By Naadiya Adams – @Miss_Naadiya

In a move dubbed as anti-muslim by opposition politicians, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party recently passed a law abolishing state-run Islamic schools in North-eastern Assam, saying they provided inferior education.

Known as madressahs, more than 700 of these government-funded religious schools are set to be shut by April, the state’s Education Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the local assembly.

“We need more doctors, police officers, bureaucrats and teachers from the minority Muslim community rather than imams for mosques,” said Sarma, a rising star in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The state plans on converting them to normal schools as education provided in the madrasas could not prepare anyone for “the temporal world and its earthly concerns,” he said.

Rival politicians said the move was an assault on Muslims.

“The idea is to wipe out Muslims,” said Wajed Ali Choudhury, a lawmaker from the opposition Congress party.