UNESCO’s recent State of the Education Report for India 2020, found that 69 per cent of the teachers across private and government sectors in India were working without a contract and earning an average salary barely above Rs 10,000.
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For some years, Indian Muslims had lived in a collective nostalgia which contrasted with the humiliations of the present. This was now blended with a sense of imminent doom. Months before the bill was passed, I was combing the streets of Old Delhi, looking for the poet, Zauq, in his neglected shrine, and for Ghalib in his achkan and cap and beard, paired with his trademark air of rebellion. I wondered whether they, too, could be pulled by their beards or made to pull their pants down in their Dilli in “New India”.
My longings for the past do not feature sultanates and caliphates but something far more scarce to my kin: dignity. Struggling for this scarce resource, and bearing a colonially dictated version of identity, India’s Muslims have always simmered in its margins. That was until last year, when the mundane streets of Okhla became boundless, celestial spaces of reclamation. Spaces like this soon sprung up across the country.