The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Where the state pays for teachers of hate

• The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Where the state pays for teachers of hate

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  • Praveen Swami

     

     

     

    The Jammu and Kashmir government has decided to hire hundreds of schoolteachers linked to the Jammat-e-Islami.

  • Last week, the National Conference-Congress government quietly moved to help realise Mawdudi’s ugly dream. Hundreds of jobs, a Cabinet decision taken on July 14 mandates, will be handed out to schoolteachers linked to the Jammu Kashmir Jamaat-e-Islami, the party set up in Mawdudi’s name. More than 440 Falah-i-Aam Trust teachers will now be inducted into the State school system.
  • Early in the 20th century, Kashmir saw the emergence of the religious neo-fundamentalist movement that was to lay the foundation for the rise of the Jamaat-e-Islami. From the outset, education was a core part of the neo-fundamentalist programme. In the minds of the religious right, education was an instrument
  • From the outset, the Jamaat understood the centrality of education to its political project. According to the account of Pakistani scholar Tahir Amin, Jamaat schools were intended to prepare the ground for a “silent revolution.”
  • It was alleged that the government of India had despatched a team to Andalusia headed by the Kashmir Pandit [politician and state Home Minister] D.P. Dhar, to investigate how Islam was driven out of Spain and to suggest measures as to how the Spanish experiment could be repeated in Kashmir, too.”
  • During the Emergency, Sheikh Abdullah cracked down on the Jamaat. Some 125 schools run by it, with over 550 teachers and 25,000 students, were banned. So were another 1,000 evening schools run by the organisation, which reached out to an estimated 50,000 boys and girls. In one speech, Abdullah described the Jamaat schools as “the real source for spreading communal poison.”
  • But Jammu and Kashmir’s crackdown on the Jamaat proved short-lived. In 1977, the party founded the Falah-i-Aam trust and charged the Doda-based Islamist activist Saadullah Tantray with reviving its school network.
  • The Jamaat also formed a student wing, the Islami Jamaat-e-Tulaba. Helped by Saudi Arabia-based Islamist organisations, the IJT soon grew into a powerful force in schools and universities.
  • By the end of the decade, the IJT had formally committed itself to an armed struggle against the Indian state.
  • In 1990, as the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir gathered momentum, the state cracked down on the Jamaat-e-Islami once more. The party was banned, and the Falah-i-Aam schools were shut down. Promises were made that the teachers would be brought into the State school system. However, fearful that the Falah-i-Aam teachers would misuse their position to spread the Jamaat message, successive governments went slow.
  • No great imagination is needed to see what the Jamaat hopes to get from the party affiliates whose salaries will now be paid by the Jammu and Kashmir government — and the tragedy that could lie ahead.