GUWAHATI, India – An Indian state ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party on Wednesday passed a law abolishing all Islamic schools, saying they provide substandard education.
Opposition politicians criticized the measure and said it reflected the government’s anti-Muslim attitude in the majority Hindu country.
More than 700 schools, known as madrasas, in northeastern Assam will be closed by April, state education minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the local assembly.
“We need more doctors, policemen, bureaucrats and teachers from the Muslim minority community instead of magnets for mosques,” said Sarma, a rising star in the Bharatiya Janata de Modi Party.
The government would convert them into regular schools, as the education provided in madrasas could not prepare anyone for “the temporal world and its earthly concerns,” he said.
Opposition politicians said the move was an attack on Muslims.
“The idea is to eliminate Muslims,” said Wajed Ali Choudhury, a legislator for the opposition Congress party.
More than 100 retired civil servants and diplomats on Tuesday urged the BJP government in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, to repeal a new law that criminalizes forced religious conversion of brides, which is seen as directed against Muslims.