In the span of two weeks, 12-year-old Zen Gunratan Sadavarte has hit national headlines on two occasions, for two completely different reas...
In the span of two weeks, 12-year-old Zen Gunratan Sadavarte has hit national headlines on two occasions, for two completely different reasons.
On January 26, the Class 7 student from Mumbai was given a National Bravery Award by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for saving the lives of ten people when her building caught fire in August 2018.
A week later, while researching the problems with India’s midday meal scheme online, Sadavarte chanced upon a news report on the death of a four-month-old boy at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh protest. The infant had been exposed to the winter cold on several occasions when his parents took him to the sit-in protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, and finally caught a fatal cold on January 30. His parents, though distraught, have claimed that they will continue to attend the sit-in protest along with their other children, aged one and five.
Disturbed by what she read, Sadavarte wrote a letter to Chief Justice of India SA Bobde on February 5, describing the participation of infants and children in protests as “torture and cruelty”, violative of “child rights and natural justice”. Her letter sought a probe into the Shaheen Bagh infant’s death and guidelines on the contentious issue of the presence of children at protest sites.
Her letter...
