GUWAHATI, India – An Indian state ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party on Wednesday has passed a law abolishing all Islamic schools, saying they offer basic education.
Opposition politicians have criticized the move, saying it reflects the government’s anti-Muslim stance in the country of the Hindu majority.
More than 700 of the schools, known as madrasas, in northeastern Assam will be closed by April, Education Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the local assembly.
“We need more doctors, police officers, bureaucrats and teachers from the Muslim minority community rather than Imams for mosques,” he said. Sarma, a rising star in the Bharatiya Janata party in Modi, said.
The government would convert them to ordinary schools as education in the madrasas could not prepare anyone for ‘the temporary world and its earthly worries’, he said.
Opposition politicians said the move was an attack on Muslims.
“The idea is to exterminate Muslims,” said Wajed Ali Choudhury, a lawmaker from the opposition Congress party.
More than a hundred retired senior officials and diplomats on Tuesday called on the BJP government in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, to repeal a new law criminalizing the forced religious conversion of brides.