Mahbubul Hoque, the owner of the University of Science and Technology, Meghalaya (USTM) — a private educational institution on the outskirts of Guwahati that has been at the receiving end of several attacks by Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, including allegations of ‘flood jihad’ — was arrested by the Assam police early Friday morning from his residence in Guwahati. A senior Assam Police official confirmed that Hoque had been arrested in connection with a case registered in the Sribhumi district on Friday. According to police, a "law and order" situation erupted at the Central Public School in the Patharkandi area of Sribhumi district on Friday during the CBSE class 12 physics examination. The school is run by the Education and Research Development (ERD) Foundation founded by Hoque, which also runs the USTM. Videos from outside the school after the examination show a group of uniformed students shouting, “We want justice.” One student is heard claiming that they had enrolled in a special coaching programme by the ERD foundation, in which the centre head assured them that they would “get help” to clear their board examination. “When we were given admission, we were told that we don’t need to worry about boards,” he is heard saying. A police official from Sribhumi district alleged, “There are 274 students who wrote the exam. Of these, 214 are enrolled in the Central Public School but they were taking classes in USTM throughout. They came here to take the exams. After speaking to them, we found that they had been assured that after being given a centre here, they would easily be able to pass the exam.” Hoque's arrest comes days after the Assam CM’s latest attack on him and the USTM. Last week, Sarma had allegedly that USTM is "fraudulent" and that it is issuing "fake certificates and degrees" to students, prompting the university to deny these allegations as "unfounded." After Hoque’s arrest, Sarma said, “Students from Goalpara, Nagaon and Kamrup districts – more than 200 students with the promise of being given more than 30 marks are taken to Barak’s Patharkandi. When they did not get help, they made a racket and the whole ring came to the surface. And this is not contained to CBSE; it also extends to medical entrance and the whole fraud will come forward. I have said earlier also that this man is a very big fraud, his history is all about fraud… We will keep working so that in Assam, education is not turned into a bazaar.” ERD Foundation principal secretary Mehjabeen Rahman said, “Essentially, we have been accused of not giving students an opportunity to cheat in examinations.” “These were allegations made by a handful of students, and you will find a few students like this everywhere. They did not do as well in their physics exam as they would have hoped and they maybe they must have wanted to use unfair means, which the invigilators did not allow. When we first saw the videos, we were taken aback by what they were saying,” she said. The ERD Foundation was founded by Hoque, a Muslim of Bengali origin from Assam’s Sribhumi district in the Barak Valley. The foundation’s flagship institute is the USTM, of which Hoque is also the Chancellor. It also runs a number of other institutes, including two schools in Patharkandi and Badarpur, both in Sribhumi, founded in 2008 and 2010, respectively. According to Rahman, the Vision-50 programme was started by the foundation during the Covid pandemic to provide specialised coaching for competitive exams to its students both in higher education institutes and in the two schools. She said that there are around 200 students at the school level enrolled at a “nominal fee” and the coaching – for exams such as NEET and JEE – is conducted as an after-school programme. On the allegation that the aggrieved students were not attending classes in Patharkandi, she said, “They are students of the Patharkandi school, and they attended classes there. But during lean periods, we bring them to USTM for specialised coaching, especially when we get expert coaches from Delhi and elsewhere.” In August last year, invoking the term ‘flood jihad’, Sarma had pinned the blame of flash floods in Guwahati on construction work in USTM, located in Meghalaya’s Ri-Bhoi district, stating that deforestation and hill-cutting for the campus were responsible. The University is promoted by the Education Research and Development Foundation, founded by Hoque, a Muslim of Bengali origin from Assam’s Karimganj district in the Barak Valley. Hoque is also the Chancellor of the University. A week later, Sarma had accelerated his attack on the university. The large main gate of the University has three domes atop it, about which he said, “It’s embarrassing to go there, you have to go under ‘Mecca’. What we are saying is that there should be a namghar (community prayer hall, part of Assam’s neo-Vaishnavite tradition) also there. ‘Mecca-Medina’, church. Make all three… They have kept a ‘Mecca’ there. Let them make a namghar, make a church. We will walk under all three, why will we walk under just one,” he said. When he was questioned by reporters on his use of the term ‘jihad’, he said, “They are doing jihaador baap (slang, translating to ‘father of jihad’). I’m being mild by calling it jihad. It is destroying our education system. Whatever attacks our civilisation, our culture, that is called jihad.” Sarma had also threatened an FIR against Hoque for allegedly wrongly obtaining an OBC certificate in 1992.
