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, told Reuters. “Muslim students and teachers will go back by 30 years.”
Muslims are a minority in mainly Hindu India, accounting for about 14 percent 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.
According to a document seen by Reuters, the federal government stopped funding the program, called the Scheme For Providing Quality Education in Madrasas, in March 2022.
The document, from the Ministry of Minority Affairs, shows Modi’s government did not approve any new proposals from states under the program between the 2017/18 and 2020/21 fiscal years, before closing it altogether.
