for Israel during its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians since early October.
Biden’s announcement on Monday comes less than a week after nearly 50,000 Democratic primary voters in Wisconsin voted “uninstructed” in protest of his policies on Israel and Gaza.
The president continues to face calls to use US aid to Israel as leverage to broker an immediate ceasefire in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
On the student loan issue, the US Supreme Court last year cancelled Biden’s attempt to scrap billions of dollars in debt.
Since then, the White House has pursued debt relief through other targeted initiatives, including for public service workers and low-income borrowers.
Biden administration officials say they have cancelled $144bn in student loans for almost 4 million Americans.
A sign calling for student loan debt relief sits in front of the Supreme Court on February 28, 2023 [Nathan Howard/Reuters]
But as of June 2023, approximately 43.4 million student loan recipients had a total of $1.63 trillion in outstanding loans, according to the Federal Student Aid website.
White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in a call on Monday that, if the administration’s latest proposals are finalised following a public comment period, they would take effect “as early as this fall“.
Monday’s announcement drew criticism from some Republicans, however. Biden is expected to face his Republican predecessor Donald Trump in the upcoming vote.
US Senator Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate education panel, said such “loan schemes” simply transfer the cost of the debt onto others.
“This is an unfair ploy to buy votes before an election and does absolutely nothing to address the high cost of education that puts young people right back into debt,” Cassidy said in a statement.
Spring has arrived in Afghanistan, and Afghan children have returned to their schools to begin a new academic year. Girls beyond the 6th grade across much of the country, however, are still unable to pursue an education and remain unsure what the future holds for them.
Two years ago, on a spring day like today, the hopes and dreams of Afghan schoolgirls were crushed by the Taliban’s interim government.
On March 21, 2022, the Taliban promised to reopen all schools in Afghanistan, seemingly ending the temporary ban it had placed on girls attending secondary school since its return to power seven months earlier.
Two days later, while many girls were enthusiastically preparing to return to school, the authorities reversed the decision and restricted girls over the age of 12 from attending state-run schools. In an apparent attempt to soften the blow, the Ministry of Education said the closure would be temporary and schools would be reopened once it put in place policies that would ensure compliance with “principles of Islamic law and Afghan culture”.
Six months later, with no plan in place to reopen secondary schools to girls in the foreseeable future, the government issued a new edict and banned girls and young women in Afghanistan from higher education.
This move prompted countless analysts and experts around the world, including myself, to invite Taliban leaders to rethink their decision. We pointed out that “depriving Afghan women of an education would benefit no one” and these anti-education edicts actually stand against the very foundations of Islam.
Regrettably, the Taliban did not listen. This March, exactly two years after the supposedly temporary ban on girls attending secondary schools and universities, another academic year in Afghanistan began without the presence of women and girls.
The hopes and dreams of teenage girls, who believed the ban on their education was indeed “temporary” and they would return to their classrooms once the conditions were “right”, have likely begun to fade away.
As we enter the last week of Ramadan, it is a good moment to reflect on the importance of not reneging on a promise. Those leaders who claim to execute the Divine Will have the responsibility of fulfilling the promise made to millions of innocent Afghan schoolgirls who find themselves oppressed and deprived of their God-given right to an education.
The Taliban’s stance on this issue defies both worldly and religious logic.
Afghanistan, a post-conflict nation that has just emerged from the jaws of multiple protracted armed conflicts spanning four decades, needs all hands on deck to work towards getting the country out of the economic abyss that it finds itself in.
The Taliban takeover of Kabul in 2021 and the ensuing uncertainty precipitated the exodus of a vast number of Afghan professionals, leading to a brain drain at a very precarious time. The last thing that the nation needed was its new leaders to handicap it further and jettison any prospects of recovery by excluding half the population from participating in education, and thus the recovery efforts.
The exclusion of girls from education also contradicts the Taliban’s aim to build a gender-segregated society.
How can women have dedicated healthcare when no female healthcare workers are trained in the country? According to the World Health Organization, 24 women died each day in Afghanistan from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes in 2020 – one of the highest rates in the entire world.
