Tag Archives: All India United Democratic Front

Number of Students Clearing NEET Exam After Coaching From Ajmal Foundation’s Increases from 11 to 80

ASSAM :

Ajmal Foundation’s Super 40 program started with a science topper in board exams (2018) and later prepared students for medical and engineering exams.

Representative image.
Representative image.

New Delhi: 

All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) President Badruddin Ajmal’s integrated educational program with a special focus on students from underprivileged background has fought against all odds to deliver great results in competitive exams such as NEET/ JEE(Main)/(Advance).

On Saturday the MP tweeted: “More than 100 students from our 2-years Integrated Coaching Programme have cleared NEET this year, of which 80+ students likely to get admission in MBBS. My heartfelt thanks to the faculty and other staff members associated with Ajmal Super 40 programme and Ajmal Group of Colleges (sic).”

Badruddin Ajmal was referring to the Ajmal Foundation’s Super 40 program that started with a science topper in board exams (2018) and later prepared students for medical and engineering exams. Eleven students cleared NEET (2019), and more than 100 students cleared NEET in 2020 with 80-plus getting admissions in MBBS.

According to the director of Ajmal Foundation, Khasrul Islam, from 11 students clearing the exam in 2019 to over 80 likely to get admission in MBBS this time, “the result over the year is speaking for itself on how commitment and dedication of teachers and students can make all the difference.”

This year in JEE (Advanced) and (Mains) there were 7 and 18 students clearing the exams, respectively.

The students’ response to Super 40 has been overwhelming over the years. “After seeing the keenness among them to study for medical and engineering, the Foundation increased the sponsored participants from 40 to 160 (80 girls and 80 boys),” he said.

Islam said the key feature of the integrated program is its teachers with most of them being non-Muslims. “About 75% of the teachers are non-Muslims and their dedication is the life of the program. They are committed and available to clear all doubts of the students, who are majorly Muslims, almost 75%”, said Islam.

The Ajmal Foundation is a registered public charitable trust, established in the year 2005 at Hojai, Assam, India. It has 25 educational institutions all over the state of Assam. “The organisation has been working in the fields of modern education, skill development and employment generation, women empowerment, poverty alleviation, relief and rehabilitation, and environmental awareness and health aid programs,” states its official website.

The trustees of the foundation are committed to undertake multifarious schemes and projects in various parts of the country to “serve the downtrodden section of the society.”

source: http://www.news18.com / News18 / Home> News18> India / by Eram Agha / October 18th, 2020

The River Between: The Bengali Muslim Community Of Western Assam

ASSAM :

A farmer at a border post in Takimari. The village lies on an island on the unfenced stretch of the border with Bangladesh, where stone pillars mark the border. (2014)
A farmer at a border post in Takimari. The village lies on an island on the unfenced stretch of the border with Bangladesh, where stone pillars mark the border. (2014)

At the western edge of Assam, near a district called Dhubri, the Brahmaputra river exits India and enters Bangladesh. Here, for a stretch of about six kilometers, the border between the two nations is fluid—it lies squarely on the river, making it near impossible to fence. Several hundred sandy islands, known locally as chars, pepper the surface of the Brahmaputra. This archipelago, inhabited by a largely Bengali-speaking Muslim population—seen by many as illegal immigrants—has become a pivotal element in the politics of Assam.

The residents of the chars can trace their presence in the region to policies laid down by the British at the turn of the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, in order to administer populations and grow food in undivided India, the British government encouraged labourers from the Bengal region—much of which, after Partition, would become East Pakistan, and then Bangladesh—to move into the Brahmaputra valley. However, as early as the 1930s, anti-immigrant sentiment had begun to take root in the region. The local population felt threatened by the new settlers, who had begun living in the chars, the sandbanks and the wastelands along the river, and had activated an agrarian economy. After 1947, the political developments in the state only fueled the anti-immigrant sentiment. The bogeyman of the “Bangladeshi immigrant” was ritualistically revived for decades, resulting in outbreaks of violence in the state. During the Nellie massacre of 1983, thousands of Bengali Muslims were killed for opposing a boycott of the state elections. A bout of violence occurred as recently as 2012, in the Bodo Territorial Area District (BTAD). Clashes between the indigenous Bodo tribe and the Bengali Muslim community resulted in the deaths of over 70 people, and hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes.

Between 2012 and 2014, I visited the districts in western Assam, including Dhubri, Kokhrajhar, Bongaigaon, and Chirang, on multiple occasions. At the time of Independence, led by an Islamic scholar and community mobiliser named Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, the chars in Dhubri were the breeding ground for some of the most radical peasant politics of the time. A pious maulana who came to be regarded as a peer, a spiritual guide, Bhashani fashioned a brand of Islamic socialism that captured the imagination of Bengali Muslims. But for some years now, a large part of the community has been under the sway of a new peer. The perfume baron-turned-politician Badruddin Ajmal, and his party, the All India United Democratic Front, have maintained a stronghold on the Bengali Muslim polity for nearly a decade. Dhubri is Ajmal’s constituency.

