The students
The main attraction of these madrassas is that they
provide free food, shelter, clothes, medical aid and education to their
students. A visit to any such institution reveals that students have come from
from far off and different parts of the country but one factor is common to
most of them. They all belong to poor homes and destitute famlies who could
neither feed them properly nor meet the exorbitant costs of their school
education and therefore they had to look for some alternative. Madrassas came
to their rescue. The parents, the guardians put their sons, daughters and wards
there and forgot all about them. The number of Madrassas in Pakistan at present
is around 17000. Almost all of them remain full to capacity. They are scattered
throughout the country but their main concentration is in the Tribal areas,
Frontier region and north-western parts of Baluchistan. According to a modest
estimate about 15 % of their strength consists
of orphans, a larger number comes from broken homes and the rest belong to
parents who spend miserable lives far below the poverty line.
Since the state funds were not coming to their aid
they had to pull on somehow independently. The obvious sources of their incomes
were, and continues to be so, the generosity of individual and NGO
philanthropists at home and from abroad, some foreign governments like Saudi
Arabia and Gulf countries, the Pakistani emigrants but in some cases their
financial support came from extremist militant organizations, local and
foreign, which expected such madrassas to toe their line and remain prepared to
indulge in acts of violence as commanded by them. The students of these
institutions were denied all outside exposure and being entirely at the mercy
of their benefactors, were their hostages who could be brainwashed easily and
used as puppets in their sinister designs of promoting terror. The primary need
therefore was that funding of the madrassas should be taken over by the state
to free their students from the mental and physical bondage of the terrorist
organizations.
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