While this statistic was a significant improvement from the situation in 2001 when the Taliban was last in power, experts fear that the situation is likely to get worse, and the Taliban’s diktats on curtailing women’s education in schools and universities are not helping either.
From the religious perspective, too, the Taliban leaders must realise that they are accountable before Allah SWT for thrusting ignorance upon a generation of girls just so they can claim a perceived localised victory of tradition.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in their previous avatar from 1996 to 2001, the education of women was banned across the nation as were most of the avenues for their employment.
This time, the Taliban gave public assurances that it would do things differently and avoid earlier pitfalls and mistakes. The people of Afghanistan believed it. They put their trust in the Taliban.
This trust, this “Amanah”, is an asset the Taliban should value and not waste away in pursuit of meaningless political gains.
The group that claims to follow the path of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), the Amin, the trustworthy, should not be seen to break the Amanah of the people.
The Taliban’s refusal to allow Afghan women and girls to receive an education is also a strategic mistake that stands in the way of the government’s efforts to gain international acceptance and find reliable partners that would support Afghanistan’s economic and structural development.
The important geostrategic location of Afghanistan has led to it receiving a lot of political attention from major global and regional powers for much of its history. Oftentimes, this translated into protracted conflict and resulted in security issues overshadowing all global discussions and engagement with Afghanistan.
If it is serious about bringing stability to and building a prosperous future for the country, the Taliban must endeavour expand the global interest in Afghanistan beyond security and divert the agenda of global engagement with the country to issues of development.
Such a change would not only create the conditions for international projects and initiatives that would create employment and alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans living in dire conditions but would also help end the international isolation of Afghanistan and pave the way for its integration into the rest of the world.
By allowing another academic year to pass without resolving the issue, the Interim Government in Kabul is demonstrating a worrying lack of capacity to work out what should have been a straightforward mechanism to create the conditions under which girls would be allowed back to school.
Thus, it is signalling to the international community, including the Muslim World, that it cannot be trusted and is practically putting a block on any development-focused engagement that could put an end to its ongoing isolation.
Any further procrastination on the issue will no doubt reflect negatively locally, regionally, and globally on the Taliban and on their efforts to demonstrate the applicability of political Islam to today’s development challenges.
It is high time for the Taliban to undo this egregious mistake and prove to its own people and the rest of the world that it is a trustworthy leader, and a responsible caretaker of the future mothers and daughters of its nation.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram are addictive and have ‘rewired’ the way children learn, educators say.
Four major school boards in Canada have filed lawsuits against some of the world’s largest social media companies, alleging that the platforms have disrupted students’ learning and are highly addictive for children.
The school boards, which are seeking about $2.9bn (four billion Canadian dollars) in damages, said the social media platforms have been “negligently designed for compulsive use, [and] have rewired the way children think, behave and learn”.
Students are experiencing “an attention, learning, and mental health crisis because of prolific and compulsive use of social media products”, the boards said in a statement on Thursday.
The legal claims were filed separately but all identify Meta Platforms Inc, as the defendant; Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram; Snap Inc, which runs Snapchat, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd.
“The influence of social media on today’s youth at school cannot be denied,” said Colleen Russell-Rawlins, director of education at the Toronto District School Board, the largest school board in Canada and one of the four involved in the legal claims.
“It leads to pervasive problems such as distraction, social withdrawal, cyberbullying, a rapid escalation of aggression, and mental health challenges. Therefore, it is imperative that we take steps to ensure the well-being of our youth,” she said in the statement.
Three other school boards involved in the lawsuits are Peel District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board, and Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.
Several studies have shown that platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be addictive and their prolonged use can lead to anxiety and depression.
In May 2023, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said, “There is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health.”
Murthy said children are exposed to violent and sexual content on social media platforms, as well as bullying and harassment, and their exposure to the platforms can lead to a lack of sleep and cut them off from their friends and family.
As many as 95 percent of children aged 13 to 17 said they used social media, according to a statement from the surgeon general last year, while a third said they used social media “almost constantly”.
“We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis – one that we must urgently address,” Murthy said.
