IT is by now clear that discrimination in India is widespread and not confined to any single community or group. Yet, until recently, official discourse revolved essentially around issues of caste-based discrimination, by implication leaving unaddressed many other critical areas of deprivation and discrimination.¹ Caste-based reservations in employment and education have been the primary vehicle for fulfilling the constitutional promise of an egalitarian society. For six decades we have discussed and debated eligibility of various caste groups to access and utilize the benefits of reservations. But there are indications of a perceptible shift in academic and official thinking reflected in the recognition of the multiple axes of disadvantage that characterize our society. The recent debates on equality in the wake of the Sachar Committee Report (SCR) give an indication of the shift beyond the caste paradigm of inclusion.

The political motivations behind the conceptual shift are clear. Winning over a large and disaffected Muslim minority – the biggest minority in the world – was essential for the Congress Party to regain its primacy in Indian politics. Indeed, the implementation of social welfare programmes for Muslims over the past five years had gone a long way in marshalling support for the Congress. Undeniably, a crucial factor responsible for the spectacular verdict in favour of the Congress in the 2009 elections was the strong support of Muslims, marking an end to their post-Ayodhya estrangement from the Grand Old Party.

In addition to political considerations, the rapid transformation of India’s economy and its need for a more efficient utilization of the enormous reserves of resources and manpower in the country has drawn attention to the educational backwardness of Muslims and their economic marginality.² They are generally not part of the ongoing economic boom; in fact, the new economic boom threatens to marginalize them further from the mainstream economy driven by knowledge and education. Service related and IT industries recruit very few Muslims.³ The SCR helped the government to calibrate future initiatives to incorporate Muslims into the political system and to push for a more nuanced debate on minorities that in the recent past ‘largely revolved around perceptions and rhetoric.’⁴

 

The policy change was initially prompted by the success of the Congress-led alliance in defeating the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 2004 elections, which signalled a repudiation of the politics of exclusion and a return to policies of inclusiveness. The UPA-I government formed with the support of Left parties had within months of assuming power set into motion a large number of proposals for the welfare of disadvantaged and deprived groups. These included the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, reservations for the OBCs in higher education, formation of the Sachar Committee, and the Prime Minister’s new 15-point programme for minorities, to mention just a few. It also established new institutions to address the concerns of minorities. These include the setting up of the Ministry of Minority Affairs, the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, and the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions. Besides the MoMA, the Ministry of Women and Child Development and Ministry of Human Resources and Development too have earmarked funds for schemes for minorities.

The Prime Minister’s new 15-point programme was recast to focus action sharply on issues linked with the social, educational and economic uplift of minorities and provide for earmarking of outlays in certain schemes so that progress could be monitored. In 2006, the Union cabinet directed that ‘wherever possible, 15 per cent of targets and funds be earmarked for the minorities in the schemes included in the Prime Minister’s 15-point programme.’ These initiatives marked a conceptual shift in favour of socio-economic development and equity issues as against the past preoccupation with identity politics and the secular-communal divide. This represented a long overdue recognition that the concept of minority rights needed an approach of substantive rather than formal equality. The government now needs to ensure a translation of the conceptual shift into substantive policies and targeted measures with proper implementation in quick time.

 

The new schemes include the Area Intensive and Madrasa Modernization Scheme, setting up the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language, leadership development of minority women, corporations to promote entrepreneurship with increased credit flows, national-level scholarships for students in professional and technical institutions, provision of basic amenities in selected minority concentration districts and the development of artisan clusters.

There has also been some increase in the budgetary allocations made by different ministries in the past few years for minority welfare. The plan outlay of the Ministry of Minority Affairs has been enhanced from Rs 1,000 crore in 2008-09 to Rs 1,740 crore for 2009-10, registering an increase of 74 per cent, though given the extent of the development deficit of the Muslim community, a greater budgetary allocation is clearly required. While most of the MoMA schemes involve distribution of scholarships to students at different levels and coaching schemes, the multi-sectoral development programme for minorities in 90 minority concentration districts remains the UPAs flagship programme. However, this scheme will benefit only 30 per cent of the minority population since it has been allocated only Rs 990 crore in the 2009-10 budget. Given its central role, however, it not only needs additional funding but should also be extended to more districts.

 

Evidently, framing policies to implement the conceptual shift is not easy because of a lack of political will to confront the predictable charges of minority appeasement whenever there is an attempt to introduce special measures for minority welfare. The controversy over instituting a special plan on the lines of a similar plan for the Scheduled Castes is a case in point. The Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007-12) offered an important opportunity to correct the deficits in empowering of minorities bearing in mind that while ‘the previous five year plans have attempted to focus on weaker sections, they have failed to include many groups, especially Muslims, in the development process.’

However, the Planning Commission did not accept the proposal for a minority sub-plan, presumably because of the political opposition from the BJP. As in the past, the BJP objected to the incorporation of any special measures, plans or budgetary allocations for minorities and disparaged the proposal as ‘communalizing the development processes.’⁵ Though the Congress rejected the argument, the accusations nevertheless compelled the UPA government into taking a cautious approach with regard to the proposal for a minority sub-plan.

