BJP fights for minority educational rights in Ireland

Holds a protest march from Dublin's Leinster House to Department of Education to demand 'equality in education'

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is fighting for minority rights, but in Ireland.

The overseas arm of the party, the Overseas Friends of BJP or OFBJP, has taken up the cause of minority educational rights in Ireland. On Sunday, it held a protest march from Dublin’s Leinster House to the Department of Education to demand “equality in education”.

The immediate provocation for the “Hindu community” to come together was when its member Roopesh Panicker, a resident of Dublin, was asked to baptize her four-year-old daughter if he wished that she be admitted to a government-run school near their house.

Panicker, in a Facebook post, has claimed how he couldn’t enroll his daughter to the neighbourhood school and six other schools, all of which put her on a waiting list, because of the “Catholics first” enrolment policy where schools require a baptismal certificate as a precondition for enrolling students. “We now travel six km each way in busy Dublin traffic to send her to school. My daughter is only four-years-old, and cannot understand why she cannot go to school with her friends in her local community,” he writes.

Panicker says when he contacted Archbishop’s office, he was told: "Why don't you baptize your child?” “The suggestion shocked my Hindu Irish family, and me. We suffered many sleepless nights, as we know that almost 97 per cent of Irish state funded schools are still run by religious institutions (mostly the Catholic Church). We even considered leaving the country in search of somewhere less discriminatory to live,” he says.

He, along with OFBJP and dozens of other Hindu families, held a protest march on October 25 to demand that "religious minorities and non-religious families don’t continue to suffer religious discrimination when accessing state funded schools."

A statement from the OFBJP Ireland to its members said: “As you all know that we are living in a foreign country where we have to preserve our Hindu culture and protect our Indian identity (but) there were continuous instances faced by group of Indians or individual families where we were forced to convert or were asked to compromise on our great religion of Hinduism…This is the time we all should get united as we are a minority here in Ireland and united we can definitely protect and preserve our culture and our religion in this country.”

Panicker and others have also posted a petition on website change.org to demand make Irish education laws less discriminatory. The petition says each year hundreds of parents are being blocked from access to schools because they refuse to baptize their children and families are forced to move house. Some are forced to resort to "pragmatic baptisms". The petition demands from the Irish government to increase the number of nondenominational schools.

"Our (Irish) system should be changed to protect: "religious freedom, right to education and religious equality," the petition demands.