New York Times, International Section, Nov. 29, 2006

Memo From India:
Report Shows Muslims Near Bottom of Social Ladder

By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: November 29, 2006

NEW DELHI, Nov. 24 — Even those who caution against “illusions of grandeur and power,” as the head of India’s governing coalition, Sonia Gandhi, did last week, cannot hide their sense of pride at the idea of India as a nation that extends the concessions of secular democracy to its many castes, creeds and faiths.

Yet that notion has come under some strain in recent days, with an official panel having concluded that Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, are “lagging behind” on most things that matter.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s office, which is reviewing the report, summarized the panel’s biting conclusion this way: “The community is relatively poor, more illiterate, has lower access to education, lower representation in public- and private-sector jobs and lower availability of bank credit for self-employment. In urban areas, the community mostly lives in slums characterized by poor municipal infrastructure.”

Muslims make up roughly 13 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion, and their numbers are nearly equal to the entire population of Pakistan, which was carved out of British India nearly 60 years ago as the homeland of the subcontinent’s Muslims. Soul-searching about Muslim rights and well-being in this country, which has witnessed periodic outbreaks of religious violence, has been a recurrent leitmotif ever since.

The latest findings have prompted fresh debate. In an editorial in The Indian Express, an English-language daily, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the president of the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, suggested that the government’s panel had revealed “the hollowness of our concept of republican citizenship.”

“What is at stake,” Mr. Mehta said, “is not just uplifting this or that group, but the very idea of India itself: whether it has the capacity for transcending the cant, indifference and identity traps that have brought us to this pass.”

The report is expected to be made public soon, but leaks in the last several weeks have already turned its contents into political fodder. Trial balloons have been floated about extending affirmative action benefits originally devised to uplift low-caste Hindus and others considered “backward,” by offering additional set-asides in education and employment for Muslims.

The mark of “backwardness” is a boon in this country, where a government job can lift a family’s fortunes forever, just as it is a vital part of political arithmetic: Secure jobs for a group, the reasoning goes, and you secure its loyalty at the polls.

A number of Muslim religious and political leaders have already begun to advocate quotas for Muslims. But the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has pointed out that Indian law prohibits faith-based quotas.

The secretary of the panel that issued the report, Abusaleh Shariff, said in an interview this week that in some states, education and poverty indicators showed that Muslims had fallen behind even low-caste Hindus. Mr. Shariff said the panel recommended, among other things, free and compulsory education up to age 14, as well as financial support to promote industries in which Muslims are concentrated, like textiles.

The findings of the panel, headed by a retired high court judge, Rajinder Sachar, are expected to add to sparring over the Muslim vote, particularly in the elections to be held next year in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where Muslims are a vital chunk of the electorate. The report will become public when Mr. Singh submits it to Parliament, possibly during its current session.

Among the panel’s most damning statistics, as reported by The Indian Express, are that in many states Muslims are significantly overrepresented in prison. In the western state of Maharashtra, for instance, Muslims make up 10.6 percent of the population but 32.4 percent of those convicted or facing trial. In the famed national bureaucracy, the Indian Administrative Service, Muslims made up only 2 percent of officers in 2006. Among district judges in 15 states surveyed, 2.7 percent were Muslim.

Educational disparities were among the most striking. Among Muslims, Mr. Shariff said, the literacy rate is about 59 percent, compared with more than 65 percent among Indians as a whole. On average, a Muslim child attends school for three years and four months, compared with a national average of four years.

Less than 4 percent of Muslims graduate from school, compared with 6 percent of the total population. Less than 2 percent of the students at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology are Muslim. Equally revealing, only 4 percent of Muslim children attend madrasas, Mr. Shariff said.

The gaps in employment are likely to be among the most politically explosive. Muslims appear to be overrepresented in the informal sector of day laborers and street vendors and underrepresented in the public sector. Muslims secured about 15 percent of all government jobs, considerably less than the share filled by “backward” castes and Dalits, those who were considered “untouchables” in the Hindu caste system.

Whatever action the government decides to take, it will have to contend with a peculiar dimension of Muslim identity here. Since they are mostly converts from Hinduism or descendants of converts, Muslims in India are riven by caste. In other words, there are Muslim Dalits, as well as Muslims who are considered “backward.”

To ignore those divides and entitle all Muslims to the same affirmative action benefits, Imtiaz Ahmad, a retired professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University argued, would be to reward only those at the upper reaches of the Muslim social ladder.

Many well-to-do Muslims, he said, particularly those with access to education, have benefited from the Indian economic advance in recent years. The Muslim community, he and other scholars point out, is made up of a small elite, vast numbers of poor people and very few people in between.

Whether India can deliver the fruits of economic progress to the many Muslims at the bottom of the ladder remains a crucial question.

At least, Mr. Ahmad argued, India has managed to address Muslim concerns without what he called the “coercive apparatus” that some European countries have adopted. He compared India’s approach with that of the Netherlands, which recently banned the wearing of the Muslim burqa, or face-covering veil, in public places.

“There are many things we can say about Indian democracy,” Mr. Ahmad said. “But it has given assurances, to minorities included, that things are negotiable.”
 

(Hari Kumar contributed reporting.)