Abul Kalam Azad: The snake that bit India’s education system

Abul Kalam Azad Who is the first education minister of India

Source: The Statesman

The birthday of Abul Kalam Azad, the former education minister of India, is celebrated as the National Education Day in India. Born on November 11, 1888, in Mecca as Abul Kalam Azad, he was popularly known as Maulana Azad given his religious learning. Azad was appointed as the first education minister of India by Prime Minister Nehru and occupied the post till his death in 1958.

The colonial, Marxist, and Nehruvian biases that we see in our textbooks are a result of the work that was started by Maulana Azad. The religious leader filled the universities and the ministry departments with sympathizers of Islam, Marxism and removed the linkages of India’s Hindu past as much as possible. 

Maulana Azad ensured that the hundreds of years of atrocities of the Muslim rulers on the Hindu subjects in whitewashed and the children learn a ‘secularized’ version of history.

An ardent supporter of pan-national loyalty of Muslims, he participated and advanced the Khilafat movement that was launched by Congress to install the ruler of Turkey as Khalifa. “If even a grain of the soul of Islam is alive among its followers, then I should say that if a thorn gets stuck in a Turk’s sole in the battlefield of war, then I swear by the God of Islam, no Muslim of India can be a Muslim until he feels that prick in his heart instead of sole because the Millat-e-Islam (the global Muslim community) is a single body,” Maulana has said in a speech.

Maulana Azad laid the foundation for the ‘secularization’ of Indian history and social sciences and positioned the Marxist professors and bureaucrats in all important government posts. The intellectuals with contrary views were purged; as there was a very limited private sector, the government patronage to left made it a dominant force in academia.

Commenting on the ethnic cleansing of non-Left academics by the government, Sanjeev Sanyal, the economist and historian, wrote, “The Left dominance over the intellectual establishment has its roots in the systematic ‘ethnic cleansing of all non-Left thinkers since the 1950s…the result of the systematic cleansing was that there were no non-Left academics remaining in the social sciences field in India by the early 1990s.”

The successive Ministers of Education built on the foundations of ‘secularism’ and Marxist Indology laid by Azad. After Azad, K L Shrimali became the Minister of education for the next five years and he continued with the policies of Azad. After Shrimali, Humayun Kabir, M C Chagla, and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, all Muslims and self-proclaimed Marxists became education ministers. All of them further secularized academia and carried out ethnic cleansing of non-leftist professors, writers, and media persons.

Maulana Azad, whose birthday India celebrates as National Education Day, is no less than Gandhis when it comes to institutions in the education sector carrying his namesake. The Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi, the Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology in Bhopal, the Maulana Azad National Urdu University in Hyderabad, Maulana Azad Centre for Elementary and Social Education (MACESE Delhi University), the Maulana Azad College, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, and the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, in Kolkata, Bab – e – Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (Gate No. 7), Jamia Millia Islamia are just to name a few institutions carrying the name of the first education minister of India who laid the foundation of everything that is wrong with the Indian education system.

A hardcore Islamist, Maulana Azad had infamously said, “Remember, today, for Islam, for Muslims, any national or local movement cannot be fruitful. In my beliefs, all of this is an act of magic by the presager-Satan who makes those asleep because it does not like those sleeping [ie Muslims] to rise up”.The most important matter is that we have to build a university in Aligarh, have to collect Rs 30 lakh for this, it will serve as a Kaaba of Aligarh. The day the university is established, wahi (revelation, of Quranic verse 5:3) … will land on the roof of the Strachey Hall (of AMU).” In verse 5:3, Allah says: “This day I have perfected for you your religion…”

If India does want to celebrate National Education Day, it should be on the day of Saraswati Puja rather than on the birthday of an Islamist who made a mockery of the ancient Indian education system and burdened our textbooks with Colonial, Marxist, and Nehruvian biases. 

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