New Delhi: Fascist Modi government has announced to discontinue the Maulana Azad National Fellowship, a scholarship for students from minority communities, from this academic year.
Union Minority Affairs Minister Smriti Irani said that the decision was made as the fellowship overlapped with other schemes.
Maulana Azad National Fellowship was launched in 2009. It provided financial assistance to students from six notified minority communities – Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Muslims, Paris and Sikhs to pursue MPhil and PhD.
Due to discontinuation of this scheme there will be a great injustice with the students of minority communities and they will lose chance to study and the such move will adversely affect the Muslim, Sikh and Christian students.
Student organizations across India called upon Modi led BJP government’s recent rollback of Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF) a ’blatant injustice’ and urged immediate reimplementation of MANF, a scholarship for students from minority communities.
It is a violation of the Right to Education to the underprivileged minority communities and it will also go against the dream of Baba Saheb Ambedkar ji. It is a step to marginalize minorities within Indian society.
The Right to Education Act, 2009 makes it obligatory for the Central Government to provide compulsory and free elementary education to everyone. Punjab State Commission for Minorities appeals to the Honourable Smt. Droupadi Murmu, President of India, to issue directions to the Central Government for continuation of these schemes to the minority communities.
This past year has already witnessed attempts by the Sangh Parivar to deny the very fundamental right to education to young Muslim women and to establish an aggressive majoritarian cultural nationalism by usurping spaces of education.
The decision to discontinue the MANF, under whatever guise such a decision might come, must be necessarily seen as a further effort in this direction – to deny access to education, and to ensure that higher education continues to remain the exclusive enclaves of the privileged few.
BJP government has once again made public its ingrained attitude against minorities and the idea of public education.
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