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Assam MP Maulana Badruddin Ajmal has asked Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma to stop bulldozing madrasas.
Slamming the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government for demolishing the Markazul Ma-Arif Quariayana Madrasa in western Assam’s Bongaigaon district on August 31, he said such actions are an attack on the education of children in minority-dominated areas of the State.
“Madrasas are public properties that cannot be bulldozed without any legal notice. Even the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh has stopped using bulldozers now,” Mr. Ajmal, who is the chief of the minority-based All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), said on Wednesday evening.
“I urge the Chief Minister of Assam to stop this policy. If any individual is caught for link with jihadi organisations or anti-national activities, the government should arrest him immediately and punish him according to the law,” he added.
Claiming that madrasas never teach hatred or communalism and demolishing them is unfair, Mr. Ajmal said: “The madrasas targeted by the government were doing well academically. Bulldozing them is denying education specifically for Muslim children,” Mr. Ajmal said.
The Bongaigaon madrasa was the third demolished by the Assam government after the arrest of 37 people over more than a month for allegedly working as operatives of the al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and the Ansarul Bangla Team, a Bangladesh-based terror group.
Citing a District Disaster Management Authority feedback that the madrasa was unsafe and was being used for multiple activities without proper documents, the Bongaigaon administration gave less than 24 hours to the occupants of the madrasa to shift.
The bulldozing followed the arrest of Mufti Hafizur Rahman, who was a teacher at the madrasa since 2018 and was allegedly working for a “jihadi” organisation. He was arrested by the police in another district.
A couple of days ago, the National Investigation Agency filed a charge sheet against eight of the 37 arrested for alleged links with fundamentalist organisations. Seven of them are from western Assam’s Barpeta district and one from Tripura.
The State government had handed over the cases of “jihadi terror modules” to the NIA after the preliminary investigation.
