Madrasa Education

Urdu education must be brought to mainstream educational institutions by overcoming the political descrimination Urdu has suffered as a virtual synonym for religious education. The issue is a political one and demands political will and strategy to address it.

The association of Urdu with Muslims as their mother tongue, a post-independence phenomenon, had damaging consequences for Muslims. It alienated Muslims from areas other than north India from their regional languages and it weakened the case of Urdu for state patronage as facilities for its instruction as part of a secular syllabus could simply not be provided on an all-India level. As this paper points out and what has been seen in other aspects besides Urdu, it was in this aspiration to be an all-India community, they lost sight of what could be achieved regionally or even locally.

The Indian nation cannot march forward with a major segment of its largest minority group remaining backward, illiterate, unenlightened and weak. It is the duty of every section of Indian society to help in the mainstreaming of this section. But the issue of modernisation of madrasa education brings up the vested interests of fundamentalist elements trying to protect their turf and the political system which strives to utilise the backward for electoral gain. Strangely, the interests of the non-secular religious groups and those of the so-called 'secular and progressive' politicians merge, reinforcing one another.

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