History teacher suspended for ill-treating Muslim students

– History teacher of a high school in Shimoga in Karnataka was yesterday suspended for discriminating against Muslim students in his class and ill-treating them.

Acting on a complaint lodged by a host of organizations including National Students Union of India (NSUI), the management of National High School in Shimoga decided to suspend history teacher P K Pandey, was has been accused of openly deriding Muslim students in the class and passing contemptuous remarks against them.

According to NSUI activists, the history teacher had asked the ten Muslim students of tenth standard in National High School to sit on a separate bench and would frequently taunt them as “beef eaters” in front of the entire class.

After the recent arrest of Bangalore-based doctor Mohammed Haneef in Australia in connection with the failed terror plot at Glasgow airport, the history teacher began branding Muslims as terrorists and used to insult the Muslim students in the class by asking whether even they would become terrorists when they grew up.

The teacher, who used to frequently threaten the students, had also beaten them occasionally.

The students had begun skipping the school since the ten to fifteen days. “We were afraid to go to school as the teacher would again insult us in front of everybody”, Nawab, a student of the school, told a regional television channel.

NSUI activists said the suspended history teacher had a track record of subjecting students to religious discrimination and had been removed from a private school on similar charges about five years ago.