MUCH has happened and much remains to be done. But as the year ends, the Indian Muslim problem does inch along towards some sort of muddled solution. On occasion it has (of course) been derailed into the familiar national burlesque with familiar comforting tropes – mullahs, burqas, beards, debates on Quranic suras, the tragic personal lives of Muslim women. At one juncture, thanks to Jack Straw in distant Britain, the Indian public was amply enlightened on the critical sartorial differences between the hijab, the naqab, the burqa, the full cover, half-cover, face cover, head cover, and on Quranic injunctions on all of the above, by an impressive range of maulanas sporting the Turkish fez.

Despite these moments of high octave entertainment, the mood in the closing months of the year threatens to turn somewhat saner. I footnote this by saying that the Uttar Pradesh elections will inevitably dictate less sane directions for the Muslim debate. But while we have the respite, let us breathe deeply, think out loud. And debate constructively.

It appears to have been a period of frenetic activity. The prime minister, perhaps in anticipation of the Sachar report, issued a revamped 15 point programme for the ‘welfare of minorities’ (read, Muslim?) giving 12 specific schemes/programmes the mandate to crank up development and ‘wherever possible’ earmark 15% outlays for minorities; a spanking new Ministry (of Minority Affairs) was constituted in January 2006; the Sachar Committee set up in March 2005, began leaking its explosive findings in October 2006; the report was officially presented to the PM on 17 November, and tabled in Parliament on 30 November 2006. So, the Muslim cat is finally out of the ‘unity in diversity’ bag of enforced invisibility, and it’s cavorting around nakedly sans hijab or fez, making policy-makers uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. Perhaps even enough to act.

 

Sixty years after independence, India has succeeded in creating a brand new 14 crore strong underclass – the Indian Muslim. For many of us the Sachar report has meant a big fat ‘phew, finally!’ Its findings on the dismal development record for Muslims are not startling. We all knew. Muslims and non-Muslims knew. Any one who has stepped into a Muslim mohallah in recent years knew. The power pundits in the country knew. They may not have had data and percentages and tables and graphs and charts and enrolment and dropout ratios and infrastructural assessments shoved indisputably under their noses, but they knew that Muslims were in shabby shape. The difference of course, a critical difference, this truth is now presented as knowledge, the Muslim experience of deprivation in the form of hard data. That is important. It is also much harder to escape.

The responses to these findings have been entertaining. The BJP somewhat incoherently trashing the report as divisive, blaming years of Congress rule for the condition of Muslims, but unable to dispute the findings themselves, which is really 1-0 for the Muslim cause. Finally, the appeasement myth can be put to rest. And we can move on to a new level of debate.

Now, the obvious question is not the ‘what’ of the Muslim condition but the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ to move forward? So which is it? Wilful discrimination or just benign neglect of the kind that says – ‘Oops, we did not see 14 crore Muslims as a distinct community qua community. But really, no offence meant. They looked just like everybody else and besides even though some of them dressed differently, we have "unity in diversity" and we didn’t notice that the ones in caps and beards were doing particularly badly?’

The debate is silly. The facts are there – 60 years of systemic ‘absence’ of planning for the development of Muslims at the top level, combined with lethal doses of communalism (from the dormant to the active variety) at the very bottom, at the ground level, in the minds and hearts of the development brigade which delivers food, water, housing, education and civic amenities to one billion Indians. District Collectors, BDOs, DDOs, mamlatdars, talatis, primary education officers, teachers, chief medical officers, sarkari doctors, anganwadi workers, and of course the cops on the local beat – everyone is implicated. (And even as we go into overdrive making minority development plans, it is in their implementation that we will need grievance redressal mechanisms and zero tolerance for non-compliance by this very brigade.)

 

So, why did the nation’s planners let Muslims down, plan after five-year plan? Why is it that allocations for minority development in the Tenth Plan stood at barely 3% of the budget of the Ministry of Social Justice? At least partly because, notwithstanding the equality mantras enshrined in several articles of the Indian Constitution, Indian Muslims (subsumed under the minority tag) were constructed in the national imagination primarily as a cultural and religious community, with rights articulated chiefly and specifically in constitutional sections on Right to Freedom of Religion and Cultural and Educational Rights. (Article 25. Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion. Article 26. Freedom to manage religious affairs. Article 29. Protection of interests of minorities – (i) Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same. Article 30. Right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions).