Thirty-three US states also sued Meta last year, alleging that its products cause mental health issues among young children and teenagers.
A spokesperson for Snapchat says the platform was designed to be different from other social media platforms [File: Richard Drew/AP Photo]
Meanwhile, in Canada, a spokesperson for Snap Inc told Canadian media outlets that Snapchat was intentionally designed to be different from other platforms.
“Snapchat opens directly to a camera — rather than a feed of content — and has no traditional public likes or comments,” the spokesperson said, as reported by CBC News.
“While we always have more work to do, we feel good about the role Snapchat plays in helping close friends feel connected, happy and prepared as to face the many challenges of adolescence.”
Asked about the lawsuit at a news conference on Thursday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he disagreed with the school boards’ effort.
“Let’s focus on the core values of education. Let’s focus on math and reading and writing, that’s what we need to do: put all the resources into the kids,” he told reporters.
“Let’s focus on the kids, not about this other nonsense that they’re looking to fight in court.”
New Delhi, India – A Bollywood film called JNU will be released across India next week. The tagline on its publicity posters asks: “Can one educational university break the nation?”
The film is only the latest, thinly veiled attack on Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of India’s premier public universities that for decades has also been a cauldron of political activism, with admission criteria designed to ensure that students from some of the country’s poorest and most neglected regions get a shot at quality higher education.
The university, a traditional bastion of left-liberal politics that is named after independent India’s first prime minister, has been a central target of political attacks from the country’s Hindu majoritarian right, especially under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule. Like in the film, the university’s critics affiliated with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have described JNU as an “anti-national” hub over its politics. Students and ex-students have been jailed for treason. Teachers have accused the university administration, appointed by the BJP government, of weakening quality standards and processes for appointments to stock the faculty with ideologically aligned professors.
Amid a heated campaign for national elections scheduled for April and May, the university held its own vote last week for the JNU Students Union (JNUSU), which has historically been one of India’s most powerful and influential student bodies. These were the first JNUSU polls in four years, and results came out on Sunday.
Students gather to listen to the JNUSU presidential debate in New Delhi [Courtesy of Sunny Dhiman]
Nationally, the BJP is predicted to win. At JNU, it lost.
“This election was a referendum against the right wing,” Dhananjay, the new students union president, said in his victory speech. The 28-year-old student of theatre and performance studies at JNU’s School of Arts and Aesthetics is also the first Dalit to be elected JNUSU president in nearly three decades.
Located on rocky, forested slopes in southern New Delhi, JNU is often described as a bubble, and there is little evidence that the outcome of its student body elections is any reflection of the national mood. But for many in the institution best known for its pedagogy and research in the social sciences, the win on Sunday of a coalition of left-wing organisations, offered a breather from perceived efforts by the BJP and its allies to take over their oasis.
‘Solidarity and hope’
The JNUSU has been dominated by groups affiliated with India’s many communist parties for decades. However, the rise of Hindu nationalism in the early 1990s saw the emergence of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a pan-India student organisation affiliated with the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor of the BJP.
The university’s alumni include Nobel Laureates like Abhijit Banerjee, who won the economics prize in 2019, and foreign leaders such as former Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan and former Nepal Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai. Many of India’s top political leaders — from Sitaram Yechury, the leader of India’s biggest communist party, to the current BJP government’s foreign minister S Jaishankar and finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman — studied at JNU.
On Sunday, thousands of JNU students gathered outside their union office to learn the results of the elections held last week, in which the ABVP was a strong challenger. But three of the top four posts were won by Left candidates while the remaining chair went to a queer woman from the Dalit community, which sits at the bottom of India’s complex caste hierarchy.
Yet the national elections coming up could shape the future of JNU as much, if not more, than the students elected over the weekend.
Since Modi became the prime minister in 2014, his government has portrayed the university as a hub of activities designed to break India.
Students and ex-students – especially Muslims, such as Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam – have been arrested and charged with sedition and “terrorism”. Many remain behind bars. Students alleged that the university administration’s failure to hold elections since 2019 was also part of a pattern of actions aimed at stifling campus political activism.
