The blast near Delhi’s Red Fort and the subsequent terror probe have, overnight, turned a relatively obscure private medical education institution on the edge of Faridabad into a national talking point. Doctors linked to Al-Falah School of Medical Sciences & Research Centre have been detained, huge quantities of explosives have been recovered from premises associated with them, and the National Investigation Agency is now in charge of the case.
As emotions run high, it is tempting to collapse everything into a single, angry question: “Why are we allowing such a Muslim medical college to exist at all?” That, however, is precisely the wrong question. The right questions are harder, more technical—and ultimately more useful to the Republic:
How did a medical college with such a controversial promoter and subsequent security red flags secure approval in 2019 and then quietly expand?
Are our regulatory systems enforcing legal and financial scrutiny, or merely ticking boxes on infrastructure and paperwork?
And can we respond to possible abuse by individuals without demonising an entire community or undermining constitutionally guaranteed cultural and educational rights?
This piece attempts to answer those questions, and to place the Al-Falah affair alongside another religiously governed institution—the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi medical college in Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir—so that we see the issue not as “Muslim versus Hindu”, but as rule-of-law versus arbitrariness.
A troubled backstory and a smooth approval
Al-Falah School of Medical Sciences & Research Centre in Faridabad was granted approval to admit its first batch of 150 MBBS students in 2019. It is run by the Al-Falah Charitable Trust and affiliated to Al-Falah University, a private university established under a Haryana state law and recognised by the University Grants Commission. The college now presents itself, on paper and on its own website, as a fully approved institution with a charitable teaching hospital and all the trappings of a modern medical campus.
Yet media investigations and court records now in the public domain show that the founding figure behind the group, Jawad Ahmad Siddiqui, spent over three years in Tihar Jail in the early 2000s in a ₹7.5 crore cheating and forgery case related to an investment scheme. The case was eventually quashed after restitution arrangements, but the episode leaves a deep question mark over his past financial conduct.
On its own, a past case does not automatically disqualify an individual from ever engaging in education or philanthropy again. What matters is whether the regulatory system for medical colleges even tries to look at such histories. It does not.
The approval process for a new medical college is heavily focused on:
land and building ownership,
infrastructure and equipment,
hospital bed strength and patient load,
faculty and staffing patterns, and
an “Essentiality Certificate” from the state government certifying desirability and feasibility.
Conspicuously absent is any mandatory criminal-background check of the key trustees or promoters of the institution. The National Medical Commission (NMC) insists on moral integrity for its own members and for registered practitioners, but is virtually silent on the past record of those who actually own and run medical colleges. The Haryana government, in turn, issues essentiality certificates based on projected healthcare needs and infrastructure, not on forensic scrutiny of promoters’ past dealings.
The result is a regulatory regime that looks hard at concrete and steel, but looks away from character and history.
Terror probes and the “white-collar” ecosystem
The Red Fort blast and the massive explosives haul from premises near Al-Falah University have added a chilling new dimension. Several doctors associated with the university and its hospital have been detained or questioned in connection with an alleged terror module described as a “white-collar” ecosystem using educated professionals as operatives and facilitators.
At this stage, it is crucial to repeat a basic principle of constitutionalism: investigation is not conviction. Individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The fact that some doctors are accused or under investigation does not make the entire student body, alumni network or local Muslim community complicit in terror.
At the same time, a pattern is emerging that cannot be brushed aside as mere coincidence: a founder with a tainted financial past, opaque funding streams reportedly including visitors from parts of the Arab world, and now a cluster of terror-related arrests in and around the campus. This calls not for social media lynch mobs but for rigorous statutory scrutiny on three axes:
Criminal-background vetting of trustees, senior management, and key faculty in sensitive positions.
Forensic audit of funding, including compliance with the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) wherever foreign donations or grants—not just student fees—are involved.
Security review by state and central agencies, with proportionate safeguards for the rights of students and staff who have nothing to do with any alleged conspiracy.
We must be absolutely uncompromising on terror, radicalisation and violent extremism—whether the accused are doctors, engineers, priests or professors. But that zero tolerance must be matched by a zero tolerance for shortcuts around due process.
What the Constitution actually says about minority institutions
Much of the public anger, including on social media, has coalesced around the fact that Al-Falah is widely perceived as a “Muslim medical college”, with a predominantly Muslim student base drawn from Bihar, Kashmir, Mewat and other regions. There are dark mutterings about “exclusivity” and “ghettos in the guise of campuses”.
Here, we need to step back from outrage and read the Constitution.
Article 29 protects the right of any section of citizens—majority or minority—to conserve their distinct language, script or culture, and to establish institutions for that purpose.
Article 30 gives religious and linguistic minorities the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.
These rights are not an indulgence; they are a deliberate structural choice, meant to reassure minorities that they can flourish within the Indian Union without having to dissolve their distinct identity. They sit alongside the universal guarantees of equality before law (Article 14), non-discrimination on religious grounds in public institutions (Article 15) and the fundamental freedom to practise and propagate religion (Article 25), subject of course to public order, morality and health.
Two consequences follow.
First, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about a Muslim trust setting up a college that draws a large number of Muslim students, just as there is nothing problematic about a Sikh or Christian or Hindu trust running universities and professional institutes that draw disproportionately from their own community. The law does not prescribe a communal quota of either minimum or maximum representation in private minority institutions.