 

How do we assess the introduction of new initiatives to deal Muslim deprivation in the context of a wider conception of inequalities that go beyond the exclusive caste paradigm of reservations? The dissatisfaction with the one-dimensional model of equality embodied in caste based reservations points to the need to think of a new model of equality applicable to a wider population. Arguably, the SCR contributed to this change in arguing that the disadvantage suffered by Muslims is the result of a larger institutional and development deficit. This focus on Muslim deprivation and the neglect of minority development by the state touches upon the larger issues of equality and justice. This is evident from the SCR’s endorsement of an equal opportunity and diversity perspective to deal with the discrimination that confronts deprived groups in India, not just Muslims.

The government set up two expert groups to design an Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC) and a Diversity Index to measure diversity in public spaces (education, employment and housing) as a follow up to the SCR’s recommendations. The EOC group was asked to ‘examine and determine the structure of an Equal Opportunity Commission.’ The group envisaged the EOC as a body to ‘address the concerns of all deprived groups, with respect to equality of opportunity in education, employment and other sectors in a pro-active manner.’ Arguing that the idea of equality was founded on the provisions relating to the Right to Equality in Part III of the Constitution of India (Articles 14-17 and 29), considerably strengthened by the Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV, which expand the scope of the idea of equality beyond political equality to include equality in the socio-economic sphere (particularly Articles 38, 39, 41, 43, 45-47), it stressed the urgent ‘need to develop a wide variety of context-sensitive, evidence-based policy options that can be tailored to meet specific requirements.’⁶

 

As expected, the jurisdiction of the EOC has to be wide-ranging in terms of social groups and sectors. Obviously, while it cannot limit itself to particular groups, there is the danger of it becoming too general and getting bogged down in dealing with unfair discrimination against anyone.⁷ It must, therefore, be delimited in terms of domains and the nature of issues that it can take up. Moreover, the EOC should not be limited to education and employment. At the very least, it must apply to the housing sector, given the evidence of pervasive discrimination in urban housing. To what extent an EOC can help in the promotion of equality of opportunity without an anti-discrimination law that prohibits discrimination, however, remains doubtful. How much it can help eradicate structural injustice is even more debatable. The biggest issue though relates to the effectiveness of a group-driven rather than individual-driven complaints model in which redressal and adjudication of complaints will necessarily play only a minor role.

 

The second group was asked to propose a diversity index and work out the modalities for implementation.⁸ Its report recognized that the impact of the SCR would be wider than its principal objective: ‘Although the task of the Sachar Committee was to evaluate and enumerate the conditions of a specific minority group, the idea of a diversity index is floated to operationalize a broader notion of diversity, countering the tendencies of discrimination and deprivation in production, distribution and social sectors in India.’ Like the EOC, the Diversity Index too is not restricted to religion alone. Identification of the diversity gap and publicizing this information is expected to persuade institutions to bridge the gap.

The committee proposed a set of incentives, concessions, access to public land and resources, tenders, preferences and advertisements to encourage institutions to bridge the diversity gap by rewarding them for enhancing participation of an under-represented community in education, employment and housing. The implementation of the scheme is based on positive incentives; it does not propose disincentives which might be necessary to achieve diversity. But, can diversity work without the political will to implement disincentives to ensure fulfillment of targets?

The three expert group reports – SCR, Diversity Index and EOC – constitute the first serious attempt to look at the multiple grounds of inequality. They deserve an integrated reading if we are to debate and critique their proposals.⁹ Together these reports/proposals represent a paradigm shift in India’s approach to equality, taking into account new approaches based on a broader notion of inclusion. Moving beyond an exclusive focus on caste based reservations, they explore a combination of anti-discrimination and diversity promotion measures to pursue social justice.

Principally, they recognize that discrimination takes place on multiple grounds, and drawing rigid boundaries between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, between majority and minority, may produce a politics of resentment and antipathy among the excluded.¹⁰ The new approach appears to be more holistic and has the potential of providing a fairer distribution of social advantage as theoretically it covers a larger number of people in comparison to caste driven policies. Taken as a whole, the biggest change is a broadening of the concept of inequality to take into account contemporary discrimination.

Both the EOC and Diversity Index are in themselves extremely worthy proposals which address the first set of issues. But neither of these proposals deals specifically with the problem of under-representation of Muslims. Nonetheless, propelled by the official recognition of Muslim under-representation, both schemes are important pointers to a new model of equality which touches upon issues of justice hitherto reserved for caste groups. It takes forward the debate on equality and raises the promise of finding a way out, albeit indirectly, for increasing the representation of Muslims in the near future.

 

Footnotes:

1. See Zoya Hasan, Politics of Inclusion: Castes, Minorities and Affirmative Action, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, Second Impression, 2009; Satish Deshpande and Yogendra Yadav, ‘Redesigning Affirmative Action: Castes and Benefits in Higher Education’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 April 2006.

2. Thomas Hansen, ‘The India That Does Not Shine’, ISIM Review, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (Leiden), 19/Spring 2007.

3 & 4. Ibid.

5. Zoya Hasan, Politics of Inclusion, Academic Books, 2008, pp. 54-56.

6. Madhava Menon, Equal Opportunity Commission: What, Why and How? Report submitted to the Ministry of Minority Affairs, Government of India, 2008.

7. Tarunabh Khaitan, ‘Transcending Reservations: A Paradigm Shift in the Debate on Equality’, Economic and Political Weekly, 20 September 2008, p. 9.

8. Amitabh Kundu, Report of the Expert Group on Diversity Index, submitted to the Ministry of Minority Affairs, Government of India, 2008.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.