Even four years after the Sachar Committee Report
revealed that Muslims were one of the most economically backward and socially
disadvantaged communities, nothing much has been done to address the
development deficits of this community.
The Constitution of the republic of free India
was crafted in troubled but idealistic times. The Indian people were still
reeling from Partition bloodshed and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, in
the dark shadows of politics of religious hatred and division. Millions of
refugees displaced from the land of their birth were painfully battling penury,
loss and memory. The secular democratic Constitution adopted in 1950 promised
India's religious minorities equal protection and equal citizenship rights under
the law, and the freedom to practise and propagate their faith.
Decades later, in 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh resolved to publicly take stock of the conditions of India's largest
religious minority, the Muslims, and appointed for this a High Level Committee
chaired by Justice Sachar. For decades, India's largest opposition party, the
BJP, had denounced what they alleged to be a ‘pseudo-secular' policy of
‘appeasement' of Indian Muslims, in pursuit of ‘ vote-bank' politics. They
charged that Muslims vote en block, and to capture their bulk votes, they were
unfairly benefited by successive governments led by the Congress Party, at the
expense of the country's majority Hindu community.
Busting myths:
The report of this Committee laid to rest this
long-orchestrated political untruth, by demonstrating that on most
socio-economic indicators, the average condition of Muslims in India was
comparable to or even worse than the country's acknowledged, historically most
disadvantaged communities, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. This was
evidence not of favoured treatment, but cumulative and comprehensive official
discrimination and neglect. Therefore, the constitution of this Committee by
the Prime Minister was in itself an act of political sagacity and courage. But,
as we will observe, this collapsed and the government has displayed a singular
lack of nerve when called upon to address the development deficits in the
Muslim community which were diagnosed by the Sachar Committee.
It became evident that the only ‘appeasement'
that occurred after Independence was of fundamentalist fringes of the community
on questions of identity, because of which, for instance, Muslim divorced women
are still legally barred from seeking maintenance, or Muslim parents cannot
statutorily adopt an orphaned child. But even on these identity concerns, the
report card is blotted. Markers of Muslim identity like a beard, burqa or
hijaab frequently attract suspicion and derision in public spaces. Muslims
suffer even more from recurring insecurity, because of devastating episodes of
mass communal violence that are usually disguised pogroms, driven by prejudiced
public officials. The impunity which perpetrators routinely enjoy has created a
culture of unspoken fear in which Muslims routinely live with the tragic
certainty that violence will recur. This has pushed many into the safety of
numbers in poorly serviced segregated ghettoes, spurred further by the barriers
Muslims face to find housing in mixed settlements. In the wake of every terror
attack, Muslim youth are stigmatised and arrested on flimsy, often false and
fabricated evidence.
But much of this was already known. What the
Sachar Report primarily drew the attention of the nation to was the development
deficits of the majority of Muslim people — in education, livelihoods and
access to public services. Its sobering conclusion was that the community
‘exhibits deficits and deprivation in practically all aspects of development'.
It found worryingly low school enrolments and high drop-outs, even more for
boys than girls. Contrary to the common belief that this was the result of
religious conservatism, the Committee instead testified to wide popular
aspirations for education, and that too in mixed government schools, much more
than in denominational schools or madrassas.
It found poverty to be the main barrier to
education among Muslims, as little children are expected to work to support the
family, rather than study. There are not many good quality government schools
in Muslim areas, and fewer residential hostels and exclusive girls' schools.
The scant schools that exist are under-staffed, with poorly motivated and
sometimes prejudiced teachers. There is also the expectation of low returns
from education, because few Muslims find employment in either the public or the
private sector. This sadly becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, as few young men
and women can even qualify for such employment because of poor educational
attainments.
The Report also notes the poor representation of Muslims
in the employment market across all states. Policies of economic liberalisation
have sounded the death knell of most traditional occupations of Muslims, such
as hand and power looms, silk and sericulture, garment making, leather and
automobile repair. Home-based industries like embroidery, zari and chikan work,
which provided Muslim women stable but low incomes are also gasping for
survival. Formal banks and private money-lenders baulk from extending credit to
Muslims. Young Muslim men and women face discrimination in government
recruitment, and private sector appointment of Muslims is even more dismaying.
Similarly, the Report found Muslim settlements systematically deprived of
access to infrastructure and public services, such as power, piped water supply
and sewerage.
Acknowledging the problem:
The possibility of the solution of any problem
begins with an acknowledgement that it exists, and ensuring this realisation,
especially in a climate of denial and ‘blaming the victim', was the greatest
contribution of the Sachar Committee. The Report enjoined governments to pave
the way out of the deprivation-trap for Muslims through ‘inclusive development
and mainstreaming of the community, while respecting diversity'. Optimistic
observers may have expected that, when confronted by the unimpeachable body of
evidence marshalled by the Sachar Committee, governments would be compelled to
belatedly recognise, and stir themselves. They would strive to address the
enormity of distress and denial faced by the country's largest socio-religious
minority, a population of Muslims larger than in any country in the world
except Indonesia.
These hopes, however, stand substantially belied,
four years after the publication of the Report, as evidenced by a rapid
evaluation of official measures to address the development deficits of Muslims
in India in the light of the Sachar Committee findings, undertaken by the
Centre for Equity Studies, in collaboration with the Centre for Budget
Governance Accountability and Accountability Initiative. I will elaborate the
findings of this study in a subsequent column.
The study found that the scale of government
interventions is too small to touch even the fringes of the numbers of deprived
people. The imagination of the programmes fails to identify and address the
actual obstacles which bar the educational or economic attainments of Muslim
people, and their fair access to public services. And finally, institutional
structures responsible to implement these initiatives — right from the union
Ministry of Minority Affairs to implementing officials in districts and below —
lack conviction, clout and even a mandate to directly battle the socio-economic
structural discrimination and denial encountered by the community.
But in the last resort, the failure is not simply
of budgets, programmes or personnel. It is of statesmanship. It is not that the
answers were too daunting or complex: many pathways for public action were
illuminated in the judicious recommendations of the Report itself, others were
implicit in its findings. Still others could have been located by assessing and
building on the decades of experience with the array of programmatic, budgetary
and statutory measures adopted for other comparable most disadvantaged groups
such as Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
To actually alter the destinies of millions of
our people who face discrimination because of their socio-religious identities
would entail enormous budgetary resources and highly visible programmatic
interventions which openly target programme benefits to the Muslim community. I
recognise that it is not easy for the country's leadership to muster the
political courage for this. Political managers of the ruling combine caution
against providing grist to the opposition's charges of ‘minority appeasement'.
They fear the political consequences of government being seen as openly taking
sides with a community which is currently stigmatised as regressive and
violent, globally and nationally. Therefore they resort to small poorly
budgeted, almost token, interventions.
I think of Gandhi in the months before he was
assassinated. His life's last battle was to ensure that Muslims get a fair deal
from the division of this country: not even the Muslims who chose to remain in
India, but those who had opted for Pakistan. In the shadow of Partition, one
can speculate how unpopular his stand was. It ultimately cost him his life. But
he never flinched from what he believed was just and right. We do need to find
a little of Gandhi again today.
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