More on Sachar, OBCs, reservations etc…

Dear IHS:

First of all, thank you for your comment. I do not recall seeing you here before, so welcome.

You rightly mention that the proportion of Muslims in All-India services and certain other sectors such as the Armed Forces may not be proportional to their representation in the total population.

I have several issues with this line of argument.

First of all, to expect “quotas” in jobs/professions on the basis of religion (or indeed any other basis except perhaps economic) is fundamentally a mistake..We made that mistake in the past and I hope we do not repeat it in the future.

Therefore I do not have much sympathy for arguments along the lines of (as an example) “Although Sikhs constitute X% of the population of India, their representation in the IFS, IAS or in Private Banking is low….and this is therefore unfair.”

But the reason(s) for under-representation of Muslims in IAS,IFS or the Armed Forces have less to do with discrimination and more to do with complex scoio-cultural factors.

If anything, one can argue that at least in government services, there may have been reverse discrimination against the non-Muslims in certain cases.

I would point you in the direction of a recent article by Dr Nitish Sengupta titled, “Forget Babri, check out monks’ wooden slippers”

In the article, Dr Sengupta mentions:

India’s democracy has, in fact, taken extraordinary care to be careful of the sentiments of Muslims, and minorities in general, in sharp contrast to the situation in Pakistan.

Whenever there has been a choice between a Muslim and a non-Muslim officer for a position in the secretariat of the Union government, it is generally the Muslim officer who is selected, other things being equal. Similarly, in politics, Muslims joining mainstream political parties have always had a fair deal. One can name at least three Muslims who have become Presidents of India since 1947. There are always several Muslims serving as governors of states. In the Union Cabinet as well as in state governments Muslims have always occupied important ministerial posts. There have been cases of Muslims becoming chief ministers of states where the population is overwhelmingly Hindu. Muslims have occupied very important posts in the bureaucracy at both the Centre and at the state government level.

…It is true that the percentage of Muslims in government services has not been very high. But this is on account of the fact that, at the time of Partition, most Muslims in government service migrated to Pakistan, and a considerable vacuum was created which took an entire generation to fill up. This is not the fault of Indian democracy. And the vacuum is gradually being filled up.

Another aspect which Shabana Azmi has overlooked is the fact that there is a much larger proportion of Muslims than Hindus who are self-employed, or have definite vocations in which they excel and which come to them by heredity, such as in the fields of glassware, carpentry, carpet-making, leather goods, meat production and distribution. It is not widely known that the wooden slippers used by Hindu monks are usually made by Muslims. So also are the fans which are used reverentially before images of Hindu deities in temples across the country. We need not talk about Bollywood, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Muslim actors, actresses and technicians, a fact which even the redoubtable Bal Thackeray has never been critical of.

The Sachar Committee report, which Shabana Azmi has cited, ignored all these facts and cited only the percentage of jobs in government services occupied by Muslims. It was, to that extent, a prejudiced report, not an objective one, and more resembling a lawyer’s statement in which the lawyer has referred to only those arguments which are in favour of the brief given to him rather than an objective and impartial statement of the situation.

***

I would like to recall a comment I made in this context a while ago: “…Polygamy, fatwas against contraception, large families and the severely oppressive situation of girls and women rarely go together with economic betterment and social emancipation.”

Therein lie (I believe) the roots of poor socio-economic condition of Muslims.

Pl. also have a look at Literacy rates and “first claims”… and

Shabana Azmi is right about one thing…

and finally, do have a look at RealityCheck’s post on this issue which questions the data on Muslim backwardness.

From Muslim women in MP score high on literacy dt 25 September 2009

Madhya Pradesh has topped the figure with 60.1 per cent literacy among the Muslim women which was much better than other states including Assam, West Bengal, U P, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand and Rajasthan as per the census of population 2001.

The Muslim population in Madhya Pradesh is only 6.4 per cent of the total population and the literacy percent for Muslims in the State was 70.3 and this was achieved only by the active participation of women in the state, he said.

Jammu and Kashmir has a maximum Muslim population of 67.0 per cent but the women literacy rate was only 34.9 per cent

Brief excerpt from The Two-Regiment Theory by Balbir Punj (Mar 13, 2006):

The communal composition of the Royal Indian Army (Raj days) was heavily tilted towards Muslims. B.R. Ambedkar, in his book Pakistan or The Partition of India (1940), observes, “Whatever be the explanation, two glaring facts stand out…. One is that the Indian army today is predominantly Muslim in its composition. The other is that the Musalmans who predominate are the Musalmans from the Punjab and the NWFP.” (B.R. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol-8, Pg 95). However, the high recruitment of Hindu youths during World War II, after Veer Savarkar’s whirlwind propaganda, saw the Muslim proportion whittled down to 25 per cent of the whole by 1945.

The Muslims in the British Indian Army mostly migrated to Pakistan after Partition. The recruiting fields of Muslim soldiers viz. the NWFP and Punjab (West) are now in Pakistan. The Muslims who remained in India, say in UP, Bihar, West Bengal or Kerala, have a history of reluctance to serve in the army. This is despite any bias against Muslims or any other community in the forces. It is only a matter of their willingness to join and qualifying in the physical tests. That said, one-tenth of soldiers who laid down their lives in Operation Vijay in Kargil were Muslims.

Although British-era names like the Sikh Regiment and Gorkha Regiment persist, the government stopped raising ethnically named regiments back in the 1950s. The result: almost all regiments are of mixed ethnicity and religion today. The Indian army has its priests, granthis and maulvis to administer the religious schedule. There is no ‘religious indoctrination’ unlike in Pakistan and other Islamic states. All places of worship, be it temple, gurudwara, chaplain or mosque, are known by their generic name ‘dharamsthan’ (religious site). Recruits are groomed in such a rigorous manner that nationalism becomes their only religion. Every soldier participates in all religious functions.
…
Patriotism and nationalism are better kept outside the periphery of religion-based quotas. Suffice to say, we are proud of our Abdul Hamids, Albert Ekkas and J.F.R. Jacobs as much our Somnath Sharmas, Subroto Mukherjees and Padmanabhans.

From Sachar report may lead to Muslims’ ghettoization, says Salman Khursheed:
New Delhi: In an important development, marking a radical shift in the UPA government’s approach, from pre-Sachar to post-Sachar period, the Union Minister of Minorities Affairs Salman Khursheed has questioned, both the credibility of the Sachar report and blind acceptance of its recommendations.
…Cautioning the community from uncritical following of the Sachar report, Khursheed said that it might benefit the community in the short term but it could also lead to its further ghettoization which will be disastrous for the community in the long term as it will prevent the community’s mainstreaming.

More on Sachar…
From Sachar member flays UPA for report’s ‘misuse’ for pol gains by Abantika Ghosh, TNN Jul 3, 2011, 01.53am IST (emphasis added):
..In his article, published on the website of the Centre for Advanced Study of India (CASI) University of Pennsylvania, Rakesh Basant, professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad and a former member of the Sachar Committee, argues that main recommendations in the report, which were not community-specific..has been re-cast to make it sound Muslim-centric. He cites this as an apt example of the government’s outlook on the matter
…
“The UPA has not only picked up recommendations in isolation but has also highlighted the community-specific programs and its implementation in its election manifesto and other communications…Apparently the mainstreaming measures recommended by the Sachar Committee had much less political utility than promises of community specific benefits and programs. …It is important to recognize that mainstreaming would require a significant change in the nature of politics,” Basant writes.