The backdrop is obvious – the trauma of Partition, the two-nation theory, and the need to make Indian Muslims feel that their ‘cultural/religious’ identity would be protected in the new Indian nation. This was quite unlike SC/STs who were constructed entirely as ‘development subjects’, with economic deprivation and the debilitating experience of untouchability as their defining characteristics.

 

The defining characteristics of the Muslim became the right to celebrate Eid, go on Haj, cook cauldrons of biryani, and smilingly pose for the national photo-op (along with the turbaned Sikh and the cross-bearing Christian), an image faithfully reproduced decade after decade in the mandatory unity in diversity chapter of school civics textbooks. Discrimination, riots, communalism – these experiences of the Indian Muslim became lodged only in a frustrated political space, never cross-feeding into the development trajectory.

One of the biggest gains of the Sachar Committee report then is this – the reconstruction of the Muslim community as ‘development subjects’ of the Indian state (and resistance to it can be seen in the number of public debates invoking the Constitution against special benefits for Muslims, jumping up and screaming ‘foul!’ if Muslims are so much as mentioned in the context of development, and seeking to reinstate only ‘the madrasa modernization’ solution).

The term Sachar has used to help us shift paradigms is SRC – socio-religious community. It is a welcome shift. Other welcome shifts are the hammering down into tiny pieces of the frighteningly monolithic, homogenous Muslim ummah. The report highlights regional variations, with the South doing far better than the North on several fronts; it takes on board critical caste differences, with ashrafs, ajlafs, and arzals (broadly the upper, backward, and dalits among Muslims) finally finding official, credible, recognition. These differences demand study, engagement and carefully thought through policy interventions. The report itself – mandatory reading for anyone engaging with the Muslim condition in India today. The challenge now is to build upon what it offers, but without losing sight of the other critical paradigms that shape the Muslim experience in contemporary India, which must also inform policy, intervention and programmes.

 

The huge let down is the committee’s handling of gender. Is my outrage naïve, or is it genuinely appalling that in circa 2006, the prime minister should choose to set up a committee solely of seven wise men to study one of India’s largest socio-religious communities? It is almost medieval. Not even a token fig leaf on the gender question. Not a single wise woman on the Committee let alone two or three or four, as equity would demand (and ‘equity’ in the Sachar Committee’s own words is the report’s defining paradigm!).

By default then, on questions to do with the Muslim community, it is still an all male discourse. Men speak to men, (about men). Muslim women sit quietly deep within the recesses of the community space, waiting for the men to come home and tell them what the state said. That is the problem. For decades the Indian state has failed to seek or get direct access to Muslim women. The access is and always has been mediated through ‘community’. The legal separation of public/private spheres (with personal laws for all) has always allowed men to be kings of their domestic kingdoms, with women and children as their subject population. Self-respect, manhood, pride, injured in the daily encounter with a hostile state can thus be assuaged and somewhat healed by secure control over women, home, community.

 

The Foreword of the Sachar report makes the following apology of an apology, ‘During the committee interactions with women’s groups, some of them seriously articulated a grievance that it did not have any woman member. The committee tried to make up for this by convening a half-day meeting with women’s groups during its visits to states. In addition to that, women social activists in large numbers attended all the meetings of all the groups… Their input was intensive… about the various matters like education, medical facilities, anganwadis etc. The committee also held one full day meeting exclusively for women from all over India.’

The apology itself is revealing. Half-day and full-day meetings? Education, medical facilities, anganwadis – and the gender question is done! I think not. The apology is as problematic as the absence of a consistent gender perspective in the report. One welcomed the fact that the committee was mandated to look at Muslims, and not at minorities or weaker sections (the usual euphemistic obfuscation of the Muslim question). Name the problem to look for a solution. In exactly the same spirit, the mandate demanded focus, sections, chapter, verse and recommendations on Muslim women.

 

The lapse is particularly unfortunate because it is through the personal lives and tragedies of a series of Muslim women – Shah Bano, Gudiya, Imrana – that the image of the community has been almost entirely constructed in recent years. Media focus on the ‘religious-community’ space as the locus of Muslim backwardness, with the shariat as the fall guy, was a paradigm crying out for change. There is urgent need to locate Muslim women’s lives in the basic material matrix of education, employment, health, and equally, pointedly, in the empowered space of access to professional education, public representation and governance.

And, on occasion, to do it in a way that acknowledges the burden of identity placed upon Muslim women, that acknowledges the myriad ways in which the absence of security affects Muslim women’s lives; that Muslim women’s alienated relationship with the state cannot be built through new schools (i.e education) alone; that it must simultaneously be structured through the right to life and rule of law.

