When claims surfaced on Twitter that Hindu girls were being forced to wear the hijab by the school, the Damoh administration promptly looked into them, but they turned up no evidence.
The Madhya Pradesh home minister, Narottam Mishra, ordered a thorough police investigation into a private school’s poster congratulating 18 students for their performance in the board exam on Wednesday after a social media uproar over the girls’ head scarves, regardless of their religion, broke out.
The minister stepped in after the families of the four Hindu girls who are depicted in the poster declined to lodge a complaint when they were first contacted by the Damoh district administration during a preliminary investigation started as a result of comments from social media. In a tweet posted on Tuesday, NCPCR chairman Priyank Kanoongo claimed that the organisation had received a complaint alleging that a school in MP’s Damoh district was requiring female students of Hindu and other non-Muslim faiths to wear a burka and hijab.
The district administration found no such complaint in its investigation, which was carried out by the district education officer and the deputy collector. “We spoke with students, and they denied that the administration of the school had forced them to wear the hijab. They claimed that their family had no issues with them wearing scarves similar to the hijab to cover themselves in public. Deputy collector RL Bagri asked on Wednesday, “How can we act without a complainant?
The head of the Ganga Jamna Higher Secondary School, which is at the centre of the controversy, Mustaq Mohammad, disproved the claim. The claim that we forced the Hindu students to wear the hijab is unfounded. They used to wear the scarves themselves, and the students even supplied the images for the posters. Nobody was ever made to wear anything other than their school uniform.
The district administration announced that it will conduct a comprehensive investigation as per the home minister’s instructions.
Damoh SP Rakesh Kumar Singh said, “We will look into the matter and record the statement of the students and their parents to know the truth.”
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