India’s top court puts order banning Islamic schools on hold

India’s top court put on hold a lower court’s order that effectively banned Islamic schools in the country’s most populous state, lawyers involved in the case said on Friday, giving a breather to thousands of students and teachers in the system.
The directive comes days before the country begins voting in a national election where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are seeking a third term.
The top court was responding to a challenge to the March 22 order of the Allahabad High Court which scrapped a 2004 law governing the schools, called madrasas, in Uttar Pradesh state, where one-fifth of the 240 million population is Muslim.
Saying the law violated constitutional secularism, the High Court had also directed that pupils at these institutions be moved to conventional schools.