An unsual song ‘Manushya tu bada mahaan hai’ rang out from FD High School in the Muslim-dominated Juhapura area in Ahmedabad rural district.
On Friday, as part of a new mandatory morning ritual, the students were singing the song which is closely linked to the RSS.
As reported in The Indian Express, the initiative begin to happen together with a state-wide painting competition on “Mahatma Gandhi and Cleanliness” to mark Gandhi’s 67th death anniversary.
A senior office-bearer of the FD Education Society which runs 24 schools in Urdu, English and Gujarati medium, mostly in areas with a significant Muslim population such as Jamalpur, Dariyapur and Juhapura has criticized the inclusion of the RSS-linked song.
According to Shafee Maniar, vice chairman of F D Education society, “Songs with religious notions attached should not be forced upon schools like ours which have an entire population from a particular religion. What if we had students from other religions and asked them to follow our prayers and rituals?”
Mohammad Hussain Gena, principal of FD High School, Juhapura, said, “These two songs — ‘Manushya tu bada mahaan hai’ and ‘Vaishnav jan to’ — were given to us by the DEO’s office in a pen drive so that these could be played for students. Since these songs are new to the children, we arranged a workshop where a teacher explained the meaning of these songs to them. Now, these would be incorporated in our morning assembly schedule.”
DEO (Rural) M I Joshi who decided to include these motivational songs in the morning assembly — three days a week and confirmed that the “entire DEO office was on inspection rounds across schools” to make sure that the new directives were put into practice.
“I myself visited ten schools. Other officials have been deputed to visit schools in various areas,” said Joshi.