Making sense of the decision to clip the wings of Madarsas in Uttar Pradesh

Two years after the Supreme Court ruled in November 2024 against the UP Madarsa Board awarding degrees equivalent to graduation and post-graduation, the UP government in August 2026 approved amendments to implement it. The apex court had ruled that the Madrasa Board could issue matriculation or Aalim or matriculation certificates but not Kamil and Fazil degrees roughly equivalent to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The court reasoned that only UGC approved universities or institutions empowered by the Parliament or state legislatures could issue the degrees.  

Uttar Pradesh is said to have around 25,000 madrasas, 16,500 of which are recognised by the state Madarsa Board. Around 560 of them receive government grants. The timing of the cabinet approval is seen to tie up with the Assembly election due in 2027. The government’s response when the Supreme Court ruled, was that a solution was being worked out. The minister of State for Minority Welfare Danish Azad Ansari had said that legal options were under review and had assured that teachers already employed in aided madrasas on the strength of Kamil or Fazil degrees would not lose their jobs.

The state’s indifference to the plight of madarsa students and teachers is borne out by the fate of a petition filed in the Supreme Court in May 2025 seeking permission for Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti Language University in Lucknow to conduct the university-level examinations. The university's executive council had approved and voted for the proposal as early as 2022, but it never received the state authorisation necessary to implement it. The petition before the Supreme Court too is yet to be heard.

Maulana Khalid Rasheed Farangi Mahali, a prominent cleric in Lucknow, expressed concern over the impact of the move on madrasa students and called for an alternative route for university affiliation. Zaman Khan, general secretary of the Teachers Association Madaris Arabia, Uttar Pradesh, conceded that the court’s ruling left little room for appeal, but argued that the state government had to find a way to ensure that students and teachers are not abandoned. Students have stopped attending madarsas, he added, because of the developments. This will lead to the slow death of the Madarsa education system, he pointed out.

Significantly, the Sanskrit Vidya Dharma Vijnan faculty at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) began teaching Vedic philosophy, grammar and astrology in 1918. Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya, also in Varanasi, traces its lineage even further back, to 1791, when the East India Company's resident Jonathan Duncan proposed a Sanskrit college under British sanction. Both institutions have carried Vedic and astrological instruction into the present as recognised universities, awarding Shastri and Acharya degrees within the same regulatory framework as other higher education institutions.

Uttar Pradesh also runs a school-level Sanskrit board, namely the Uttar Pradesh Board of Sanskrit Secondary Education, established under a 2000 state Act. It conducts examinations up to the senior secondary level and issues certificates rather than university degrees. It therefore performs the kind of school-level function that the Madarsa Board continues to perform after the latest amendment.

In contrast, formal regulation of madrasas in Uttar Pradesh dates back to 1975. Madrasas however existed since earlier. Raja Ram Mohan Roy was sent to a madrasa in Patna when he was around nine or ten to study Persian and Arabic before going to Benares to study Sanskrit. Munshi Premchand began his education at a madrasa in Lalpur, near his village of Lamahi, where a maulvi taught him Urdu and Persian. Rajendra Prasad was placed under a village maulvi at the age of five to learn Persian and, according to some accounts, Hindi and arithmetic as well.

Even in recent years, Madrasa-educated students seem to have done well in life. Irfan Ahmad, born in Dumri, has written about studying at his village madrasa before moving on to BN College in Patna and then Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. He subsequently completed an MA and MPhil at Jawaharlal Nehru University and a PhD at the University of Amsterdam. He is now a professor of sociology and anthropology at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul. He has also spent several years as a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen and has published with Princeton University Press and the University of North Carolina Press.

Shahid Raza Khan studied at a village madrasa in Bihar's Gaya district and later completed an Alimiyyah qualification at Al Jamiatul Ashrafia in Azamgarh. He subsequently went to Jawaharlal Nehru University for an MPhil and PhD and cleared the UPSC Civil Services Examination in 2018 with an all-India rank of 751.

With the state government having finally closed the legal gap identified by the Supreme Court, the initiative to provide an alternative route to indigent students, not all of them Muslims, to learn Arabic and Persian besides the sciences and English have been destroyed. A progressive state could have integrated the madarsa system with the formal schooling and university system and made use of the trained madarsa teachers in the formal sector. Political and ideological motivations, however, and bureaucratic apathy and incompetence have destroyed the possibility in the bud.

Around 25,000 madarsa students are affected in UP. Students who had chosen to continue in madarsas for their higher education, and madarsa teachers have been left in the lurch. Madarsa students already in the first or second year of their study in degree courses have to start all over again and seek admission in regular universities. Many will simply drop out. As for teachers, they will have to look for alternative employment.

Who has benefitted, one is left to wonder.