BHANDARA: Caste hatred can lead to the strangest of obscurantist behaviour, as a group of upper-caste teachers in a rural school demonstrated recently.
After a Dalit headmistress of the Zilla Parishad Higher Middle School at Surewada village was transferred, the successor, an upper-caste teacher, ordered the premises %u2014 and even students %u2014 to be 'purified' by spraying cow urine.
The school, located 9 km from Bhandara town in Maharashtra, has 210 students in classes I -VII, 20 of them Dalits.
It was headed until now by Tilottama Tembhurkar, who was hated by her upper caste colleagues for having made it to the top.
They reportedly openly discussed how her presence was 'inauspicious' for a school where bulk of the students were from upper castes.
So when Tembhurkar left and the charge was handed over to Sharad Kaitade, who boasted of caste pedigree, earlier this month, the first act of the new headmaster was one of 'purification'.
Kaitade allegedly performed a puja in the school and asked a lady teacher, Madhavi Raut, to sprinkle 'gau mutra' in the classes and school premises.
Raut took her orders seriously and promptly went around classrooms armed with cow urine %u2014 even sprinkling it on students who were taking their annual exams.
She entered a class where Dalit students were also solving question papers and asked them to get up and get the 'go mutra' shower, saying it would 'purify' them.
The administration ordered a probe and police interrogated the headmaster.