While COVID-19 lockdowns prevented the polls in 2020 and 2021, the subsequent years saw a reluctance by the JNU administration “because it wanted elections to stop forever”, outgoing JNUSU President Aishe Ghosh told Al Jazeera.
Outgoing JNUSU President Aishe Ghosh with Dhananjay, right, and another student [Amir Malik/Al Jazeera]
“Conducting the election again seemed impossible, but the students showed solidarity and hope,” she said. Unlike other public universities, the elections at JNU are conducted by students who form an Election Commission to oversee the vote.
“The hiatus in conducting the election was a major challenge as the Election Commission consisted of many new members. But I told the varsity administration that if I begin the process once, I will finish it,” said Chief Election Commissioner Shailendra Kumar, a doctoral student in South Asian studies.
“We have done so successfully and sensitively,” he said, adding that a Braille system for visually challenged voters was introduced for the first time.
‘Punching bag for BJP’s politics’
The JNU vote came weeks before India goes to the polls in a marathon six-week exercise, starting on April 19. And the university is likely to figure into the BJP’s campaign, as is evident by the release of JNU, the film, on April 5.
The movie is part of a slew of similar films produced by a section of Bollywood filmmakers to ostensibly promote Modi’s BJP. The film’s publicity posters, split in half between shades of saffron and red, clearly show a prominent university building with two rival groups of students demonstrating in front of it.
“The Left winning in JNU is not a new thing. It has been winning for many years and has been dominant ever since JNU came into being,” Harish S Wankhede, a professor at JNU’s Centre for Political Studies, told Al Jazeera.
“The new thing is that the central government’s attempts to change JNU, both ideologically and demographically, didn’t affect the campus much. The efforts by the government to malign JNU, defame it, calling it a den of anti-nationals, didn’t bear any fruit to the right-wing student group.”
From left, newly elected JNUSU President Dhananjay, Vice President Avijit Ghosh, General Secretary Priyanshi Arya and Joint Secretary Mo Sajid [Amir Malik/Al Jazeera]
Wankhede said it was “surprising” that the ABVP, supported by a political environment for four years, did not win.
“JNU was considered a punching bag for the BJP’s politics,” Amisha Thakur, a doctoral student, told Al Jazeera. Wankhede agreed: “That’s true because no other university was giving an intellectual opposition to BJP with as much fervour as JNU was doing.”
But Govind Dangi, a 29-year-old student and an ABVP candidate in the election, described the Left as a dying force at JNU.
“The flame of a candle flickers before it ends. The Left is that dousing candle,” he said.
During an election debate held a day before the voting, ABVP’s presidential candidate, Umesh Chandra Ajmeera, made a gesture similar to what RSS members do at their meetings — a raised hand that critics of the Hindu right have compared to the Nazi salute.
While the gesture was met with angry protests, Dhananjay thinks Ajmeera may have done it unintentionally. “No one would accept Hitler in India,” he said.
Ajmeera was unavailable for a comment despite repeated efforts to reach him.
The Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in New Delhi [Courtesy: Creative Commons]
Caste assertions
Priyanshi Arya, the first Dalit queer person to be elected the JNUSU general secretary, belongs to the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Student Association (BAPSA), which derives its names from some of India’s most prominent caste and tribal leaders, including Bhaimrao Ambedkar, the country’s first law minister and the chief architect of its secular constitution.
“The entire nation has its eyes on JNU. A first win for the Ambedkarite movement after 10 years of BAPSA’s inception, has created inspiration and hope coursing through the entire nation. It’s an emotional moment for us,” Arya told Al Jazeera.
Ajay Gudavarthy, also a professor at JNU’s Centre for Political Studies, said that while the university may represent a microcosm of the national politics, the claim that its Students Union election has “an impact on the national vote is an exaggeration”.
Still, he said, “all elections are being fought on the infallibility of Modi’s image. Any loss in an election is a dent on his larger-than-life persona,” he said.
“Somehow the BJP regime does not look confident despite being in power for a decade, … so it creates a hype knowing that its survival is only there till the hype lasts. There’s nothing beyond. But the ones in power live in the fear of losing it. That’s a terrible way of living.”
