India: Kashmir: On the Way Back?
By Athar Parvaiz and Animesh Roul / In Asia Pacific, Society & Education / October 5, 2010
Kashmir/New Delhi | In May of this year, four Kashmiri candidates passed India’s prestigious civil service examination. But what sparked celebration all across the region was the rare feat achieved by one of them, Shah Faisal, who topped the examination with the best score. This was the first time that as many as four Kashmiri youths had qualified for India’s civil service – and that one of them excelled above all others was the icing on the cake.
The results in the civil service exam, one of India’s most competitive exams, led to almost a month of celebrations. Faisal was driven to his native village with a fleet of cars that even a political leader with a huge following would envy. “It was an outburst of pent-up emotions as Kashmiris have witnessed nothing worthwhile happening in the last 21 years, particularly in the field of education,” explained psychologist Malik Roshan Ara.
The students’ success was the latest sign that the education system in Kashmir has at last started to recover since the devastation wrought by the latest conflict over the disputed territory, which started in 1989 and quickly accelerated over the following years. The violence only started to decline in 2004. During those years of intense conflict in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which claimed tens of thousands of victims, the education sector suffered the worst fate next to tourism. Already in 1995, a four-member committee from New Delhi, headed by the social policy analyst Joseph Gathia, concluded that children were the “biggest victims of violence in Kashmir.”
The Gathia committee found that more than 400 schools were gutted during the early 1990s; more than 60 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 14 were deprived of education opportunities because of the surrounding violence; paramilitary forces occupied a large number of rural school buildings; and the presence of those soldiers in and around education institutions created a psychosis of fear among school-going children.
The academic atmosphere in the entire Kashmir valley atrophied because of the physical turmoil and psychological pressure of conflict. The abrupt large-scale migration of Pandits (Kashmiri Hindus) from the valley due to the armed conflict meant that the system lost many of its best teachers. Disruptions in the academic calendar were brought about by violent incidents and repeated strikes, not to mention dereliction of duty by education staff claiming that they were avoiding the conflict. Education standards were not enforced, leading to rampant copying of work and several cases of brazen cheating on standardized examinations.
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