What Modi must do

Modernising Madrasas, Winning Trust

A government reaching out to taking care of the educational and economic uplift of a segment of its population which is backward is indeed a good thing. In late May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to MPs of the need to win the trust (vishwas) of the Muslim minority. His government has followed up on it by announcing it would provide scholarships to five crore minority students, with 50% earmarked for girls. It also announced it would modernise the madrasas by linking them to formal modern education. A first step in this direction is to train madrasa teachers for it.

Truth be told, there is nothing new in this scheme. Based on the recommendations of the Sachar Committee (2006), the UPA government sought to move ahead with educational reforms for the uplift of Muslims and to set up a national board to modernise education in madrasas. A bill was drafted for legislative enactment.

Then, too, there were misgivings among segments of Muslims who considered the formation of the Madrasa Board to be State interference. These segments, mainly the clerics and conservatives, put forward a valid argument — that only 4-5% Muslim children go to madrasas. Why is the government concerned about only this 5%, they said, it should think of the other 95% and introduce schemes like scholarships for them?

Despite such misgivings, in June 2012, the UPA-II announced a scheme of modernising madrasa education, but not much was heard about it subsequently. Now, almost an exact replica of that scheme has been announced, not from the Union HRD ministry, as it should have been, but from the ministry of minority affairs.

Bihar set up a Madrasa Board, a statutory body, long ago and government-funded madrasas in Bihar have since offered modern education, with courses in physical, natural and social sciences, in mathematics and English literature. Its curricula and textbooks are Urdu renderings of the textbooks used by the state government schools (based on the NCERT). It has centralised Board examinations for class VIII (Wastaniya) and then for Class X (Fauqaniya). Thus, it is more rigorous. Students who pass out of Fauqaniya are eligible for admission into technical courses such as Diploma in Engineering and Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs). Those who can afford, get into colleges of modern education — technical and non-technical.

The Bihar Madrasa Board has a long and proud history. In 1912, Justice Nurul Hoda established a madrasa to provide theological-cum-modern education to poor children. It has hostels with modern architecture just opposite to the Science College, Patna. In 1919, it became a government institution.

As per the scheme visualised by this madrasa, in 1922, the then education minister Syed Mohammad Fakhruddin established the Madrasa Board for Bihar and Odisha. Maulana Azad’s experiment in this kind of theological-cum-modern education was implemented in 1917 when he was interned (1916-19) in Ranchi by the British. In 1927, the Ranchi madrasa also came to be affiliated with this Board.

The Janata government led by Karpoori Thakur (1977-79) strengthened the Madrasa Board by making it a statutory body and providing it with a corpus of Rs 5 crore, (which was reduced by the Lalu Yadav regime to a meagre Rs 2.4 crore). The Bihar Madrasa Board affiliated as many as 1,250 madrasas in 1978. The programme did not encounter any hostility from Muslims. There was no mistrust between the then government and the Muslims. The Jan Sangh (the BJP’s precursor) was part of this government.

The Bihar Madrasa Board has seen many ups and downs in terms of government funding, but it endures till date. The teachers have been struggling for pay parity and other retirement benefits comparable with that of government school teachers.

The Aalim Honours course of the Bihar Madrasa Board also offers compulsory English language as its course. Those who have obtained postgraduate course, Faazil, join MA courses in universities and, by adding further qualifications such as PhD, they go on to become university teachers in relevant subjects. The Aligarh Muslim University, meanwhile, runs a one-year Bridge Course for madrasa students to enable them to enter undergraduate courses.

The Modi government can take a lead from the Bihar Madrasa Board, as well as from the AMU, and can improve upon it in every possible way -- in terms of qualitative improvements in the curriculum and rigour as well as in providing finances, autonomy, trained educationists and education-administrators. Sufficient funds and reasonable autonomy must be the two vital concerns. Narendra Modi can be expected to do it more successfully than previous regimes as he won’t encounter Hindutva resistance in the name of Muslim appeasement (Tushtikaran).

But the question is, is the Modi government sincere about it? If yes, then would it release the sanctioned amount for the three off-campus centres of the AMU in Kishanganj (Bihar), Mallappuram (Kerala) and Murshidabad (West Bengal), and will it go on to strengthen and promote these upcoming campuses? The AMU does not have religion-based reservation. Yet, the BJP government and the Hindutva forces remain perpetually hostile to the AMU. They also keep propagating rumours against madrasas, alleging these to be less patriotic.

These are the ways for the Modi regime to really win the trust (vishwas) of the Muslim communities. An equally important step will be to book the killers of Muslims who have been lynched by the so-called cow vigilantes and to compensate the victims. Justice is sine qua non for peace, and peace is a necessary precondition for all-round, inclusive progress and development. The nation and the world look forward to this.

(The writer is Professor of History, Aligarh Muslim University, and author of Muslim Politics in Bihar: Changing Contours)