And what about the JNU film? Al Jazeera asked ABVP’s Dangi if he agrees with the film’s claim that his university is a “nation-breaker”.
Dandi said the film “portrays our university in a negative way and has no truth in it”.
Guadalajara, Mexico – In Maria Soto’s classroom, nearly half of the fourth-graders have not yet learned how to read. The rest are at least a year behind. For these kids, the pandemic era continues, even if no one wears a mask anymore.
But as Soto sees it, the problem lies not just in learning delays accumulated during months of remote education. It stems equally from an ongoing trend of classroom crime.
The Eduardo O’Gorman elementary school, in Guadalajara’s impoverished Chulavista neighbourhood, has been the victim of near-constant robberies since 2020, Soto said. The latest occurred this past October.
Bit by bit, furniture, electrical equipment and plumbing infrastructure — down to the toilets and sinks in the bathrooms — have disappeared from the campus, which features a pair of skeletal two-storey buildings linked by a square patch of asphalt, decorated with hopscotch squares.
The school has become a buffet for local criminals who resell stolen goods, at the expense of the community’s children. Many of the thefts occurred in broad daylight, with multiple witnesses and security camera footage as evidence. But police investigations have not yielded any answers or any change, Soto said.
“They stole everything little by little, the cables, the windows, the sinks,” she explained. “The neighbours had to have seen who was doing it, but no one admitted that they saw anything.”
What is happening at O’Gorman elementary is part of a nationwide trend. In the year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, the National Union of Educational Workers (SNTE), Mexico’s largest teachers’ union, estimated that 40 to 50 percent of the nation’s schools had faced robbery or vandalism.
Teachers and education advocates like Soto say that heightened risk has yet to subside. And they fear that the continued threat of theft will exacerbate the education setbacks wrought by the pandemic.
“We couldn’t return to school for two years, so we did online class, and now 35 percent of the kids can’t read,” Soto said.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in educational setbacks, including lower reading scores [File: Gustavo Graf/Reuters]
Fernando Ruíz, an investigator at Mexicanos Primero, a non-profit involved in improving the Mexican public education system, told Al Jazeera that school robberies continued throughout 2023 at high levels, affecting 11,000 of the schools his organisation worked with last fall.
The damage can end up shuttering educational facilities indefinitely, he added. “There are schools that remain pretty much abandoned.”
Ruíz and other advocates suspect the number of schools affected is likely much higher. But the Mexican government has not collected data on the subject since 2022.
In a press conference in July 2023, Daniel Covarrubias Lopez, the SNTE’s secretary general, remarked on the frequency of school robberies by saying, “This is our daily bread.”
For Soto — a short teacher with tall, block heels whose firm, measured tone lays bare her decades of experience — the constant repairs and replacements required at her school have left classrooms with few resources.
Midway through the pandemic, the school was able to gather money from state government grants, allowing it to make the minimum necessary repairs.
“When we were able to raise money, the first thing we did was replace the electricity, so workmen could come do construction,” Soto said. “But the next day, the new cables were gone.”
Because the school could not afford further fixes, students continued online classes well after the risk of COVID-19 abated in the community. In-person classes only resumed in 2022, thanks to further government assistance and a private donation.
Nearly four years after the start of the ordeal, the school is still struggling to keep afloat. Some days, students are turned away at the school gate because the water tank has malfunctioned, rendering the bathrooms unusable. The school does not have the funds to repair the issue.
“We started just telling the kids to hold it in,” Soto said. Every time she leaves for a weekend or holiday break, Soto fears she will return to a school in tatters.
“One time [in April 2023], I opened the door to my classroom, and it had been completely vandalised as well,” Soto said. “On the wall there was a message addressed to me, and I realised the person who did it had likely been my former student.”
Advocates say schools are struggling to replace stolen items amid an ongoing wave of thefts [File: Daniel Becerril/Reuters]
While drug lords like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and his four sons, Los Chapitos, have gained a kind of celebrity status in Mexico, the everyday reality of organised crime intersects more often with poverty than with riches and fame.