How do the twin lenses of identity and security impact upon many Muslim women’s increasingly fraught existence within the ‘community space’? And how do these intersect and interact with the twin paradigms of development and participatory democracy, to create the overall status of Muslim women in contemporary India? That remains the challenge – to seek a complex and nuanced gender understanding – to help us think of nuanced solutions, which admittedly, in all fairness, the Sachar report did not even set out to meet.

On ‘pure’ (de-politicized) development, there is a quantum of impressive data on all manner of things. Much of it gender disaggregated – on employment and education in particular. Education for Muslim girls is safe. It is non-political. It is part of the state’s welfare duty and patriarchal self-image. No one can possibly argue with it, or be threatened by the image of lots of earnest little Muslim girls bent studiously over their school books, perhaps even hunched over computer tables. But on bigger and better aspirational fronts, on true representation – like jobs in the IAS, IFS, IPS, participation in UPSC exams, entry into IITs and IIMs and Parliament, the gender lens disappears, as does the gender data. (Almost as if to say, Muslim girls certainly deserve basic education, but they cannot possibly aspire to the bigger stage, so why bother?).

 

Muslim women are mentioned in the context of home-based self-employment, as contenders for primary and elementary education, as candidates for teachers’ jobs, and so on. It is a self-limiting lens that pitches the aspirations of Muslim women at the lowest levels of participation and development, rather than look for them at the highest level. At least look for them there, pretend to be somewhat aghast when you fail to find them, and then by all means write a table or draw a dismal graph that says – Zero Representation. The construction of such a table itself, with a ‘Muslim woman’ category, albeit unfilled, validates the Muslim woman’s right to access that space. It sets up an aspirational norm, a goal, a dream – which some Muslim women, somewhere, then work towards.

In the concluding chapter, the report mentions the NHRC and NCM as grievance redressal institutions, but fails to mention the highly under-utilized NCW (National Commission for Women), a rather obvious case of gender oversight. (At a recent seminar to discuss the report’s findings, one member of the Sachar Committee, in response to a gender critique of the report, helpfully suggested the need to have another committee look at the Muslim gender question!)

 

So there you have it – a seminal, but not satisfyingly gender-informed, re-construction of community. Even so, in the spirit of being constructive, let us look forward. What does the nation do with the terrible condition in which its largest minority group finds itself? By Jove, we give them quotas! It’s cheap, it’s easy, a single sleight of the hand answer to a complex problem. Although if I were Munnabhai, I may have said – ‘kya thakela idea hai Maamu!’ India is truly a nation in need of a new idea. Unable to think of progress, development, equitable growth, inclusive citizenship, of anything without thinking quotas and reservations.

This is what all the recent debates around the Muslim socioeconomic decline appear to be centred around. Every other politician is making known his position on quotas for Muslims. A thousand ideas are afloat. Quotas for Muslims as dalits. Quotas for Muslims as OBCs. Quotas within existing quotas. Quotas in the private sector. Newspapers are asking the quota question, as are TV channels. And the million-dollar question doing the rounds last month was ‘Will the Sachar Committee recommend quotas?’

The Q debate is naturally generating hot opposition. Notably from the BJP, but even others, who hold out the Constitution in support of their position, with the same stoic expression of sanctimonious truth-bearing as the lawyer in the Hindi film court room scene who holds out the Gita for the customary sach ki saugand. The Constitution does not permit reservation along religious lines, they say. True in letter but not in spirit. When the framers of our Constitution wrote that wonderful document, they wrote it in a different context, at a different time and place in history. It is not frozen for eternity. It has been amended hundreds of times. If there is a sufficient justification for the good of society and the nation, the Constitution can and should be amended.

 

The point is why only think quotas when it comes to the problems of marginalization and discrimination? I support quotas. On principle, it is untenable that Muslim and Christian dalits alone should be kept out of the dalit quota pie while Mazhabi Sikhs and Neo-Buddhists are included. My fear is that having given ‘the quota’, it’s a home run for politicians, and governments will do little else. Certainly Mulayam Singh does not even pretend that he will do more than demand quotas for dalit Muslims (who are but a minuscule 0.8% of the Muslim population).

Quotas are not the end; they are the means. The goal is inclusion and representation. What we need are a series of affirmative action interventions, an enabling environment, back-end subsidies to institutions which promote Muslim inclusion, an anti-discriminatory culture, codes of conduct, equal opportunity legislation, a series of anti-discrimination laws, grievance redressal cells, and of course, targeted, monitorable development policies implemented with political and bureaucratic will.

