Quietly, unobtrusively, the oldest Muslim organisation in the country, Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind is warming up to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Without making any formal announcement about it or lending explicit support at the time of elections, the Jamiat has been happy to support the BJP, be it the recent ban on Popular Front of India or the Uttar Pradesh government's decision to start a survey of non-regular madrasas. Much of the support is hush-hush though.
When countrywide raids were conducted at the PFI premises and over a hundred leaders arrested, the Jamiat went into silent mode, much like, as a Jamiat official says on condition of anonymity, "Mohammed Shah Rangeela of the latter Mughal days". Even as the Jamaat-e-Islami asked for fairness and transparency in the action, the Jamiat washed its hands off the affair entirely with the spokesman limiting himself to saying, “We are neither with them nor against them. Let the law take its own course.”
Even more stark was the Jamiat support to the madrasa survey launched by the Yogi Adityanath government. In a case of a quick somersault, the Jamiat president Arshad Madani not only lent the survey support but also promised that from the next year, only those students who have completed matriculation from the CBSE will be admitted to Darul Uloom, Deoband. “So far the picture of the survey that has come out, there is nothing to fear or be apprehensive about,” Mr. Madani stated. His statement in favour of the survey came days after Jamiat had held a meeting in New Delhi where over 200 rectors of various madrasas in Uttar Pradesh participated. At the meeting, the organisation pledged “to safeguard madrasas at any cost” and dismissed the survey as smacking of “evil intention”.