The most recent government statistics, from 2022, indicate that 43.5 percent of the Mexican population grapples with poverty. Slightly more than 7 percent — or 9.1 million people — face extreme poverty.
Those numbers were even higher during the pandemic. Extreme poverty touched nearly 11 million people in 2020 alone, as businesses shuttered and residents self-isolated to reduce infection.
In low-income urban areas, the economic drought that characterised the pandemic years lingers. Advocates like Ruíz say already-vulnerable public schools are paying the price.
“What we’ve seen is the formation of groups dedicated to stealing electrical wiring. They’ve found the weak spots,” Ruíz said. “The minute [the schools] replace something, they come and take it again.”
Ruíz explained that the schools best able to recover from theft are the rare examples of community cooperation: institutions where parents, teachers and local officials all pitch in.
But most schools struggle to keep parents engaged, much less local officials. Ruíz added that law enforcement likewise devotes little time to the schools’ protection and upkeep.
“Most schools make police reports just to receive government aid if it is available,” Ruíz said. The police “almost never actually follow up with the cases”.
Teachers and education advocates are hoping school thefts will subside as the economy recovers [File: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters]
Even some of the schools that face only one or two robberies are left in precarious financial situations. The José Revueltas secondary school in Tepic, Nayarit, is one such case.
Last May, a group of men breached the school’s brick walls on two separate occasions and made off with over 30 metres (98 feet) of electrical cables, as well as computers and several pieces of furniture.
Without electrical cables, there was no air conditioning, and Diana Marujo, a member of the school’s administration, said students were becoming sweaty and distracted.
The school was forced to spend 7,000 pesos (over $400), a quarter of the following year’s budget, to replace the stolen cables. To compensate, Marujo told Al Jazeera that the school asked parents to contribute several hundred pesos more than the customary annual fee, which is an optional, though encouraged, donation that parents give to the school for supplies.
School employees also used a colleague’s pick-up truck to buy school supplies in bulk, in order to save money.
“We stopped being able to afford liquid soap, so we put bags of soap powder in the bathrooms. We had to start telling kids to bring their own toilet paper,” Marujo said. “We’re in danger of exhausting our budget.”
However, Ruíz expressed cautious hope that robberies will soon return to pre-pandemic levels as the Mexican economy stabilises.
“Over the winter break, we saw far fewer robberies for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, and all of them were electrical cables, which is a good sign,” he said.
In Soto’s classroom, meanwhile, the fourth-graders take 15 minutes to slowly pencil in letters on their worksheets before the next lesson begins.
“You might notice some of the kids are still sitting on broken chairs,” she said. Some of the bricks in the wall are missing cement on one or two sides, so odd beams of light break through into the room.
Kolkata, India – At the three-storey building of Sarada Shishu Vidya Mandir, a school for grades five to 10 in Uluberia town in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, students gather every day at the prayer hall 15 minutes before their classes begin.
The walls in the prayer hall are bedecked with colourful posters of Hindu deities, saints, mythological figures, ancient Indian scholars, kings and Hindu religious practices. The prayer starts with the Saraswati Vandana, a chant praising Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge.
The same routine is followed at Sarada Shishu Mandir, the preprimary school for children to grade four which stands next to it.
Sarada Shishu Vidya Mandir, an RSS-run school in Howrah, West Bengal [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]
When students enter the classrooms after the prayers, they encounter the same ancient figures yet again – in a series of books called Sanskriti Bodhmala, or cultural awareness manuals, published in English, Hindi and several other Indian languages. The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are mandatory for the students of classes four to 12, who also have to take a nationally coordinated annual test based on these books.
For more than two centuries, millions of Indians, especially Hindus, have long read about the ideas and philosophies attributed to ancient scholars from what is known as the Vedic era (1500 BC to 500 BC), when many of the religion’s scriptures were written.
But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, many of these concepts have made their way into India’s vast formal schooling system, blurring the lines between religious Hindu beliefs on the one hand and established history and science on the other.
In a country where half the population is younger than 25, this, say critics, has given Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their Hindu majoritarian partners the ability to use pedagogy to influence the minds of millions of young Indians – many of whom will be voting for the first time in national elections expected to be held between March and May.
