Debolina Dutta conducted the first of its four-part series workshop, on issues of human rights, at Chowringhee High School on 15 January 2008. 18 students, both girls and boys, from standard VIII and IX participated in the one and a half hour session.

The session started by screening two clippings from Anand Patwardhan’s Ribbons for Peace music video. Students were then asked to reflect on the video. They said that despite the ‘macabre scenes’ the only thing that stood out was the relentless ‘message of peace’ that it seemed to urge. For many of these young minds, the ‘rationale for peace’ found reflection in the simple yet stark question, ‘If some people begin by conducting a wrong, why must everyone else follow?’ Does the notion of peace exist but only superficially? What prompts people to adopt violence or violent methods? When is violence ‘legitimised’? Does ‘peace’ then become a symbol for weakness…

Participants were taken through what seemed complex conceptualisation around the notion of peace and violence—however this was done by asking the participants to reflect on a situation where they themselves faced the threat of violence, which led to some amount of self-questioning. Participants felt that a violent act was sometimes legitimised, citing their own example, for instance, when they are being hit or beaten up, and when the justification used for such acts was that it was ‘for their own good’. Some of the students said that they were led to believe this and it often ‘normalised’ the use of force against them.

The next set of issues that the workshop focused on centred around the notion of rights. Debolina asked the students what they understood by the term ‘right’. One of them responded by saying ‘right means haq’, expanding the notion to include ‘jeene ka haq (Right to Life)’ amongst others.
The students were then asked whether people should have the ‘right to harm other people’, to which they responded that ‘it is wrong to consider such rights favourable. It is wrong because, it’s simply ‘not accepted by everybody’.

The Group Exercise: ‘Human Rights for All’

This orientation session with the students, which included substantial amount of questioning and the concomitant search for answers, helped spur the ‘flow of ideas’ in the young minds. The students were now divided into small groups and the task set before them was of formulating rights that are applicable to everybody—more specifically, to children, young girls, women, men and older people. The group ex- ercise did yield interesting results. The rights listed spanned from the most fundamental to something as essential as ‘right to protest against wrongs’. The group felt that it was every child’s right to play. The recurring question vis-à-vis rights as framed by the students were the right to be protected against all forms of exploitation.

What the Students felt

One of the students said, before the workshop, it ‘never occurred to her to think about such issues…I look forward to participating in the next workshop’. The participants acknowledged that this workshop was good fun for them as it meant a welcome break from monotony of textbooks and towards a more engaging discussion on pertinent issues. Certainly, the brief session left an impact in the minds of the students in order to frame an abstract notion of ‘human rights’ into small but meaningful articulations centered around their lived-in realities and expand it from those coordinates to something that has a universal application. There was much to ponder over.

— A report by Siddharth Hajra