But development alone is a limited tool for change. The deeply fractured relationship between the Muslim and state (which directly bears upon any development intervention) is structured through the other critical paradigm of justice and security. Now, justice is admittedly in short supply for all poor people everywhere in this great country. But when the source of repeated violations of the rights of one community is the state, then justice assumes a different, greater meaning. Justice and protection by the same state alone repairs and heals, restores a sense of citizenship.

 

Sachar is silent on the communal question. Vital jail data (that Muslims in several states are disproportionately represented in the nation’s prison cells) was collected, but kept out of the report. Justice does not figure. A report so heavy on data has failed to note that there is still no official record of communal violence in this country. Statistics are left capriciously to individual (highly implicated) states to compile. How many incidents of communal violence remain unrecorded, un-prosecuted? We still do not know. How many Muslim men and Muslim women have been affected by the extraordinary laws – TADA and POTA? How many jailed? How does this compare relative to other SRCs?

The absence of any gender perspective in the government’s proposed Communal Violence Bill, despite the horrors of sexual violence inflicted upon scores of Muslim women in Gujarat, does not find mention. And where do the Muslims of Malegaon go when they hear the midnight knock? Grievance redressal is not only about discrimination in jobs and education. It is a wider, more generous idea; it is about the state’s commitment to its citizens to protect and secure, and for them to have some place to go when it doesn’t.

We need to acknowledge that despite United Nations Guidelines on Internal Displacement, and India’s international obligations, we do not have a national policy on internal displacement due to violence; that lakhs of Muslims displaced and ghettoized with every communal incident are still fending for themselves. Some identity and security concerns are cursorily touched upon in the report’s second chapter, helpfully called, Public Perceptions and Perspectives containing, ‘…the perceptions and perspectives of people as they were reported to us without taking a view on them.’ In order words, these are not the Sachar Committee’s perceptions (or, are they?)

Besides ‘perceptions’, we all know, are soft and subjective. This one crucial chapter alone stands outside the terra firma of hard truth and objective knowledge, which the rest of the report occupies. Few of these immensely troubling perceptions surface in the rest of the report or in its recommendations. Justice for all, strict action against biased police action, a national task force to look at incidents of communal violence, to determine a state policy on reparation and rehabilitation for survivors of sexual violence, ways to ensure a de-communalized police and security force, a decent piece of legislation on mass crimes (not the shoddy Communal Violence Bill) – we need all this and more.

 

Sixty years of SC/ST reservation and you still have the brutal multiple rape and murder of four dalits in Khairlangi. What does this tell us about integration, or about building a more humane country? About the continuing anger, frustration and sense of disenfranchisement of dalits, a community which has directly benefited from quotas for over half a century. Bhaiyalal Bhotmange is an educated dalit. Education gave his family neither protection nor justice. Why have the erring police officers simply been suspended? Why have they not been hauled up, charge-sheeted under the Atrocities Act, and sent to rot in jail?

Set up 100 primary schools for Muslims in Malegaon or in Gujarat or wherever you like, but unless Muslims feel secure in the right to life, rule of law and justice, both real and symbolic, the compact between community and state remains broken. This then is the Muslim reality, hovering above, beyond and beneath development plans and any number of incisive reports.

 

The Sachar report has pointed the country towards a long overdue development roadmap. And a Congress prime minister says that he is prepared to walk the mile. As a statement of intent, it is welcome. But what of the Hashimpura massacre of 1987 when under cover of curfew in Meerut, over 40 Muslims were killed in cold blood by the Uttar Pradesh PAC? Congress then ruled both at the Centre and the state. It has taken 19 years for charges to be framed and for the trial to even begin.

As the nation and its ‘secular’ media celebrates 100 convictions in the Bombay bomb blast case, does it pause to ask what happened to the Bombay riots cases? Recall, for Gods sake – Maharashtra was also run by a Congress government, which allowed the Shiv Sena to roam free and kill at will. The Srikrishna Report submitted in 1998, indicting the state’s police officers, lies shamefully buried. Nearly five years into the horrors of Gujarat, the UPA has done pretty much… nothing! And all we have by way of justice is one poor, misguided Muslim girl Zahira Sheikh staring out at us from behind prison bars. This then is the truly long walk to inclusion, democracy and citizenship. And the question is whether a Congress prime minister can and will trudge this difficult mile?