Atoms to aviation
Vedic-era philosopher Kanada was the world’s first atomic scientist, say the books meant for the students of classes four and six.
Kanada, in his book Vaisheshika Darshan, did write about anu (atoms) being the smallest particles of substances that cannot be further divided. But the substances he listed – prithvi (earth), jala (water), tejas (fire), vayu (air), akasha (ether), kala (time), dik (space), atma (soul) and manas (mind) — make it clear, say scientists, that he was speaking in philosophical or metaphysical terms.
The class five textbook tells them that Vedic sage Bharadwaja, who is credited with writing the book Vymaanika Shastra (Science of Aeronautics), was the “father of aviation”. The class five and class 12 books call ancient Indian physician Sushruta “the inventor of plastic surgery”.
The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are not approved by the government. But they have been taught in addition to the state-approved syllabus for decades in a large chain of schools run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the far-right ideological mentor of the BJP.
The schools are formally operated by Vidya Bharati, the education wing of the RSS, which controls more than 12,000 such schools catering to nearly 32 million students across India. The schools are affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) or the government education boards of the states they are located in.
A poster on a school wall depicts RSS founder KB Hedgewar and his successor MS Golwalkar as ‘great men who birthed a new awakening in the Hindu society’ [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]
In recent years, unsubstantiated historical and scientific claims – being taught in Vidya Bharati schools – have made their way into the formal syllabus of state-run schools.
The claims of Kanada’s atomic theory and Sushruta’s plastic surgery are already a part of the curriculum of the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) – an education board controlled by the federal government. The NIOS describes itself as “the largest open schooling system in the world with a cumulative enrolment of 4.13 million [during last five years]” students.
The NIOS curriculum also encourages students to find out about Vedic mathematics – another subject taught specifically at RSS schools.
The National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) new module on India’s moon mission says the book Vymaanika Shaastra “seemingly reveals that our civilisation had the knowledge of flying vehicles”.
The NCERT is the apex body advising the federal and state governments on school education, including model textbooks. However, various state education boards may differ from NCERT’s advice and pursue their own syllabus. Among federal government boards, CBSE had 1.2 million students appearing in the grade 12 exams and 1.8 million students appearing in the grade 10 exams in 2020.
In Vidya Bharati schools, students must keep shoes outside classrooms [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]
In 2019, federal Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal said, “Our scriptures mentioned the concept of gravity much before Newton discovered it.” Sanskriti Bodhmala books say the same, one of its books attributing it to fifth-century mathematician Aryabhatta and another to 12th-century mathematician Bhaskaracharya.
“The Sanskriti Bodhmala books have no conflict with the formal syllabus, as the history presented here is entirely missing in the existing formal syllabus, which thoroughly neglects India’s pre-Mughal history. That is where we stress on,” Proloy Adhikary, in charge of Uluberia’s Sarada Vidya Mandir, told Al Jazeera.
He said the National Education Policy (NEP) that the Modi government has introduced had been implemented in Vidya Bharati schools for several years now.
“The NEP has taken some of our schools’ practices to the broader sphere,” he said, hoping for more information from the Sanskriti Bodhmala books to find their way into the formal national school syllabus.
‘Glorious culture’
Vidya Bharati says its cultural awareness examination for students was introduced in their schools “with a view to transmitting a glorious culture to the new generation”.
Debangshu Kumar Pati, a Vidya Bharati official in West Bengal, claimed the contents of their books are well-researched. “We inform students of the history that the colonialist and Marxist historians have suppressed to make generations of Hindus feel inferior,” he told Al Jazeera.
A large photo of Swami Vivekananda at the Vidya Bharati school [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]
But historians – not just Marxists among them – as well as scientists and other critics have accused the Modi government of altering school syllabi to suit their Hindu nationalist agenda.
Hilal Ahmed, associate professor of history at New Delhi’s Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS), told Al Jazeera no one can be blamed for telling new histories “as the discovery of the past always lies in the future – as long as proper historiographical methods are followed”.
