RSS poisoning in Meghalaya

“I want to join the Army and fight Pakistan,” says 15-year-old Dhangapaya.

And what if he doesn’t get selected? “I will join the Bajrang Dal and protect the country.” From whom? “Terrorists, anti-nationals, those promoting western culture…” he rattles off in faultless Kannada.

Dhangapaya is one of the 70 children from Meghalaya who are receiving free education at the Sri Rama Vidya Kendra – an institution run by the RSS in a small town near Mangalore called Kalladka.

Locals in this unremarkable town in Dakshina Kannada district often say that Kalladka is famous for two things – KT and KP

Dhangapaya is one of the 70 children from Meghalaya who are receiving free education at the Sri Rama Vidya Kendra, an institution run by the RSS, in Kalladka, Mangalore (Photo: HT)

KT or Kalladka Tea is a special tea preparation and KP stands for Kalladka Prabhakar Bhat. The head of the Sri Rama group of institutions, Bhat is described as the most powerful RSS leader in south India and the architect of the first BJP government here. His admirers call him the Bal Thackeray of Karnataka for his fiery speeches. Detractors say he is the reason coastal Karnataka has seen an upsurge in communal violence since the 1970s.

There have been seven major Hindu-Muslim flare ups in Kalladka town this year. Bhat’s students have been listed as accused in at least three of these cases. In two cases, registered in March, Muslim victims alleged that students from Meghalaya pelted stones at their houses. The names of the accused students are being withheld as all of them are minors. Although he wasn’t part of it, Dhangapaya says the violence in March was a response to provocation by the Muslims who live just outside the school campus. “They attended a Congress rally where they said insulting things about Guruji (Bhat),” he says.

“Dhangapaya is one of our star students. He will be a great leader one day,” says a beaming Bhat of the boy who came to him at the tender age of five. Dhangapaya is proficient in the Hindu scriptures and in martial arts and is an ace sportsman. Brimming with the Sangh’s ideology, he feels Love Jihad is one of the biggest problems facing the country.

“Why can’t Muslim and Christian men find women in their own communities?” he asks, “All they want is to convert our women.” Dhangapaya’s polemic sounds like an echo of an incendiary speech, targeting Christians and Muslims, that Bhat delivered just ahead of the parliamentary elections this year for which he was booked by the police. Here’s the irony: Dhangapaya’s father is Christian and his mother follows a tribal faith.

Like Dhangapaya, hundreds of students from the north east have passed out of the Sri Rama Vidya Kendra in the last 15 years. “Ours was one of the first RSS-run institutions in Karnataka to host these children,” says Bhat, “The project was started by Thukaram Shetty, one of our pracharaks, in the 1990s with the help of the [Meghalaya-based] Lei Synshar Cultural Society.” He estimates that today there are at least 5,000 students from all over the north east in schools run by the RSS and its affiliates in Karnataka.

In 2009, an investigation conducted by the Child Welfare Committee of Dakshina Kannada found that children from the north east were being illegally trafficked without proper paperwork by the RSS “to be trained and indoctrinated in Hindutva”.

The committee found that, in most cases, the children had been listed as orphans and that Thukaram Shetty had posed as their sole guardian. The CWC’s report, which was shared with the State governments of Karnataka and Meghalaya, said that the parents were told that their children were being taught in English medium schools. In reality, they were put in Kannada medium schools.

The report stated that in violation of the UN Convention on the rights of the Child, which stipulates that children must stay with their parents until the age of eight, children younger than six were being brought. Most of the children had forgotten their native language and culture. The CWC also found that the facilities in most of the RSS-run schools were extremely poor and that they did not qualify as fit institutions as prescribed by the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2000.

Following the report, the CWC came under extreme pressure from the then BJP State government and was eventually dismissed, says Geo D’Silva who was then a member of the CWC. “In December 2009, the Joint Director and Deputy Director of the Karnataka Department of Women and Child Welfare barged into our office and took away important investigation files. We never saw the files again,” he says

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