NEW DELHI: India’s most populous state has stopped paying some 21,000 teachers of subjects including mathematics and science in Muslim religious schools, or madrasas, an official said on Thursday, and they could lose their jobs altogether.

The teachers work at madrasas in Uttar Pradesh, ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, and the move comes ahead of Modi seeking his third straight term in a general election due by May.

“Over 21,000 teachers are set to lose their jobs,” Iftikhar Ahmed Javed, chief of Uttar Pradesh’s madrasa education board, said. “Muslim students and teachers will go back by 30 years.”

Muslims are a minority in mainly Hindu India, accounting for about 14 per cent of a population of 1.42 billion, and they make up nearly a fifth of the population of Uttar Pradesh.

Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch say nationalist groups have threatened and harassed Muslim and other religious minorities with impunity under Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), accusations the party denies.

Thousands of teachers are set to lose their jobs

According to a document seen by Reuters, the federal government stopped funding the programme, called the Scheme For Providing Quality Education in Madrasas, in March 2022.

The document, from the Ministry of Minority Affairs, shows the Modi government did not approve any new proposals from states under the programme between the 2017-18 and 2020-21 fiscal years, before closing it altogether.

The government raised funding for the programme to a record of about three billion rupees ($36 million) in the fiscal year to March 2016. His office did not respond to a request for comment.

India’s minority affairs ministry, which ran the programme until it was closed, also did not respond to requests to comment.

The document did not cite a reason but a government official said it could be because a 2009 law ensuring free compulsory education for children covers regular government schools.

Government data shows more than 70,000 madrasas were covered in the first six years of the programme, started in 2009-10 by the previous government run by the Congress party.

The programme benefited Muslim children and should be revived, said Shahid Akhter, a member of a government panel on minority educational institutions.

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2024