It All Comes Under One Cap

• 15-point programme to improve education and employment opportunities
• Allocate 15 per cent of all developmental schemes for minorities; 72% are Muslims
• Provide reservation for Muslims identified as backward class in the central list of OBCs
• Reservation can thus be provided without new quotas. At present, most seats set aside for OBCs goes to other communities.

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he ruckus over the 'religious census' in the armed forces thrust the Sachar panel into the public eye in a rancour-filled context. But its full report on the status of Muslims, chock-full with startling facts, has fired a genuine debate. In the air are many proposals, even a creative use of affirmative action. The facts—which the report will formally bring to light when it is presented later this month—are well-known: Muslims fare worse than even the SC/STs in education, and trail the OBCs in employment, economic status and landholdings. That they are represented well below their demographic share in government jobs and the lower judiciary. And, ironically, the only place where they are over-represented is in the country's prisons.

The UPA government is oath-bound to redress this. After all, its common minimum programme (CMP) had promised to look into "how best the welfare of socially and economically backward sections among religious and linguistic minorities...is enhanced". The Sachar committee's constitution was perhaps a first step—such a reorientation of policy had to be grounded in fresh socio-economic data. The panel's findings, PMO sources said, will now help "initiate a national debate on the subject...and hopefully move the discussion from talk of fundamentalism and terror to a focus on improving the socio-economic condition of the Muslim community".

It is one thing to say, as the PM did on November 2, that minorities must get "a fair share in central, state government and private sector jobs". The trouble is with the roadmap to achieve this. Interestingly, while the CMP did talk of the possibility of reservation, PMO sources were quick to stress the PM did not exactly have quotas in mind.

So what did he have in mind? A PMO official says, "The PM wasn't waiting for the Sachar report to begin work. In June, he had the new 15-point programme for minorities notified. It should be operational by January '07. It improves on the original 15-point programme of 1983, which was just a set of good intentions rather than a definite set of proposals." (Incidentally, it took till 2006 for a fresh programme to emerge, an indication of the priority given to the subject.)

The new programme, expectedly, talks of improving education/employment opportunities, enhancing living conditions and ensuring just rehabilitation of communal violence victims—all this with no extra budgetary allocation. Instead, it simply says a percentage of all existing developmental schemes, whether in the area of employment, housing and bank credit meant for the poor, should be allocated to minorities; that a certain percentage of government schools be built in areas of high minority density and that selection boards for public jobs be more representative to ensure fair selection. The Union cabinet has decided that 15 per cent is the figure to be allocated for all minorities. (The national figure for them is 18.5 per cent; Muslims constitute 72 per cent of this.)

o, is reservation impossible for Muslims? Not really, even though the Constitution forbids reservation on religious lines. Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid told Outlook, "Muslims cannot be given reservation on religious lines but it's possible on grounds of being a backward class. In Karnataka, when Veerappa Moily was CM, a survey established that the entire community was backward and a four per cent reservation package within the OBC quota was given to Muslims in the early '90s. No one has questioned it. The central list of OBCs contains innumerable Muslim communities (most Muslims in India are OBCs) who are entitled to reservation. The problem is that most of them can't take advantage of this provision as the principal OBC groups gobble up the benefits. A solution is to segregate the less advantaged as was done in states like Bihar so that more backward Muslims can get a share. This is constitutionally valid."

A PMO official agrees that this is possible: "No one has challenged the list of communities. So nothing prevents the government from passing an order that Muslim communities named as backward be given benefits on a priority basis."

Clearly, it is a lack of political will and an anti-Muslim bias rather than constitutional/legal constraints that prevents ameliorative action. An instance of this came from a senior Congress functionary himself. According to him, since Islam does not believe in caste, Muslims cannot expect to get reservation on grounds of belonging to a backward caste; if they do start getting such benefits, the mullahs would challenge it; and anyway, if a Muslim OBC changed the profession from which he derived his caste, he'd lose his rights. He refused to accept the fact that while Islam did not believe in caste, the Indian reality was that Muslims here did subscribe to the caste system; that while a mullah would cheerfully ask an Imrana to live with a rapist father-in-law, he wouldn't dare stop a Muslim from getting a job; and that if a Muslim OBC lost his right to reservation if he changed his profession, so would a Hindu OBC.

When these arguments were put to Moily, chairman of the Oversight Committee examining reservation for OBCs in educational institutions, he laughed it off. "Hinduism may recognise caste, but the Constitution doesn't. Reservation has been given to certain communities on grounds of being members of the Other Backward Classes, not because they belong to certain castes. Some are Hindu, others are Muslim."

National Minorities Commission chairman Hamid Ansari summed up the situation: "The situation requires a two-pronged approach. One, of course, is empowerment through providing educational and employment opportunities." But he stresses that the PM's 15-point programme, which seeks to strengthen the monitoring mechanism through a committee of secretaries and by urging the CMs to do likewise, will not work unless it is supplemented with a civil society monitoring mechanism. Says Ansari: "A civil society team will ensure that bureaucratic explanations for non-action will be verified; it will widen the debate as it is a subject neither discussed by the media or Parliament. Second, the fact of exclusion of the minorities must be squarely faced and reversed consciously. For instance, few Muslims may qualify for the civil services but why are they not accommodated even at the lowest level as constables or peons? Surely, they meet the minimum literacy levels and physical fitness requirements for such jobs. When the Rapid Action Force was constituted in the early '90s, a conscious effort to include Muslims was made and its record in communal riot situations has been far superior to that of state police."

The point, Ansari says, is that "everyone has to be given a stake in the system—majority, minority, men, women. It's the only way forward towards a society where everyone is involved in the welfare and security of the country".