“Since history writing is a complex process, serious historians have evolved methods and protocols, including the requirements to verify the veracity of the sources, introducing the sources, and explaining how the information is being interpreted and connections are being made. But these schools don’t follow the protocol of citing serious history,” he said.
Ahmed thinks the Sanskriti Bodhmala textbooks present history as if they have discovered “the final truth of the past”, calling them “anti-student”.
“They introduce a kind of pedagogy that would not allow the students to draw their own meanings of the past. The students would be hostile to other renditions of history. They are being prevented from thinking of the past afresh in the future,” he said.
Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, one of India’s best-known cosmologists, debunked many such claims in his 2003 book, The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times. Most claims about modern scientific discoveries having a Vedic origin “do not stand up to scientific scrutiny”, Narlikar wrote, adding: “That they were curious about the universe is beyond doubt. But that they knew what modern science talks about today cannot be accepted.”
In 2023, when Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief S Somanath claimed that major scientific developments in branches like metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, aeronautical sciences, and physics took place in ancient India and were later taken to Europe by the Arabs, Breakthrough Science Society (BSS) issued a statement, asking, “If superior knowledge in astronomy, aeronautical engineering, etc., is available in the ancient texts in Sanskrit, why isn’t the ISRO using them?”
“Can he [Somanath] show one piece of technology or theory that ISRO has taken from the Vedas and applied to make a rocket or a satellite?” the statement asked. The BSS is a Kolkata-based group of rationalist scientists.
From fringe to mainstream
Vidya Bharati’s role in pushing a certain kind of history is part of a larger project of what critics have called the “saffronisation” of education, after the favoured colour of the Hindu right. It is a process pursued by the Modi government and the institutions controlled by it.
The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are published by Vidya Bharati Sanskriti Shiksha Sansthan, whose former president, Govind Prasad Sharma, served on the BJP government’s National Curriculum Framework’s steering committee formed in 2021.
Of the 25 focus groups the state-run NCERT formed to develop the National Curriculum Framework, based on which new textbooks for government schools were written, five had Vidya Bharati officials as members.
The Bengali language versions of Sanskriti Bodhmala textbooks [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]
According to Vidya Bharati’s national president D Ramakrishna Rao, “senior and retired teachers” of their schools were being picked up as resource people in many Indian states for writing textbooks for government schools.
“Vidya Bharati has been putting its all-out efforts and providing unstinted support to the government at the [education] policy preparation stage for almost five years,” Rao wrote in a column for a right-wing website in 2021.
Some of their schools’ principals and office bearers are members of the committee for the development of the National Professional Standards for Teachers, and almost every state task force for the implementation of the NEP included their representatives who “actively monitor” the process, Rao added.
‘Catch the Hindu minds young’
Between 1999 and 2004, when the BJP formed its first-ever federal government, a similar effort to change school curriculum was made.
A key name to emerge for that project was Dinanath Batra, then Vidya Bharati’s general secretary. Shortly after Modi came to national power in 2014, his home state Gujarat made Batra’s books mandatory in government schools.
Batra is a pioneer among Hindu nationalist historians, even though globally acclaimed historians such as Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib accuse him of turning both history and geography into fantasy.
Journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, who has authored several books on Hindu nationalism, and has a biography of Modi, told Al Jazeera the Vidya Bharati schools are part of the RSS’s larger strategy of creating hegemony over all walks of life, including education.
Mukhopadhyay said the idea behind the RSS operating such a large network of schools across the country is to “catch the Hindu minds young and instil the idea of ancient Hindu invincibility, a past when Hindu India was the dominant race all over the world and that the golden bird of Indian civilisation was destroyed by thousands of years of slavery, first in the hands of Muslims and then the [Christian] colonial powers”.
He said Modi’s rule has given the Hindu nationalists “their best chance to restore that ancient glory of global Hindu superiority”.
“If you instil such thoughts in children’s minds, they will grow up with a tremendous amount of anger against Muslims and Christians. Such information attempts to create a constant state of paranoia in Hindu minds about the entire world being a conspirator against Hindu supremacy,” he said.
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