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Author: Rashmee Roshan Lall
Publication: The Times of India
Date: October 14, 2005
Britain has officially decreed that its future generations of Indian-origin schoolchildren may substitute Christian prayer with morning mantras, aartis and Vedic ritual, and has announced that it will pay for the country's first, government-sponsored Hindu school.
News that the school will be established with £10 million of government money and will he run by the I-Foundation, a religious partner of the persuasive, power-networked and peaceful Iskcon movement, prompted a cheer from many of the UK's estimated 700,000 Hindus.
The British government's nod to Hindu educational aspirations for future generations comes some years after the first state-funded Sikh school opened its doors in west London. Several state-funded Muslim schools are already thriving, alongside at least 30 Jewish state schools and thousands of Anglican establishments.
On Thursday, ordinary British Hindu families in far-flung parts of the British capital admitted they would earnestly endeavour to secure a place for their children at the new Hindu school to "learn Hindu values, to say Hindu prayers and have a Hindu priest to cater to religious needs". It's expected to be heavily over-subscribed when the first state-funded Hindu school opens in 2010 in Harrow, west London, which boasts the country's largest concentration of Hindus as a percentage of the population.
But Britain's first and only state-funded Hindu school will begin its instruction more than two decades after the Dutch government paid for and allowed the establishment of Holland's very own Hindu Modern, an American high school-style secondary school called Shri Vishnu in The Hague.
On Thursday, Rainesh Kallidai, secretary-general of the umbrella Hindu Forum of which the I-Foundation is a part, told TOI that the next step would logically be to have state-funded Hindu schools in other parts of Britain where large Hindu populations lived and worked.
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