Second, constitutional protection is not a licence for opacity or law-breaking. Minority-run institutions must still obey tax laws, anti-terror laws, FCRA requirements, medical education norms and all other regulatory frameworks. The shield of Article 30 does not immunise fraud, money-laundering, incitement or terror financing.
The task before us, therefore, is not to attack the very existence of Muslim, Christian, Sikh or Hindu colleges, but to insist that every single one of them—without exception—meets the same standards of transparency and legality.
The Reasi contrast: Shri Mata Vaishno Devi’s medical project
This is where it is useful to place the Al-Falah controversy against the parallel initiative in Jammu and Kashmir’s Reasi district. The Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board (SMVDSB), which manages one of the most important Hindu pilgrimage centres in the country, has in recent years expanded from running a superspeciality hospital at Kakryal to establishing a full-fledged medical college.
The Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence (SMVDIME), owned by the Shrine Board, has been sanctioned 50 MBBS seats, with its first batch set to begin in the 2025–26 academic session. The college is initially co-located with the university campus but draws its clinical strength from a well-equipped hospital serving pilgrims and local residents.
This is, by any definition, a religious-body-run medical institution, funded substantially through offerings, donations and the Board’s own revenues. It exists explicitly to further the Board’s charitable mandate in healthcare and education. That is not seen as sinister; it is, rightly, celebrated as a Hindu shrine using its resources for public service.
The question, then, is not whether a temple trust can run a medical college (it can) or whether a Muslim charitable trust can do the same (it can). The real questions are:
Are both subject to the same NMC norms and inspection regimes?
Are both equally accountable under income-tax, FCRA (if applicable), and other financial regulations?
Are both expected to disclose their funding and governance structures with the same rigour?
If we applaud the Vaishno Devi medical college as an example of institutions emerging from faith-based philanthropy, we must accept in principle that Muslim and Christian trusts can also contribute positively to education and healthcare. What we cannot accept—for any of them—is opacity, regulatory capture or complicity in criminal activity.
FCRA, foreign money and the thin line between charity and leverage
In the Al-Falah case, concerns have also been raised about foreign visitors and possible funding from West Asian sources, particularly from some Arab countries. This is where the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act becomes central.
The law makes a clear distinction between:
fees paid by foreign students for education or services, which are generally outside FCRA’s definition of “foreign contribution”; and
donations, grants, endowments or soft-funding from foreign individuals, organisations, governments or foundations, which do fall under FCRA and require registration, dedicated bank accounts, audited reporting and specific permitted uses.
If Al-Falah or any similar institution has been receiving foreign donations—whether overtly or via layered arrangements—it must demonstrate full FCRA compliance. If, on the other hand, it is run entirely on domestic donations and fee income, that is a different question. Scrutiny must be forensic, not communal: follow the money, not the faith.
Exactly the same standard must apply to any Hindu, Sikh, Christian or other religious trust that runs hospitals and colleges and also receives foreign donations from diaspora devotees or global philanthropies.
Zero tolerance, but for what exactly?
It is entirely legitimate for citizens to demand zero tolerance towards terror and towards any institution that, by negligence or design, enables violent extremism. In the Al-Falah case, if the allegations about a doctor-led “white-collar terror” module are proved, society will be justified in insisting on the strictest possible punishment.
But a mature constitutional democracy must also insist on zero tolerance towards:
trial by television and social media,
collective punishment of an entire community for the alleged sins of a few, and
regulatory laxity that is conveniently ignored until a tragedy forces action.
The correct response to the Al-Falah scandal is not to say, “Muslim colleges should be banned”, just as the correct response to any hypothetical scandal in Vaishno Devi’s institutions would not be “shut all Hindu trusts”. Instead, we should demand:
Mandatory background checks of promoters and trustees for all medical colleges and universities, with clear disqualifications for serious economic and terror-related offences.
Transparent FCRA enforcement, with public disclosure of all foreign donors and end-use, irrespective of whether the institution is Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian.
Independent audit of approvals, especially in the light of repeated scandals around medical-college inspections and allegations of bribery and “ghost facilities”.
Time-bound but fair security investigations, so that innocent students and faculty are not condemned to permanent stigma because of a long-drawn, opaque probe.
A shared stake in both security and fairness
India’s strength lies in an uncomfortable but powerful balancing act. We are a deeply religious society that runs thousands of schools, colleges and hospitals in the name of gods, gurus, saints and prophets—and yet we aspire to be a modern constitutional republic governed by secular laws.
The Al-Falah medical college controversy and the Vaishno Devi medical college project are not opposites in a civilisational clash. They are two test cases of the same proposition: can faith-linked institutions operate at the frontier of modern professional education while remaining fully accountable to the Constitution and the law?
If we allow our understandable anger about terror to harden into blanket suspicion of “Muslim institutions”, we will end up weakening the very legal tools we need to fight both terror and corruption. If, conversely, we treat minority-run institutions as politically untouchable, we will continue to see the regulatory capture, approval scams and moral hazards that made something like Al-Falah’s trajectory possible in the first place.
The way forward is simple to state, hard to practise:
Protect minority cultural and educational rights without apology.
Enforce financial, academic and security regulations without exception.
Refuse both communal demonisation and selective blindness.
Zero tolerance for terror. Zero tolerance for regulatory impunity. But also, zero tolerance for the lazy politics of blaming an entire faith for what may turn out to be the crimes of a few.
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