Barking up the wrong tree

By G.S. Bhargava

The thrust of the report of Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee is that the Muslim community exhibits 'deficits and deprivation 'in practically all areas of development. The committee was set up to 'evaluate the social, economic and the educational status of Muslims.

Reinforcing the finding with a massive array of statistical data, the report implicitly suggests reservation for Muslims on the lines of the constitutional provision for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, whose condition has been taken as a point of reference for the evaluation.

First and foremost, Gandhiji and the Indian National Congress, once bitten by the system of separate electorates ending up in partition, agreed for safeguards or reservation for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the Scheduled Tribes (STs) for a limited period. The reason was that because of the pernicious caste system the SCs, especially, had been exploited and deprived of their due by the upper castes, for generations.

Nevertheless, Dr. Ambedkar introduced the cautionary provision of limiting the safeguard for ten years. He was on record in the Constituent Assembly that too long a dependence on the crutch of reservation would rob the beneficiaries of initiative and drive. In this connection, it is also necessary to recall Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the great Muslim reformer and educationist of last century, whose watchword was that education was the key to development and would open the gates to social amelioration. Ironically, his handiwork, the Aligarh Muslim University, (which, incidentally, is the alma mater of stalwarts like Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah), has been for some years the hotbed of sectarian agitations and mob violence. Eminent social scientists on its faculty have taken to preaching separatist philosophy.

Why?

Because successive governments since Independence, instead of striving to improve the socio-economic condition of Muslims, have been sedulously wooing them as a source of bulk votes. No wonder they did not succeed. Professor Mohammad Yunus of Bangladesh, this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, has demonstrated with his Grameen Bank achievement that the attack on poverty and social backwardness has to be direct.

In his own words, "I firmly believe that all human beings have an innate skill. I call it the survival skill. The fact that the poor are alive is a clear proof of their ability. They do not need us to teach them how to survive, they already know this. So rather than waste our time teaching them new skills, we decided to make maximum use of their existing skills. Giving the poor access to credit allows them an ability immediately to put into practice the skills they already know-to weave, husk rice paddy, raise cows, peddle a rickshaw. And the cash they earn is then a tool, a key that unlocks a host of other abilities, a key to explore one's own potential."

The Congress party that was in unchallenged power for over fifty years after Independence, first under Nehru and then Indira Gandhi and the dynasty she founded in a republican country had not shown awareness of such a sound development strategy. The reason again is its pre-occupation with tapping the community for electoral purposes, which required that the people be left 'deficit ' and 'deprived ' in the main areas of development. Most importantly, such a perception in the community has to be sustained!

India is a multi-cultural society. A pluralist approach to all religions, as advocated by Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, should have been the norm. But the secularism practised and promoted by the Governments all these years is not geared towards that end. In fact, the expression 'secular added to the preamble of our Constitution under the 42nd Amendment has remained undefined. With the result that a Shiva Sainik who defects to the Congress party becomes a secularist!

Of course, it would be satisfying for the practitioners of the policy to determine who is 'secular' and who is not. On present reckoning, the Congress party, its supporters like Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan and of course the Communists and their allies are sea-green secularists. The purpose is patently vote garnering, not development or amelioration of the conditions of the victims.

Even in Kerala, cited in the Sachar report, improvement in the socio-economic conditions of the sizable Muslim population came in the wake of oil boom and the opening of employment opportunities for emigrants from the State in the Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia. The Ezhavas, regarded as the lowest caste among the Hindus, owe their upliftment to a savant, Sri Narayan Guru, who had striven relentlessly for social reform.

Besides, thanks to enlightened princely rulers like those of erstwhile Cochin and Travancore, not to mention the Christian missionaries, there was unprecedented spread of literacy among the people. The role of the madrasas is limited, if at all. Moreover, in the frontier areas of U.P. and Bihar the madrasas are breeding grounds of unhealthy activities, according to official sources themselves. In the circumstances, one would expect the Sachar Committee to advocate reform of the madrassa system as it obtains but such a step would be objected to as interference in the working of minority educational institutions.

As a matter of fact, the Sachar report says only a miniscule fraction of Muslim youth go to madrasas for their education; many more attend schools organised in mosques, which presumably are exclusively Muslim because non-Muslims are not expected to study there unlike in Christian schools .On top of this, the Sachar Committee also wants special schools to be established for Muslims, a recipe for keeping Muslims apart from the mainstream. Although not spelt out by the Sachar Committee, perception of 'deprivation and deficit 'of development among Muslims is aggravated by their failure to go along with non-Muslims, including Hindus. (Syndicate Features)