Meerut gang-rape: Blow to modernizers, madarsas won’t recruit Hindus - Firstpost
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Lucknow: There are several loose
ends and unanswered questions in
the Meerut rape incident.
While the truth will remain open to
interpretations of the investigation
reports, the noise over the incident
has served its communal-political
purpose. The fallout of the incident
is the UP Modernised Madarsa
Association has announced that it
won’t appoint women from the
Hindu community as teachers in
madarsas.
This means old madarsas, which
have been insisting on segregation
of communities gain the upper hand
now. It also could be a blow to the
modernization of the Muslim
educational institutions.
In the last ten years or so, madarsas
had opened up to modern education,
including English, science and
computers and this signaled an
eagerness among the community
leaders to spread education among
the underprivileged sections of
Muslim society.
According to Athar Husain, Director
of Centre for Objective Research and
Development (CORD) who is himself
a voluntary teacher at many
madarsas, not many people seem to
know that non-Muslims, especially
Hindus, are also employed in
madarsas.
“The working of madarsas has
become more streamlined with
regular appointments, teaching aids,
computers and other equipments
etc. This is a positive development
and must be encouraged,” he said.
However, he said if the Meerut
incident was not thoroughly and
independently investigated, it would
lead to many madarsas going back to
their old ways. This would only add
to the already prevalent
ghettoization of Muslims which the
community needs to get over,” he
said. All madarsas, he agreed,
should not be seen as places where
things were wrong.
Syed Abbas Rizvi, a Shia community
leader, agrees. “We are all for
improvement of madarsas and an
inquiry must be held into the
allegations in the Meerut case. But
this does not mean that all
madarsas are wrong,” he insisted.
However, state BJP spokesman Vijay
Bahadur Pathak maintains that an
inquiry must be ordered at least in
the functioning of those madarsas on
which various allegations had been
leveled. “There is no need to view
every law and order problem or
incident of crime from a Hindu or
Muslim point of view. We don’t
believe that things are wrong in all
madarsas, but at the same time this
should not be a reason to ignore the
reported wrong-doings in some of
them,” he says.
Repeating his earlier observation
that his party opposes any move to
use incidents of crime to polarize
the people, Pathak maintains that
other parties were trying to deflect
attention from purely crime or law
and order issues by giving them a
communal colour.
He also criticized the move by the
madarsas association not to appoint
any Hindu women as teachers in
madarsas, saying that it was not
correct to take such a decision along
religious lines. But within the BJP,
however, there seems to be a
section, that includes the Gorakhpur
MP Yogi Adityanath, which has been
demanding inquiry into working of
madarsas.
The number of madarsas has
mushroomed across Uttar Pradesh in
recent years, with there being an
estimated 10,000 of them now all
over the state. However, according to
a government official, the number of
those affiliated to the Uttar Pradesh
Madrasa Talimi Board, under the
Department of Minorities Welfare
and Waqf, is around 6300. About
460 Arabi-Farsi madarsas are on the
list of government subsidy.
The official said financial assistance
is given for madarsas both by the
Central and state governments. “The
2013-14 budget of the UP
government had an allocation of Rs
777 crores for scholarships to Muslim
students and Rs 200 crore for
running and maintenance of
madrasas,” he added. Another
Rs.315 crore had been earmarked for
madrasas teaching Arabic.
Madarsas in Uttar Pradesh offer
teaching to Muslim students in Urdu
and Arabic, with the levels of studies
being Fazil (equivalent to
postgraduate), Kamil (graduate), Alim
(class XII), Munshi and Maulvi (both
equivalent to class X). The certificate
of Munshi and Maulvi issued by the
Uttar Pradesh Madrasa Talimi Board,
is equivalent to those issued by the
Central Board of Secondary
Education. Interestingly, the
academic calendar in madarsas is
not as per fixed months, but ends
just before Ramzan every year. The
students pass out before Eid, after
which they have a long holiday.
In 2013, the state's minority welfare
department had discovered that
there were more than 100 fake
government-aided madrasas in the
state. These institutions simply did
not exist, yet on record there were
buildings, teachers, furniture,
computers and of course, students.
In the decade of the 1990s, the
mushrooming of madarsas especially
along the Nepal border in eastern
UP including districts like
Gorakhpur, Basti, Bahraich etc had
caused serious concern to state and
Central intelligence agencies and it
was revealed in several inquiries
that many of them were being used
as shelter for anti-Indian elements
who crossed over from Pakistan via
Nepal.