But the district is steeped in problems. The 2012 strife had thrust the unfenced riverine border into the spotlight. The islands here formed the final frontier of the Indian state. Following the clashes, leaders of Bodo groups alleged that the Border Security Force (BSF) in the region was lax, and unable to check illegal immigration. This accusation led to the tightening of security at the banks of the river and intense scrutiny for the residents of the chars. Every year, the precarious geography of the chars, with periodic changes in the river’s levels, pushes the residents to migrate inward into the more stable ground. Access to healthcare and education is limited, as are sources of revenue. The Dhubri Foreigners Tribunal Court sees hundreds of visitors from the surrounding districts, many of whom hope to get their names cleared from the “D-voter,” or doubtful voter lists. The community is ruled by paranoia, and fear of Bodo militants, sentiments many accuse Ajmal of having used to his advantage.

During my final visit to western Assam, in November 2014, the mood was tense. Other parties in Assam, such as the Congress and the Asom Gana Parishad had begun to clamour against the AIUDF and religious bodies such as the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, or the Organisation of Indian Islamic Scholars (Ajmal heads the Assam wing of the Jamiat), accusing them of fanning communal fires and encouraging insurgency. The AIUDF came out strongly in its own defense. At the centre of its campaign were the questions of home and belonging, in the form of the National Register for Citizens, a government roster of official residents of the state that has been under process for decades, and has assumed a power of mythical proportions amongst the Bengali Muslim community.

As election season peaks once again in Assam, hitherto unexpected players are raising the familiar slogans of threats from outsiders. The BJP, which until recently had a minor presence in the state, has ridden to prominence, partly by forming an alliance with the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP). The alliance has become the incumbent Congress’s biggest threat, which has steadily lost the Bengali Muslim vote to the AIUDF. But regardless of whether Ajmal’s seeming hold over the Bengali Muslim community plays a crucial role in the formation of the next state government, the question of identity will continue to remain central to Assam’s politics.

source: http://www.caravanmagazine.in / The Caravan / Home> Vantage> Communities / by Nikhil Roshan / April 10th, 2016

Assam polls: Badruddin Ajmal’s AIUDF emerging as a new alternative?

The agar (Aquilaria agallocha) tree takes about eight years of infection by a fungus to yield agar oil, one of the costliest perfumery raw materials. It has taken almost the same time for All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) to shake off the minority tag and produce a universal ‘political perfume’.

Badruddin Ajmal at his barkat home at Nizammudin west in New Delhi on Tuesday. (HT photo by Arvind Yadav)
Badruddin Ajmal at his barkat home at Nizammudin west in New Delhi on Tuesday. (HT photo by Arvind Yadav)

The agar business and the AIUDF are inseparable. Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, patriarch of arguably India’s richest agar oil exporting family, is the chief of AIUDF.

Many in Assam, a state wary of migrants aka ‘Bangladeshis’, allegedly went by Ajmal’s appearance – flowing beard, skull cap and clad in white kurta-pyjama – to label AIUDF as a pro-Muslim party. Some saw it as a one-election wonder, much like the United Minorities’ Front (UMF) that came and went after the 1985 assembly elections .

Both UMF and the AIUDF were formed to fight for the rights of the migrants they say are victimised with the Bangladeshi or foreigner tag. But the former did not have at its helm someone like Ajmal who, as party colleagues say, understands the politics of business or the business of politics.

Like the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi, the AIUDF took less than a year to make its presence felt in the 2006 assembly elections  in Assam. The decision of the Supreme Court in 2005 to scrap an allegedly pro-migrants act hampering their detection and deportation, hasted the party’s birth.

The AIUDF won 10 of the 69 seats it contested, eating into the traditional Muslim votes of the Congress. Ajmal was the lone winner for AIUDF in its debut (2009) Lok Sabha polls, but the party came a close second in four more seats.

The skeptics were silenced when AIUDF bagged 18 seats in the 2011 assembly elections , emerging as the second largest party ahead of Asom Gana Parishad, once the ‘regional alternative’ to the Congress.

“Just because a Muslim cleric-businessman heads our party does not mean it bats for Muslims or migrants. Otherwise, I would not have been the working president of this party,” said Aditya Langthasa, former AIUDF legislator and a Dimasa tribal.

The composition of candidates for the assembly, panchayat and civic polls during the past few years underscores the secular, democratic structure of the party, he added.

According to senior party leader Aminul Islam, labelling AIUDF as a Muslim or minority party is a conspiracy of the Congress and BJP.

“Yes, Muslims are a decisive force in some LS seats (they constitute 30-56% of the voters in six of Assam’s 14 parliamentary constituencies) but we have come a long way to broad-base the party to appeal to every community, minority or majority,” he said.

So how many non-Muslims will the party put up? “What matters is the right candidate, and we will finalise the names after the Congress and BJP declare their lists,” Ajmal said.

source: http://www.hindustantimes.com / Hindustan Times / Home> myindiamyvote / by Rahul Karmakar, HT / Guwahati, March 09th, 2014