Five-year-old Reshma Khatoon rises before the sun and heads straight for the morning namaaz at a Beldanga madarsa. Prayer over, she has a frugal breakfast comprising dry bread or muri and then rushes to class where the mistress is waiting. The day is spent studying the Quran and gets over only in the evening. She, of course, washes her own clothes and utensils.
But that does not bother her father, Abdul Mannan, a farmer from Nadia's Jamsherpur village, unduly. He doesn't have too many expectations of Reshma (a daughter) and the Rs 150 he needs to spend every month does not bother him. "I'd have had to spend many times that amount if she stayed at home and went to a government-aided school," Mannan points out. "I am saving the money to give Milan, my son, a 'secular' education," he explains.
Murshidabad is a long haul from Pakistan. And Pervez Musharraf's promised clampdown on madarsas and Islamic fundamentalists in his country should sound like a distant thunderclap that loses its boom as it passes through the thick brick walls of the madarsa. But it isn't so. Not now.
The administration in Murshidabad, Bengal's madarsa district, says there is a similarity of pattern - of Islamic fundamentalists drawing most of their support from these religious study centres and feeding on similar socio-economic conditions - between both far-off Pakistan and Murshidabad. The route to organisations like the now-banned Students' Islamic Movement of India (Simi) lies through these khareji (which operate without government sanction) madarsas, say intelligence sources.
Murshidabad especially, along with Malda and North and South Dinajpur, falls in the belt which provides a very fertile soil to institutions like madarsas and mosques built without government permission. Poverty - cases like Mannan's (where girls and the dull boys are sent to these madarsas where 'education' and food come cheap and the family riches are reserved for the brighter boys) abound - leads the district's youth to the madarsas.
Besides, a grounding in Islamic education assures the pass-outs of a fixed income as the village maulvi or the madarsa maulana in an area where every month sees several unauthorised madarsas and mosques cropping up. Take the case of Tahidul Islam, an MA in history who's now leading a part-time teachers' agitation at Beldanga S.R.F. College against the monthly pay of Rs 400. Rafiqul Molla, as a teacher at the nearest madarsa, gets Rs 1,800 every month.
"The economic conditions drive the youth to these madarsas where, in some cases, minds are prepared to receive communal and anti-national ideas unquestioningly," a district intelligence official said.
But it was a Simi-sponsored strike last August, to protest against a government threat to crack down on fundamentalist organisations, that established the clear connection between these unauthorised madarsas and organisations working against the nation. More than 95 per cent of these madarsas responded spontaneously to the strike in areas such as Beldanga, Shamsherganj, Hariharpara and Raninagar, opening the administration's eyes to the influence these organisations had.
Officially, Murshidabad has 70 madarsas and Bengal 507. But the figure, even the police admit, is a "joke". Murshidabad alone has around 650 madarsas, say intelligence officials. Even madarsa maulanas say the administration is right; every minority-dominated police station has not less than 50 big and small madarsas, they admit.
The mushrooming of madarsas and mosques without permission of the administration, say officials, has become the "most important worry" now. The rule - to intimate the local police station before the construction of a mosque - is seldom followed, they add. "And once prayers start being held, there's no question of stopping them," a home department official in Murshidabad said, admitting that the administration would not be able to tackle the fall-out.
Mosques, being musafirkhanas, host all persons travelling through an area. In September 2001, soon after the suicide-jet attack on New York's World Trade Center, intelligence officials received a tip-off that ISI agents had been to villages near the border (mostly in Hariharpara and Shamsherganj), looking for recruits willing to cross over to Bangladesh for training in weapons.
"Each family, according to its economic status, was being offered anything between Rs 20,000 and Rs 1 lakh to let go of one male youth between 18 and 26 years old and the persons making the offers always stayed in the local mosque," an official said.
It is possible that the mosque authorities had no knowledge of the manner of activities the guests were indulging in.
Senior district officials feel the
state government is not really in a position to follow up its hard talk
on unauthorised madarsas. The government is scared of the fall-out, both
electoral and in law-and-order terms, and none of the major political parties
in the state would like to be seen as approving a crackdown, they explain.