Young And Armed

India has seen its first school shootout. Now, a study shows that a growing number of students carry weapons SHOBHITA NAITHANI reports

ASHWIN MOHAN WAS 12 when he began carrying a Rampuri chaku (switch blade) to school. The reason was simple: fighting off the bullies. “The minute I flashed the knife, they would pull back,” recalls Mohan, now a 32-year-old martial arts teacher who discourages his students from carrying arms. “My knives have turned on me on several occasions and the cuts have been ugly,” he says. Instead, he teaches his students to resolve a brawl verbally or else, to simply walk away. “It signifies strength, not weakness,” he says.

Try telling that to 17-year-old Harish*, a student at a premier Delhi school. “I don’t take it lying down. I strike back,” Harish told TEHELKA, although he declined to answer when asked whether he had ever used a knife, a gun or a rod when he struck back.

According to a recent study of 550 adolescents conducted by Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital across three schools and two Delhi colleges, almost 12 percent of students between the ages of 14 and 19 now carry weapons. The weapons included knives, guns, sticks, clubs, hunters and swords. About 13.5 percent who carried a weapon have threatened or injured someone with it over the past 12 months.

Dr Rahul Sharma, who conducted the study, told Tehelka, “Students were given questionnaires and they were allowed anonymous and voluntary participation. So we can’t be sure if everybody wrote the truth.

But the study does illustrate a worrying trend. It comes six months after the Gurgaon school shootout — a first for India — in which a 14-year-old was killed by two of his classmates. On December 12, 2007, Akash Yadav had allegedly stolen his father’s revolver, and smuggled it into school along with his friend Vikas Yadav. Shortly after classes ended, Akash and Vikas — both are sons of Gurgaon property dealers — pumped five bullets into Abhishek Tyagi. Their rationale: Tyagi had been bullying them.

Akash was admitted to the Gurgaon school just six months prior to the incident — he lived with his maternal grandmother in Faridabad before that — and his mother, Kamlesh Yadav, recalls that he would repeatedly say: “Mummy, main is school mein sirf ek saal padhoonga. Phir mujhe nikaal lena (I’ll study in this school for only a year. Withdraw me after that).” Kamlesh had thought her older son was having the standard “adjusting problems”. So each time he said something about changing schools, she just reassured him, saying, “It’ll be fine”.

The 32-year-old Kamlesh says that Akash, now in a juvenile home in Faridabad, had always been a quiet child. “He never discusses anything with anyone. Not even his friends.” Of the three times she has gone to meet her son at the juvenile home, the 14-year-old has been silent through most of the visit. Akash’s father, Azad Yadav, is in jail too, booked under the Arms Act, and Kamlesh says she can’t fight the case alone.

Unlike the Gurgaon homicide, which was carried out in broad daylight, another murder — on the premises of a premier school in Lucknow, 11 years ago — had taken place quietly, in the dark. The school was shut for the annual term break in March. One Friday morning, just before dawn, two persons made their way into the bachelors’ quarters on the school premises and fired, through a broken window, at the school’s sleeping physical training instructor, Frederick Gomes. Sources told TEHELKA that the principle suspects were the 30-year-old instructor’s former students, whom he had confronted a few days before the incident. “He had caught the two boys with a girl in the school premises. He reprimanded them and slapped them. I think the boys decided to teach him a lesson,” the source said. While the sensational murder did raise concerns about firearms being so freely available to children, the case remains unsolved till date.

THOUGH KILLINGS have been rare, other kinds of violence have often gone unrecorded. Psychologists and counsellors say, if children are exposed to a weapon, there’s a strong chance they’ll bring it into play. “If a child has seen a parent or relative using a weapon to settle a score, he assumes he could do the same,” says child and adolescent psychiatrist Deepak Gupta. “Parents need to understand that they can’t allow easy access to firearms. In the Gurgaon incident, all three became victims of their parents’ heedlessness,” he adds.

Although Gupta hasn’t come across a single case of a child carrying a weapon for self-defence, Dr Shailja Sen, a clinical and family psychologist at Sitaram Bhartia Hospital in Delhi, has. Eight percent of the current load of students who come to her for counselling admit to carrying weapons (mostly knives), not to school, but when they go to parties outside the school premises. Sen says most of those boys are 14- 15 years old and are part of a school gang that functions like a “mini mafia”. But many of them feel trapped: they want to break away from the gang but are unable to do so because of peer pressure.

Violence and aggression amongst children might be a metaphor of the times we live in, but where does it stem from? “The country seems to be in a phase of adolescence. The market is opening, money is flowing and lifestyles are changing. The outcome: puzzled parents and confused children,” says Sen.

For Amit*, fights are standard. One of his classmates revealed that Amit is part of a gang that uses knives or rods to threaten anyone who picks a fight with a gang member. When confronted, Amit denied this and then angrily asked, “Weren’t you part of a gang in school?” When told that in the girls’ boarding school this writer attended, nobody beat each other up or used weapons, the riled boy insisted that fights were “normal” and that the media blows such incidents out of proportion. “The way a fight is fought hasn’t changed. My parents did it too,” he retorts.

Counsellors say that, in India, students using weapons to get back at bullies or at rival gangs, is still a one-off event. But they agree that aggression among children has escalated over the last 10 years. Cartoons, movies, animated programmes and all other media seem to echo the same theme of power, violence and antagonism.

But weren’t the films made 20 years ago equally violent? “During our time, there was only one angry young man: Amitabh Bachchan. Today, every actor on the screen is angry and glorifies bloodshed,” says Gupta.

Education consultant Abha Adams concurs, saying that fights have become more extreme over the years. Children as young as five and six years use their fists to settle differences. “There’s a growing sense of anger, frustration and an inability to control one’s emotions. It reflects a lack of respect — for oneself and for the other person,” says Adams.

Another factor contributing to their frustration could be the way our education system is designed. While our economy is changing fast, our competition-driven education system plods on as before. Children are taught that they have no value if they aren’t on top of the pile. And children who aren’t very good at academics or games or anything else, end up at the bottom of the pile. They are often ridiculed by classmates and also face recriminations at home, from parents. It is then, psychologists say, that a child feels the need to regain his self-esteem and resorts to violent behavior. What schools need to do is to allow them time and design the curriculum in such a way that helps children introspect. “Unless we give that time to children, we are going to continue being part of the juggernaut that is hurtling from one conflict to another,” warns Adams.

Some names have been changed on request