Dasu Krishnamoorty
The Rajinder Sachar committee report is out, but not before the Indian Express outed it in a series titled The Missing Muslim. The report is a reprise of an ancient truth tumbling out on the eve of Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. Tahir Mehmood, former chairman of the National Minorities Commission, said as much in the Express series and listed the number of committees and commissions that have come and gone in the past without making the slightest dent on the extremely pathetic state of Muslim decline. At the time of my writing only the Tribune and the Pioneers have commented on this exercise in futility and hypocrisy, besides a long article Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote in the Indian Express.
The Tribune editorial agrees with Mehmood that the Sachar report is significant for providing statistics to prove what everybody knew about the condition of Muslims in the country. But the paper’s reading that the report had belied expectations in some quarters that it would suggest reservation for the community in government and private sector jobs is flawed. The essence of Sachar brief is to prepare the ground for such reservation by other means. How this can be done without amending the Constitution and how it can be amended without a two-thirds majority is a mystery.
The report is an unexceptionable census of the Muslim community, as the Pioneer calls it. Though there can be some hair splitting about data, nobody disputes that the Muslims are poor, illiterate and underemployed and therefore need help. Even if one overlooks the timing of the report, what needs explanation is the prolonged and expensive inquiry into what is known to everyone for half a century or more. It gives fresh lease to the Muslim sense of victimhood and withdrawal from the mainstream.
Both Mehta and the Pioneer place the blame on the Congress party which is in constant search for scapegoats for the consequences of its divisive politics. The report embarrasses the party by highlighting the performance of Narendra Modi’s Gujarat (and Tamil Nadu) in terms of economic opportunity and education. Saying that the most shocking feature of the report is not the Muslim condition, Mehta accuses the Congress of interest in keeping the Muslims as a supplicant community. The Pioneer reinforces the Mehta thesis saying, "If anything, the report is a damning indictment of Congress and "third front" politicians who have built careers by resorting to scare-mongering without, in the end, educating the ordinary Muslim out of his or her misery."
Mehta hits the nail on the head when he says, "Nothing has done public policy more harm than the idea that to be effective it must be particularistic in character, targeted to groups by virtue of their particular identity." This is exactly what I call engaging with the Muslims as Muslims, an extremely diabolical electoral tactic. In fact, this is the heart of the matter that causes heartburn among other deprived sections whose plight is nearly the same as that of the Muslims. The concern for Muslims always concealed a subtext that "a predominantly Hindu India has failed its Muslims," as the Pioneer edit points out.
In all this blame game, the media have never deemed it necessary to ask the Muslims if they had done all they could to lift themselves up. Till 1947, non-Muslims were subjects of Muslim and British rule for a thousand years. How could they overtake in fifty years a community that had the benefit of an 8oo-year rule? At least in such big states like Hyderabad and Bhopal which were Muslim-ruled till 1948, the Muslims should have done well. A major reason for their down turn is that they believed, and the media reinforced that belief, that Urdu is a basic feature of Muslimness. Telangana’s backwardness is a good example of how Urdu came in the way of social growth.
The history we saw before Independence is in contrast with the images media project today about Muslims. As children, we addressed Muslims, rich or poor, as Sayibu, a Telugu equivalent of Saheb. At school, nobody could separate a Hindu boy from a Muslim boy because every boy came to school in a shirt and knickers. No Muslim boy wore a skull cap. No Muslim spoke Urdu. Even after attempts to Arabize the Muslim community, a majority of Muslims in India speaks the local languages, dispelling the belief that Urdu is their mother-tongue. The Kerala Muslim is emotionally closer to a Malayalam-speaking non-Muslim than he is to an Urdu-speaking Punjabi Muslim. Muslims are among the leading lights of Kerala literature.
Pratap Bhan Mehta is on slippery ground when he argues that the committee’s data throws up the subtle, pervasive and complicated ways in which Muslim exclusion is produced and cites as example their difficulty in renting a non-Muslim house. How do you explain Punjabi owners in Delhi preferring Bengali and South Indian tenants to Punjabis? These are private preferences and have a highly sensitive cultural aspect that prudence demands exclusion from public discourse. But Mehta forgets the role of terrorism and the failure of the Muslim community to be fair to the minority community in places where they are a majority. Kashmir never had a non-Muslim chief minister in six decades of its history.
Positive journalism means projecting the Muslims as us and not them. One may ask how many stories have appeared in the media about the Hazarath Kale Mastan Shavalia Baba urs in Guntur district which Hindus have been organizing for the last 114 years. Many Hindus in that district used to name their children after that saint. You will find more Hindus than Christians in the Virgin Mary festival at Vijayawada every year. Such tales of amity and cordiality happen throughout the country but the media rush to cover only when some religious procession is disrupted.
The Muslims do not lack media support. Most newspapers in the country give attention to their problems. The Urdu press itself is the fourth largest both in number and circulation. Every political party pledges to improve their lot. A separate audit of Muslim situation is not only unsecular but also amounts to showing contempt for other underprivileged sections. This narrative of Muslims as a problem, separate from the chilling poverty on the fringes and outside the urban rim of the country, is counter-productive.
There are only two classes of people: those who got into the gravy train and those who missed it. All efforts should be made to see that those who have missed it get into it. Stop these minority and caste commissions and see that the backbenchers catch up with those who made it. Politicians who cry that Muslims are being targeted in the drive to fight against terrorism forget that the hundreds of Maoists and Naxalites being arrested and killed in fake encounters are non-Muslims.
Yes, if you concede that some sections of the population deserve reservation, Muslims too deserve them. But just as reservations have only produced a sense of complacence, killed all initiative among reserved communities and created social discord, Muslims too will never grow and unthinkingly condemn themselves to a state of dependence on doles. The media today encourage emotional segregation that hardly helps Muslims share the Indian miracle, as Abusaleh Sharif, a member of the Sachar committee, had said.
Education, as the report, says is the only way out for reversing the Muslim slide.