Reacting over the survey of Madrasas in Uttar Pradesh on a news channel on Thursday, Hisam Siddiqui, a Senior Journalist and Editor Jadeed Markaz Lucknow, said, “The literal meaning of Madrasa denotes ‘school’ and there is no doubt or controversy over it. However, the intentions of BJP Governments toward Muslims lack veracity and there is no doubt over it. This has even been substantiated on many occasions and Muslims are fully aware of their intentions. The survey of Maderasas in the state is being carried out simply harbouring mala fide intentions.”
“The hackles raised against the survey of Madrasas in Uttar Pradesh is due to these malicious intentions,” he said adding that, “All this began when Hemant Vishwa Sharma, the former Education Minister of Assam, ordered closure of all government aided Madrasas soon after taking charge there. Though I personally do not agree with government funding to institutions imparting Islamic teachings, they can’t stop here onwards. They even started making enquiry into public donations to these madrasas. What the Yogi government is doing here in UP is a replication of the same.”
Almost all the madrasas, he said, run through donations being received from the public pocket and some of them even maintain bookkeeping and even issue receipts to ensure transparency. However, only few of them do so when they are run by the societies while the majority of them counts-on public donations.
“This survey is not about investigating the validity or source of revenue to madrasas. The actual intention behind the survey is to reach those people making donations, how paltry they may be, to these institutions. This will allow the administration to raise further questions about where and which source the donors are getting the money from to donate. Later, they will send a police officer to question the person saying from where you brought the money to donate? This is the actual new scheme behind the survey being launched by the Uttar Pradesh government to prosecute the religious minorities,” explained Siddiqui.
Elucidating that mode of education in madrasas especially in villages are purely based of Islamic teachings and most of them confined to pre-primary level education, he said, “during 1980s, the then Chief Minister Narayan Dutt Tiwari government conducted a survey regarding the syllabus being taught in madrasas on the request of the Madarsa authorities itself in the Uttar Pradesh. “Later, satisfied with the outcome, Tiwari Government announced that the students passing out from madrasas will be allowed to take admissions in 6th standard in state run schools. Similarly, the Adeeb, Mahir and Fazil degree courses being taught in these madrasas were also ratified as equivalent to Intermedia and several famous universities are now allowing these students to take admissions into B.A degree courses,” contended Siddiqui.
As far as the quality of education is concerned, as was questioned in the survey, he said, “What type of a quality you want to check at a place where only the ‘Quran’ is being taught to the students. The next question was asked about the sanitary condition of toilets in the Madrasas. To this I can assertively say that the sanitary condition of the toilets of Madrasas are comparatively thousand times better than the condition prevailed in state run primary and junior schools. It is because the madrasas mainly taught the teachings of Quran that primarily promulgates maintaining overall neatness. As such, the sanitary conditions are maintained well in order in madrasas.”
