TN girl suicide: Education officer rules out forced religious conversion
India Today
Thanjavur District Education Office in a report has said that there were no cases of past cases of religious conversion, in the school where a student killed herself alleging forced conversion.
The District Education Officer (DEO) has submitted a report ruling out the conversion angle in the suicide of a class 12 student in Tamil Nadu's Thanjavur alleging forced conversion to Christianity.
The student was allegedly forced to clean rooms in her hostel and forced to take up Christianity. She was admitted to a hospital after she tried to kill herself. She died on Wednesday, January 19, after not responding to treatment.
The investigation report states that in the past 10 years, 5,270 Hindu students have studied in the school as compared to 2,290 Christian students and 179 Muslim students.
According to the report, DEOs have visited the school 16 times since 2010 and they have not found any student raising complaints about religious conversion.
The report also states that the girl student was suffering from Vitiligo, a condition in which the skin loses its pigment cells.
The DEO report further dwells into the school records and it was found that different names were recorded in her school certificates. The officials found that Saranya, the one who alleged forced conversion in an interview, was the girl's stepmother. Her mother Kanimozhi, had passed away.
During the Covid outbreak, the girl student did not go to her home for the summer holidays in March 2020 but stayed with the nuns and continued her studies. She scored 487 marks in 2020 getting the first rank in her school. She attended nine days of school in February 2021 and nine days in March 2021 and did not attend any of the online classes.
