Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan bats for broad-based education in madrassas

NEW DELHI: Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan on Friday advocated broad-based education in madrassas and said "right education" needs to be given while "indoctrination" of children should not be allowed. Khan also asserted that he belongs to only one community and that is "Indian".

Prime minister Narendra Modi will be remembered not only in the country but in the whole world for enacting a law against instant triple talaq, he said. With the implementation of the law, the divorce rate in the Muslim society has come down by more than 91 percent, he claimed.

About the importance of education at the TV9 Global Summit here, he pointed out that India is a signatory to the UN declaration of human rights and it is the "basic right of a child that till the age of 14 he or she cannot be given special education and has to be given a broad-based education". "We are neglecting that. We allow indoctrination of children between the age of five to six years. If we do not give the right education we should be ready for these things," he said referring to madrassa education.

Also read | WBJEE 2022 Toppers List: Himanshu Sekhar tops West Bengal JEE exam 2022

When the right to education was made a fundamental right, only one organisation that opposed it was the Muslim Personal Law Board, even though religion asks people to mandatorily acquire education, Khan said. "I figured out that their opposition was that if people get free education in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha then their catchment area would go dry," he said. In an apparent reference to AIMIM MP Imtiaz Jaleel, who recently demanded that Nupur Sharma be hanged for her comments on Prophet Mohammad, the Kerala governor said, "We have rule of the law but those claiming to be representatives of people give the call for hanging a person."

Also read | ‘Eroding autonomy’: What the fight over Odisha’s university recruitment policy is about