The north eastern state of Assam has passed a law abolishing all Islamic schools, saying they provided sub-standard education.
According to a Reuters report more than 700 of the schools, known as madrasas, in the Bharatiya Janta Party ruled Assam will be shut by April, the state’s education minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the local assembly.
“We need more doctors, police officers, bureaucrats, and teachers, from the minority Muslim community rather than imams for mosques,” said Sarma, a rising star in the BJP.
The government would convert them to regular schools as education provided in the 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 wipe out Muslims,” said Wajed Ali Choudhury, a lawmaker from the opposition Congress party.
