Madrassa ban in UP

The top court in India’s most populous state has placed a blanket ban on madrassas, further burnishing the ruling BJP’s efforts to marginalise Indian Muslims. The Allahabad High Court scrapped a 2004 law governing madrassas in the state of Uttar Pradesh, while reinforcing that the state must ensure children between the ages of six and 14 are enrolled in a school. The order will force about 2.7 million Muslim children to look for new schools, while also leaving 10,000 teachers out of work.

The main legal merit in the court’s opinion is that the state cannot craft laws governing education for a specific religious group, and that any such laws must be secular in nature. However, the judges also argue that under the scrapped law, madrassa students would not receive an equal standard of education as students in other schools because of the former’s focus on languages and religious education. But the only reason madrassas have not been meeting the requirement to provide minimum standards of education is the federal and state governments’ decisions to cut funding, making this observation a curiosity.

The crackdown on madrassas is not also not unique to the state. Assam state is already converting madrassas into conventional schools, which may well be the UP government’s next move. Under the previous administrative set-up, the government paid the salaries and some other expenses at some schools for faculty teaching ‘core’ subjects, such as maths and science, and the madrassas were only responsible for paying faculty teaching ‘specialised courses’. The government halted this funding, forcing some 21,000 teachers out of work.

Considering that the fall in standards that set events in motion was solely due to the government’s decision to cut funding for teachers, it becomes clear that the BJP had considered the ensuing chain of events to further pad the party’s election coffers. Unfortunately, the intolerant rulers seem very ready to trade in the futures of millions of children in return for a few more votes from the most xenophobic segment of Indian society.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 26^th, 2024.

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