Friday, May 9, 2008, Jamadi-ul-Awwal 2, 1429    

Dilapidated condition of Indian Muslims

Sultan M Hali

The condition of Indian Muslims has been getting from bad to worse, justifying the demand 61 years ago by Quaid-e-Azam to set up a separate homeland for the Muslims. The current government in India was forced to take notice of the dilapidated condition of the Muslims and in March 2006, Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh commissioned a seven member committee under retired Justice Rajender Sachar to look into the deplorable condition of the Muslims and report within six months. The Sachar Committee submitted the report to the Indian PM on November 17, which was later tabled before the Indian Parliament on November 29, 2006. The report highlighted the backwardness of Muslims in India stating that Muslims were even more backward than the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, in practically all spheres of life. Salient features of the report, presented by Jayanth Jacob in The Indian Express of November 28, 2006 shows:
• 94.9 per cent of Muslims in Below Poverty Line (BPL) families in rural areas do not receive free food grains.
• While only 3.2 per cent of Muslims get subsidized loans, just 1.9 per cent of the community benefit from the Antyodaya Anna Yojana Scheme, a programme meant to prevent starvation among the poorest of poor by providing food grains at a subsidized rate.
• 60.2 per cent of Muslims do not have any land in rural areas. National average: 43%
• Just 2.1 per cent of Muslim farmers have tractors. With 15, 25,000 tractors, India ranks No.4 after US, Japan and Italy
• A mere 1 per cent own hand pumps.
• On the educational front, the picture is equally dismal: 54.6 per cent Muslims in villages and 60 per cent in urban areas have never attended schools. National average: 40.8 per cent in rural areas and 19.9 per cent in urban areas.
• Only 0.8 per cent of Muslims in rural areas are graduates.
• Although in urban areas, nearly 40 per cent of the Muslims now receive modern education, only 3.1 per cent of the community in urban areas is graduates. Just 1.2 per cent is post-graduates.
The findings of the committee sent a shockwave in the saner elements of Indian media. For example, Seema Chishti, writing for the “Indian Express” of November 26, 2006, in her Op-Ed titled: ‘How Many Ways to Count Us? pointed out that similar findings were reached by other scholars. She has highlighted Omar Khalidi’s “Muslims in the Indian Economy”, calling it a “More than comprehensive, and intelligent account of the state of Muslims in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Deccan and Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. She says that MIT-based scholar Khalidi has chosen areas with significant Muslim populations, and taken data from all possible sources, government data, reports, statements made in assemblies and Parliament and analyzed it to present the appalling economic condition of Indian Muslims. Seema talks of another good book attempting to analyze and interpret Muslim women—Zoya Hassan and Ritu Menon’s “Unequal Citizens” (Oxford University Press, Rs 295). A fascinating Muslim Women’s Survey was conducted by the authors in 2000. Their conclusions are fascinating. The scholars find that the “subalternity of Muslims in India” is complete. Also two years ago, Abusaleh Sharif and Mehtabul Azam put together “Economic Empowerment of Muslims in India” (Institute of Objective Studies, Rs 240). Sharif, incidentally, was also the member-secretary of the Sachar Committee. The book is a snapshot of where Muslims in India stand today. In the conclusions detailed in the end, the book makes a case for reservation for Muslims in government jobs. It also talks of the need for providing soft loans for Muslims to start their own ventures.
The recent violent protest in Kolkata, prompted by Muslims’ extraordinary backwardness in education and socioeconomic arenas, has been critically examined by Kaleem Khawaja in his Op-Ed ‘Muslims should adopt advocacy instead of protests’. Referring to the 2006 Sachar Committee Report mentioned in the earlier paragraphs, Kaleem Khawaja too concludes that the number of Muslim students in India’s better universities, engineering colleges, medical colleges, despite much growth of such institutions in recent years still hovers around a miserly two percent. Lack of education among the Muslim youth and their lack of competitiveness have led to significant impediment to the community’s progress. Kaleem Khawaja This extraordinary backwardness of the Muslim community is now India’s national problem and not just a problem of the Muslim community. In order that India may continue its current growth in economic and industrial arenas, it is important that all segments of society come together and develop a consensus to solve this national problem. He concludes that this problem has grown steadily in the last sixty years as successive governments at the Center and in the states choose not to do anything to improve the basic infrastructure in Muslim majority localities in countless cities in India.
In all these years only very few new schools, colleges, hospitals, parks, roads were built in Muslim majority constituencies. At the same time a large number of sectarian riots targeted the economy and infrastructure in Muslim localities in various cities. He points out the fact that fifteen years after the demolition of Babri mosque and the sectarian violence that accompanied it; the government’s Liberhan Commission has not even completed its enquiry into that mayhem speaks volumes about how government has ignored the problems of the Indian Muslim community. Whenever the government has implemented programs to uplift the severely depressed segments of Indian society, it has left the Muslims out of that.
In 1950 when the government initiated an affirmative action plan to uplift Dalits it excluded Muslim Dalits. In 1989 when the government initiated the Mandal Commission affirmative action plan for OBCs (Other Backward Castes), it again left out Muslim OBCs. Similarly in all these years the government built many educational institutions for women to improve female literacy. But hardly any of them were built in Muslim majority areas. Thus while female literacy improved in other communities, Muslim women remained largely illiterate. With the introduction of free market economy and the arrival of multinationals in India, as the economy of the nation has grown rapidly, middle-class Indians have made good socioeconomic gains. But India’s Muslim community has been largely left out of this perceptible growth. Since their educational situation continues to be very dismal they are unable to get any benefit from this national growth.
Kaleem Khawaja proposes that to induce the government, the power structure and the Hindu community to give a helping hand to them, Muslims should conduct effective advocacy. Instead of angry street protests this campaign needs to persuade all segments of the Hindu community and political parties, that the Muslims’ extraordinary backwardness is a major national problem, and solving it is in the best interests of the entire nation.