Salma Ansari, the wife of former vice president Hamid Ansari, announced that she would construct a temple and a mosque inside her 'Chacha Nehru Madrassa'—where Hindu and Muslim students study—in Aligarh. According to ANI, she said, "The security of the students who reside in the hostel here is our responsibility. When they go outside the madrassa for visiting a temple or mosque, and if some untoward incident happens, it will be our responsibility. Realising it, we have decided that both a mosque and a temple would be constructed within the premises so that the security and safety of our children is ensured," she said.
"I hope it becomes model for all madrassas in India. It's a message of brotherhood. Also it'll ensure safety of students who won't have to go outside campus to pray." However, the move has also resulted in a certain backlash. The Times of India quoted Hindu Jagran Manch's Sanju Bajaj as saying, "Salma Ansari just wants to attract students from Hindu community so that she can easily convert them by inducing Islam in their minds."
In September 2017, two unidentified men had allegedly mixed rat poison in the water tank of a madrassa in Agra run by Ansari. She had then said that a child went to fill bottle at night and saw two boys mix something in the tank.
"The child then alerted the warden. Police was called. Several tablets of rat poison, yet to dissolve, were found in the water," she said. "When he called them out, they pushed him and ran away, threatening him to keep his mouth shut or face consequences," she added.
In the final days of his vice presidential tenure Hamid Ansari had spoken out that a feeling of unease was creeping into the hearts of the minorities of the country. "A sense of insecurity is creeping in as a result of the dominant mood created by some and the resultant intolerance and vigilantism," Ansari said, in an interview to Rajya Sabha TV. Ansari referred to incidents of lynching and alleged killings as a "breakdown of Indian values, breakdown of the ability of the authorities at different levels in different places to be able to enforce what should be normal law enforcing work and over all the very fact that Indianness of any citizen being questioned is a disturbing thought."
