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By:

Shoumojit Banerjee

27 August 2024 at 9:57:52 am

Classroom of Courage

In drought-scarred Maharashtra, a couple’s experiment in democratic schooling is turning child beggars into model citizens In the parched stretches of Maharashtra, from Solapur to the drought-hit villages of Marathwada, a modest social experiment has quietly unfolded for nearly two decades. It is neither a grand government scheme nor a corporate-backed charity. Since 2007, the Ajit Foundation, founded by Mahesh and Vinaya Nimbalkar, has worked with children living at the sharpest edges of...

Classroom of Courage

In drought-scarred Maharashtra, a couple’s experiment in democratic schooling is turning child beggars into model citizens In the parched stretches of Maharashtra, from Solapur to the drought-hit villages of Marathwada, a modest social experiment has quietly unfolded for nearly two decades. It is neither a grand government scheme nor a corporate-backed charity. Since 2007, the Ajit Foundation, founded by Mahesh and Vinaya Nimbalkar, has worked with children living at the sharpest edges of society in Maharashtra. The foundation has become a home for out-of-school children, those who have never enrolled, the children of migrant labourers and single parents, and those who scavenge at garbage dumps or drift between odd jobs. To call their foundation an “NGO” is to miss the point. Vinaya Nimbalkar describes it as a “democratic laboratory”, where education is not merely instruction but an initiation into citizenship. The couple were once government schoolteachers with the Solapur Zilla Parishad, leading stable lives. Yet what they witnessed unsettled them: children who had never held a pencil, begging at traffic signals or sorting refuse for a living. Prompted by this reality, the Nimbalkars resigned their jobs to work full-time for the education of such children. Leap of Faith They began modestly, teaching children in migrant settlements in Solapur and using their own salaries to pay small honorariums to activists. Funds soon ran dry, and volunteers drifted away. Forced out of their home because of their commitment to the cause, they started a one-room school where Vinaya, Mahesh, their infant son Srijan and forty children aged six to fourteen lived together as an unlikely family. The experiment later moved to Barshi in the Solapur district with support from Anandvan. Rural hardship, financial uncertainty and the pandemic repeatedly tested their resolve. At one stage, they assumed educational guardianship of nearly 200 children from families that survived by collecting scrap on the village outskirts. Eventually, the foundation relocated to Talegaon Dabhade near Pune, where it now runs a residential hostel. Twenty-five children currently live and study there. The numbers may seem modest, but the ambition is not. Democracy in Practice What distinguishes the Ajit Foundation is not only who it serves but also how it operates. Within its walls, democracy is practised through a Children’s Gram Panchayat and a miniature Municipal Council elected by the children themselves. Young candidates canvass, hold meetings and present their budgets. Children maintain accounts and share decisions about chores, activities and certain disciplinary matters. In a country where democratic culture is often reduced to voting, the foundation’s approach is quietly radical. It treats children from marginalised backgrounds as citizens in formation. The right to choose — whether to focus on sport, cooking, mathematics or cultural activities — is respected. “We try never to take away what is their own,” says Vinaya Nimbalkar. Rather than forcing every child into a uniform academic mould, individual abilities are encouraged. A boy skilled in daily calculations may not be pushed into hours of bookish study; a girl who excels in cooking may lead the kitchen team. For children who have known only precarity, standing for election, managing a budget or speaking at a meeting can be transformative. On International Women’s Day, the foundation seeks visibility not just for praise but for partnership. If you are inspired by their mission, consider supporting or collaborating—your involvement can help extend opportunities to more children in need.

A Liberal Emblem

Menaka Guruswamy’s likely entry into Parliament will make history, but it also exposes the curious theatre of liberalism in West Bengal’s ruling party.

When India’s Parliament next convenes its Upper House, it is likely to witness a historic first. Menaka Guruswamy, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India, is poised to become the country’s first openly lesbian Member of Parliament. Her path to the Rajya Sabha comes through nomination by the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), the ruling party of West Bengal led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, whose comfortable majority in the State Assembly means her victory is all but assured.


Potent symbolism is at play here. For decades, queer Indians were criminalised under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the colonial-era law that outlawed same-sex relations. In 2018 the Supreme Court of India struck down the offending provisions in a landmark judgment. Among the lawyers arguing that case were Guruswamy and her partner, Arundhati Katju, who framed their arguments around dignity, privacy and constitutional equality. The verdict marked one of the most consequential expansions of civil liberties in modern India.


Guruswamy’s legal pedigree is formidable. Educated at the National Law School of India University, the University of Oxford and Harvard Law School, she has spent decades litigating constitutional questions and civil-rights disputes. Her courtroom work and academic writing have earned international recognition; in 2019 she appeared on Time magazine’s list of the world’s hundred most influential people and on Forbes India’s roster of trailblazing women. In India’s tightly knit legal circles, she is widely regarded as an advocate who relishes complex constitutional battles.


Yet her nomination is about more than legal brilliance. It is also about optics. Mamata Banerjee TMC has long cultivated an image of progressive pluralism. Elevating a globally recognised, openly lesbian constitutional lawyer allows the party to burnish that image further.


But for all its claims to enlightened liberalism, the political ecosystem over which the TMC presides has recently been associated with episodes that sit uneasily with such branding. The Sandeshkhali disgrace where women from several villages suffered at the hands of local TMC strongmen in a regime of intimidation, extortion and sexual coercion revealed to the hilt the dark underside of West Bengal’s political machinery.


If Sandeshkhali ripped the façade of the TMC’s rural governance, the horror that unfolded months later at R. G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata shook the state’s – and India’s - urban conscience after the body of a young trainee doctor was discovered inside the hospital premises after she had been brutally raped and murdered while on duty. The crime, committed within one of the city’s most prominent medical institutions, provoked nationwide outrage.


Since then, Sandeshkhali and the R. G. Kar Medical College case have become reference points in the national conversation about the abysmal standards of governance in Banerjee’s state.


Thet have complicated the narrative of a government eager to present itself as the custodian of ‘progressive’ values. While the TMC speaks fluently in the language of inclusivity when it comes to minority communities, its local networks of patronage and muscle that underpin its electoral machine thrive with impunity. In such a landscape, the elevation of a high-profile liberal icon can appear less like systemic reform than reputational varnish.


None of this diminishes Guruswamy’s personal achievement. Though one might question why she chose a party that has had such a dismal record on women’s rights. That said, the very fact that a major party feels comfortable nominating an openly lesbian figure to Parliament reflects the distance the country has travelled since the days when Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code lurked in the statute book. India’s Parliament, despite its scale and diversity, has rarely included openly LGBTQ politicians. Guruswamy’s presence will therefore mark a symbolic widening of the democratic tent.


But symbolism can cut two ways. For admirers, her nomination signals that India’s politics is slowly accommodating new forms of identity and representation. For sceptics, it illustrates how adept political parties have become at borrowing the language of liberalism while presiding over systems that often remain stubbornly illiberal.


Either way, Guruswamy is about to enter a chamber not known for understatement. Her career has been spent invoking constitutional ideals of equality, fraternity and non-discrimination. The test of her parliamentary tenure may lie not merely in representing those ideals, but in navigating the contradictions of the political machinery that has brought her there.

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