From being bigoted, kids are ‘hope of secularism’. The Wire’s Rohini Singh explains how

The Wire journalist Rohini Singh on Wednesday took to Twitter to share an image wherein she claimed that her child drew a mosque and a temple side by side and wrote an essay on tolerance.

https://twitter.com/rohini_sgh/status/1291037746463555585?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

On the left side, Singh claims her child painted the green mosque next to a red coloured temple and wrote on ‘tolerance’. “Tolerance is not about accepting bad behaviour, but accepting “people” for who they are and treating those how “you” wish to be treated. Being tolerant of differences doesn’t mean sacrificing your own heritage or beliefs. We can be proud and stand by those beliefs 100% while continuing to celebrate the differences of others,” the child writes. Except both the things are plagiarised.

https://twitter.com/rohini_sgh/status/1291045424468393984?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

In her subsequent tweets, she does not clarify whether the child came up with this exact thought on tolerance on his own or was she instrumental in helping form his views. It could be because she perhaps needs to imbibe those lessons herself.

https://twitter.com/rohini_sgh/status/1291058603240038401?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

However, Singh’s tolerance or lack of it is not the point. The point is that the image she claims the child drew on his own has an eerie resemblance to some of the viral images on the Internet. Twitter user by the name ‘befittingfacts’ pointed out the similarities.

https://twitter.com/BefittingFacts/status/1291242854602268674?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Of course, one can argue that the child might have seen the image and it might have registered in the mind and no one is accusing the child of plagiarism here. Speaking of plagiarism, the little essay the child wrote appears verbatim on child development self-help website.

https://twitter.com/KrazyProgrammer/status/1291247865805889536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The child being smart has skipped “Remind your kids of this constantly” from that self-help website because well, child wont tell himself to remind the child of how to be tolerant.

It is quite likely that the child did not write it up on his own but it was perhaps Rohini who essentially dictated this stuff to her child so he can make a political point on Twitter. The essay written by her child is a verbatim copy of a carefully chosen text from a self-help website. It is unlikely that a child that age, went on to the internet, searched a self-help website on parenting and carefully editing that portion to copy 2 lines verbatim.

Thus, it appears that Rohini dictated the excerpt to the child, leaving out some portion, to make a political point on Twitter. Using children is a tactic which is now unknown to liberals and Islamists alike.

This, of course, isn’t the first time Rohini Singh has tried to pass off her passing thoughts as something children have said.

In October 2019, Rohini Singh, tweeted an entire thread where apparently, at a 5-year-old’s birthday party, some ‘little Zoya’ was asked to ‘go back to her country’ to which she said she ‘is not Pakistani’.

https://twitter.com/rohini_sgh/status/1180165971006197765?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Rohini had conjured up a 5-year-old Muslim girl, Zoya, attending a birthday party of the upper-middle class elites. One such elite bigoted child had asked Zoya to ‘go back to her country’, Rohini had claimed.

https://twitter.com/rohini_sgh/status/1180167260549201920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

As if on cue, Zoya instinctively knew ‘her country’ is Pakistan. As Singh had said that there was no provocation, perhaps 5-year-old Zoya knew that her identify is Muslim and if anyone ever tells her to go to ‘her country’, it would only mean Pakistan.

Less than a year back, 5-year-olds were bigoted babies. Today, same children are hope for our country.