On 14 June, the Kalaburagi Bench of the Karnataka High Court dismissed the sedition case against Shaheen Primary & High School.
School students being questioned by the police while the cops video-graph the session
It was an act that left the Karnataka Police red-faced, with a little girl’s slippers in their hands.
The Shaheen Primary and High School near Shahpur Gate in the town of Bidar divided the students into different groups, and each group was told to present an art form.
Eleven students of Classes IV to VI of the school in the Kalaburagi district of Karnataka came up with and rehearsed a play on 21 January, 2020. The nameless play was to be presented on Republic Day that year.
It was the beginning of a trying three-year-long legal battle for the school, the students, and their parents.
It ended with the Kalaburagi Bench of the Karnataka High Court quashing a sedition case against the management on Wednesday, 14 June.
The police registered the case based on a piece of dialogue from the play’s lead actor, an 11-year-old girl. “We will slipper them,” said the character, if anyone told them that India — where they had been living for more than 50 years — was not their country.
The reference was apparently to the widely-protested Citizen (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
A day after Justice Hemant Chandangoudar of the Kalaburagi Bench of the Karnataka High Court dismissed the case, Thouseef Madikeri, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Shaheen Foundation, which runs the school, spoke about the legal journey in an interview with South First.
Q. What was the case all about?
A. I remember everything as if it happened just yesterday. The play’s duration was around 10 minutes and 11 students participated in it. An 11-year-old was the lead character. It was her dialogue in the play that led to the case.
“We have been living here in our motherland, India, for more than 50 years, and if anyone tells us now that this is not our country and we don’t belong here anymore, we would ‘slipper’ (to beat with a slipper) them,” was the dialogue.
This became controversial and led to the arrest of two people.
Q. Tell us more about the ordeal the students had to undergo.
A. The students who participated in the play were from the fourth, fifth, and sixth standards. The video of the play went viral on social media.
Students of Shaheen Primary and High School coming out after being questioned by the police. (Supplied)
There was no mention of the prime minister — and certainly not by name — in the dialogue. Despite this, the police registered a sedition case against the school management.
The case was registered based on an activist’s complaint that the play enacted in the school had anti-national content and insulted Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Uniformed policemen armed with lathis and firearms questioned around 85 students — both actors and those in the audience — at the school. They interrogated the students for at least five-six days.
Five to 10 students were interrogated each day continuously that week. It was a harrowing experience.
Q. Didn’t child rights activists protest against the police action?
A. Yes, there were protests, but the students and the teachers had to go through the ordeal.
Even the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) protested against the police for interrogating the students who were supposed to be in class. But the investigators went about their job.
Child rights activists, too, protested and even filed a public interest litigation in the court against the police questioning the students.
We were cent percent sure that the upper court would quash the case since it lacked substance and was politically motivated. Our professional rivals, too, acted against us.
Q. To what extent were the students harassed?
A. Around 85 students were questioned by uniformed policemen in our school. Two persons — headmistress Farida Begum and the mother of the 11-year-old girl — were arrested. They both were jailed for about 15 days, after which they were released on bail.
The 11-year-old girl, who delivered the dialogue, was wearing a pair of slippers she had borrowed from a friend who was also a part of the play. The police visited the other girl’s residence and confiscated her slippers as “evidence”.
The police told her parents that it was with those pair of slippers in which the dialogue was delivered and hence they should be seized.
It was a secular play where the dialogues were meant to be satirical and received with a sense of humour. However, it went the other way.
Q. Did these developments affect the school’s reputation or other parents’ attitudes towards the institute?
A. No, it did not affect our institution’s reputation in any way. We have around 20,000 plus students in 60-plus branches across the state.
We knew that the case would not stand as the police could not file a charge sheet even after three years because there was no evidence.
It was just political harassment. Even though we are a minority institution, around 45 percent of our student community are non-Muslims and they continue their education without any issues.
Ours is a reputed institution run with philanthropic values, and we did not care about the case. We knew that it would be quashed. We filed for quashing the case after we managed to secure bail for the two who were arrested.
Q. The high court has dismissed the case. How do you feel?
A. We are delighted and relieved. We thank the news media and the support we received from activists.
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