West Bengal Govt to set up 1,000 RSS-run schools
The Suvendu Adhikari Government wants to set up at least 1000 schools — affiliated to Vidya Bharati Akhil Bharatiya Siksha Sansthan, the educational wing of RSS — in Bengal. Besides, his Government is also likely to merge the entire education departments of the State into one, thus bringing the Madarsa education system under one umbrella, sources said.
The Bengal Chief Minister urged the Vidya Bharati to open schools in every district and municipal areas so as to impart nationalistic and patriotic culture among the students.
Asking the Sansthan to open more schools in districts like Murshidabad and South 24 Parganas, the Chief Minister said that these districts needed to develop more patriotic feeling among the students through these schools to counter the anti-national activities that had been taking place in these areas. Vidya Bharati presently runs little more than 300 schools in West Bengal.
Murshidabad district, which has about 68 per cent Muslim population, had witnessed massive communal riots last year, forcing several thousand people to flee to the neighbouring Malda district. The then Mamata Banerjee Government had come under severe criticism from the opposition for allowing the Hindu population to be attacked, with the police looking the other way.
Criticising the previous Government, the Chief Minister also expressed his views about running separate educational institutions by the minorities’ department, thus bringing the Madarsa education under a single umbrella with the mainstream schools. Incidentally, the budgetary allocation for the Madarsa boards had already been slashed by about 40 per cent this year.
Standing by the ideology that his Government represented, the Chief Minister said, “we have come to power with a particular ideology which speaks about ‘one Constitution, one symbol, one leader’ as professed by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee... so there should be a single system (of education) for all the universities and higher education... One system for one university and another system for another university does not work.”
Reacting to Adhikari’s statement, senior Trinamool Congress leader Kunal Ghosh said that the BJP was planning to subvert the Constitutional provisions earmarked for the minority institutions. “If there are separate educational institutions, they are not illegal because they have been provisioned by the Constitution of India, which guarantees minorities’ right to follow, practice and profess their own religions and run their own religious institutions along with educational set-up... This Government is trying to create a communal divide to suit its political agenda.”
Incidentally, former Chief Minister Budhadeb Bhattacharya too had once questioned the secret activities inside the unaffiliated madrasas of the State, saying many of them were breeding grounds for antinationalist forces.
