Sujit De
A new form of bullying has emerged in schools, starting from the primary level. Students from rich families show off their money power to taunt and segregate the economically backward ones.
They make fun of their classmates, who bring simple food in their tiffin boxes, or bring ordinary pencil boxes or colour pencils, or who do not go to a foreign country like them for holidays.
The principal of a school in Kolkata said that earlier bullying was a more common phenomenon in middle school, but now it started right from class I. She actually compared the present phenomenon with the recent past. Bullying was there in middle school during our school days, but this kind of class oriented bantering and segregation were generally absent. Whereas kids aged even 4-5 years are now displaying a high level of class intolerance.
There is no wonder in it, as schools cannot be quarantined from the whole society and system, both of which are plagued with class obsessions and hatred, along with rising inequality.
The 2025 Blume Ventures' Indus Valley Report says India’s main ‘consuming class’ is 10% of the population, the rest have no income to spend, and while people from the bottom 90% are unable to join the top segment, the wealthiest class is growing even wealthier. But the drum beating about the trillion dollar economy completely veiled the alarming rise in inequality, just like the wall which was erected in Ahmedabad kept the slum area out of sight during the visit of Donald Trump.
Researcher David Livingston observes that when people dehumanise others, they think of them as having the essence of an animal lower than the human on the hierarchy. But now it seems that people began dehumanising others by lowering them below animals.
Avni, a man-eater tigress, is said to have killed 13 humans from 2016 to 2018 at the Pandharkawanda - Relagaon forest of Yavatmal district in Maharashtra. Avni could not have been caught alive despite serious efforts and had to be killed in November 2018. After its death, it got much more public sympathy than what its victims got after their deaths. Even a contempt petition was filed in court against Maharashtra officials for rewarding people who had killed Avni.
Animals have access to those poor people who work in the fields to produce corps so that all of us can eat, who graze cows so that all of us can drink milk. But these people are being regarded as unnecessary as weeds.
A callous attitude to safeguard the lives of labourers has become the new normal. In spite of snowfall and avalanche alerts since February 24 this year, labourers working on a stretch of the road to Badrinath Dham had not been evacuated in time and s a result, eight of them were killed when avalanche hit the area after four days on February 28.
The media gave little space to the failed rescue operation to save the eight workers who got trapped after a portion of the Srisailam Left Bank Canal tunnel in Telangana collapsed on February 22 this year. Whereas reports on the Indian Premier League (IPL) Twenty20 cricket matches have been covered in a way as though it is a question of someone's life and death.
A few days ago, a worker died in Kolkata after he fell from a scaffolding. Such tragic accidents has become a routine affair because workers are forced to work without adequate safety equipment. As a result, deaths after falling from scaffolding or while cleaning a tank or in a tunnel happen frequently in India.
But these news published in brief evokes little public sympathy. The bitter truth is whether a victim's plight will evoke public sympathy or not depends on the victim's class and caste.