India's Muslims
Don't blame it on the scriptures
Nov 30th 2006 | DELHI AND DEOBAND, UTTAR PRADESH
>From The Economist print edition
Why India's 150m Muslims are missing out on the country's rise
GEORGE BUSH likes to point out that India has a vast Muslim populationthe
world's second-largest after Indonesiayet not a single al-Qaeda member. Even
if this is true, it is far from the only measure of well-being. According to
more conventional ones, India's Muslims are faring terribly. They are
disproportionately likely to be in prison, unemployed, illiterate and poor.
India's economy is growing fast, but the gap between Muslims and other
religious groups is widening. Headlines refer to Muslims as the new dalitsthe
group, once known as untouchables , at the bottom of the Hindu-caste heap.
Reuters A lot to be grumpy about
That Muslims are lagging has been known for a while. But discussing why, or
what to do about it, has been taboo in a country proud of its peculiarly
religious brand of secularism. Mohammad Hamid Ansari, chairman of the National
Commission for Minorities, says that his organisation ritually files an annual
report showing how poorly India's Muslims are doing. Each year it somehow gets
lost on its way to parliament.
That is why what is known as the Sachar report, after the former chief
justice who chaired a government-appointe d committee to investigate the
condition of India's Muslims, is creating so much heat. And why it was tabled
in parliament only on November 30th, weeks after it was finished and presented
to the prime minister.
India's non-Muslims sometimes suggest that the troubles of their neighbours
in prayer hats are self-inflicted: obscurantist imams who equate education with
the rote-learning of the hadith, sayings attributed to the Prophet; four-wived
husbands with more children than they can feed; and a lack of drive to better
themselves, perhaps brought on by a nagging feeling that they would rather be
in Muslim Pakistan. None of this is true; the last accusation is particularly
unfair.
Madrassas such as the Darul-Uloom in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, which proudly
boasts of a curriculum largely unchanged since 1866, hardly equip their
students to face the future, but only 3% of Muslim children attend them. Nor is
it clear that the rulings of the orthodox, on anything from the evils of
television to matters of family law, are obeyed. On polygamy, the most recent
study (which is 30 years old) suggests that Muslim men are less likely than
members of India's other religions to have a harem. And hardly any Indian
Muslims hanker after life in Pakistan.
The problems faced by Muslims are in fact more prosaic. Not enough of them
have jobs and too few can read or write. This is not new. But according to
Abusaleh Shariff, an economist who compiled much of the data in the Sachar
report, there are two areas where the gap between Muslims and the rest has
widened dramatically over the past ten years or so. He says that both literacy
rates for Muslim girls and poverty rates among urban Muslims show something
close to a worsening even in absolute terms.
Part of the explanation for this phenomenon lies in where India's Muslims
live. First, they often occupy the old parts of big cities like Delhi, not the
fast-growing new suburbs where wealth is created and spent. Or they live in the
slums. As a result, measured by monthly expenditure, over 40% of Muslims living
in cities fall into the poorest quintile of the population, compared with 22%
of Hindus.
Second, despite large Muslim populations in southern and western states such
as Kerala, there are far more Muslims in the north and east of the country,
which is poorer and less well governed. That in turn has an effect on their
schooling. In rural Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state and home to
about one-fifth of its Muslims, only 30% of small towns have a primary school.
For every kilometre a girl is from a school, her chances of attending it fall.
In Kerala, where schooling is more plentiful, Muslim girls do well.
Poor schooling explains another of the report's findings, which is that
Muslims fail to get jobs with the country's largest employerthe government.
Some of this is plain discrimination, particularly where the more menial types
of government work are concerned. But entry into the highest levels of
government service is meritocratic, judged on exam papers written by anonymous
students. The problem here is rather that too few Muslim students stay at
school long enough to sit the exams.
Too easily appeased
For the government of Manmohan Singh, the findings of the report offer a
temptation. Indian politicians are fond of using quotas for minorities in
everything from jobs to education to secure their political support. With the
approach of a state election in Uttar Pradesh, due in the next few months, this
will become more and more attractive. This would give the main opposition
Bharatiya Janata Party yet another opportunity to accuse the government of
pandering to minorities, especially Muslims. And the Supreme Court, which is so
vigorous it sometimes seems to be running the country on its own, might object
too, since India's constitution prohibits discrimination on religious grounds.
Many Muslims argue that they are better off helping themselves, rather than
holding out for the government. In fact they often seem to fare worse where
they have more political clout, which easily translates into unreliable token
promises, for, say, an increase in the number of teachers literate in Urdu, the
language of Indian Islam. The leaked figures on government jobs show that
Muslims do better in Gujarat, scene of an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002, than in
Bihar, where governments depend on their votes.
Muslims do well in education where the initiative rests with them, says
Mushirul Hasan, vice-chancellor of Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi.
Where they are dependent on government patronage they fare badly. Muslim
educational societies have begun to improve education in Kerala and the booming
southern cities of Bengalooru (Bangalore) and Chennai (Madras). More are needed
if Muslims are not to fall further behind as India prospers.
saiyed shahbazi
www.shahbazcenter.org
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