The Times of India
22 February 2007
AREA OF DARKNESS
by Mujibur Rehman
Hindu-Muslim relations have impacted India's development discourse more decisively than was anticipated in the pre-Partition years. And for good reason: Conditions of Indian Muslims, according to the Sachar committee report, point to an appalling policy neglect over decades.
Public debate on the report suggests it is only about India's contentious Muslim reservation issue. Two articles in this newspaper 'Sachar report flawed' (Jan 23) and 'No Quotas, Please' (Nov 20) are an example of this projection.
But the report is, in effect, about how incomplete and shallow the discourse on secularism has been. It also shows how flawed frameworks of interaction between the state and communities have shaped unequal outcomes.
While the statistical portrait that emerges from the report is deeply disturbing, identical trends were noticed long before 1947.
As early as 1871, W W Hunter in his book, The Indian Musalmans, articulated the community's deep sense of discrimination. "A great section of the Indian population, some 30 million in number, finds itself decaying under British rule.
They complain that they, who but yesterday were the conquerors and Governors of the Land, can find no subsistence in it today", he said. Muslim backwardness became the rallying point for a powerful fraction of Muslim elites who successfully campaigned for a separate homeland.
In post-Sachar India, Muslim elites have no such option. What, however, still gives an edge to Indian Muslims is the power of their votes in nearly 85 parliamentary constituencies, which could determine the fate of any national regime.
With the onset of coalition politics since the early 1990s, Muslim voters have gained unprecedented bargaining power in India's competitive party politics. It is this factor, not commitment to secularism, that motivates non-Hindutva, supposedly secular, political elites to take the Sachar report's recommendations seriously.
The claim that there is nothing fresh about the report except that it bears official stamp is quite misleading. The trends are not new, but the facts are. For example, the facts about Muslim backwardness in West Bengal with its 23.16 per cent Muslim population, are a shocking revelation.
This fact remained out of public knowledge, even as the region was always part of research agenda of eminent scholars like Amartya Sen, Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta Kaviraj, Amiya Bagchi, Pranab Bardhan and others. It suggests the exclusive character of our mainstream research agenda.
The Left Front regime should be given some credit for building a riot-free society, which other major parties failed to accomplish in regions they governed. However, a riot-free society is not enough to address the backwardness of a com-munity with historical disadvantages. This calls for special policy interventions.
The report points to a significant intellectual failure .
When Muslims were up against a vicious political campaign on so-called appeasement during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the secular response either dismissed it as prejudiced claims of Hindutva ideologues or recognised it as appeasement of Muslim fundamentalists, citing the infamous Shah Bano case.
But had the facts the Sachar report lays down been available, the appeasement campaign could have been confronted more effectively.
Though this report is the first of its kind exclusively on Indian Muslims, there were similar efforts in the past, such as the Gopal Singh panel (1980-83), which also studied other minorities. According to its member-secretary Rafiq Zakaria, its findings sent shock waves through South Block.
As many as 200 researchers were sent to different parts of India to collect the facts, and Rs 57.77 lakh invested in the report's preparation. Although submitted in 1983 to the government, it was tabled in Lok Sabha on August 24, 1990, with its major recommendations rejected.
According to MIT scholar Omar Khalidi, the report is not available in any major library. Intellectuals concerned with secularism could have nailed down Hindutva votaries with this panel's findings, but they failed to place this in the public domain.
The Sachar report once again exposes the failings of our secular researchers.
The writer teaches at Jamia Millia university.
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