The Indian Muslim quandary
TERRORISTS have struck again in India. But this time it is in Gujarat, a state that had seen one of the worst communal carnages only a few years before. The Indian government has taken timely measures to prevent any communal reprisal because, as in many similar cases before, the suspected perpetrators are some Muslim fringe groups. And every time such accusations take place, Muslims in general take cover since they could become the targets of mob fury.
On wonders why, in a country that has the third largest Muslim population of the world, there should be Muslim fringe groups launching terror attacks against their own country. It cannot be that, like some armed political cadres (such as the Naxalites in Bihar or the Bodos in Assam), they are pursuing a dream to carve out a separate state in one corner of the country. The Muslims in India are far too many, and far too dispersed over the country, for anyone to even contemplate such an objective. Pakistan was tried, and we know what the outcome was. What else, then, could be behind the periodic terrorist outbursts that are attributed to these fringe groups?
A stock response would be a convoluted sense of injustice that has been consuming young Muslims in many Western countries where they are a small minority. But this would be a poor answer, considering that Muslims in India are not politically under-represented in the national forum. Could this be because, after centuries of co-existence, the Muslims find themselves straying away from the mainstream? Could this be happening because they have fallen way behind the great Indian march to advancement for lack of preparedness, and perhaps unwillingness, to modernise?
Consider some statistics. According to the Rajinder Sachar Committee (2006) report on Muslim Community of India, only about 5% are represented in government jobs, and 3 % in the elite Civil Service. This should not surprise us as only a little over 3% of Indian Muslims complete graduation, whereas it's 16% for Hindus. In premier colleges only one out of 25 under-graduate students, and one out of 50 post-graduate students, is a Muslim. To this, I would hazard to add a few of my own observations.
A couple of years back, while visiting the Chennai offshore information technology support center of the organisation I worked for in the US, I was struck by the fact that out of a total of eight hundred staff there not even five were Muslims. The employees were largely from the Tamil Nadu region, who had graduated from the local IT institutions with skills that are in great demand both in India and overseas.
I tried to find an explanation for this observation of mine in the demographics of the region. I had thought that the low number of Muslim recruits in that center probably had something to do with the low Muslim population of Tamil Nadu, which was about 5% of the total. But this explanation also turned out to be inadequate when, on my return to headquarters, I went over the total number of offshore IT workers that we had engaged from all centers. As I went through the list of names, hardly more than four or five Muslim names appeared in the aggregate. Even in a center located in an Indian state that has one of the highest Muslim concentrations (Kerala with nearly 25%), I could not locate more than two Muslim IT workers in that center. Where have the Muslims gone? Have they all migrated to the Middle East?
It is difficult to absorb these statistics for Indian Muslims in general in a country where Muslim names appear to dominate the entertainment industry, music, and arts. Look at the Indian movie industry; it is one Khan or the other who is ruling the roost. Indian classical music had long been a bastion of the Muslims. The best known Indian modern artist internationally is M.F.Hussain. Yet, why is that Muslims in general in India have fallen so far behind?
I have read various explanations for these humble conditions of the Muslims in India; and there are a whole slew of them. These range from economic deprivation of the Indian Muslim minority to their low literacy rate, from political apathy of the government towards the Muslims to downright religious discrimination. But do five to six percentage points of difference in income between the Muslims and Indian national average explain the low representation of the Muslims in the professions? How, also, can we accept political apathy to be a reason for this overall backwardness, since we know that many Indian Muslims rose to the top in Indian national politics?
The real issue lies elsewhere. It is education, education, and education. To be more precise, it is modern higher education that equips a person with a marketable language, and skill. Muslims in general lack both, and hence are poorly equipped to enter the great race to advancement.
According to statistics, a whopping 30-50% of Muslim students attend Urdu medium schools in some states, whose performance at the Secondary Education exam level falls short of national standards, bringing into question the suitability of such schools to provide mainstream education that is apt for the modern changing world. This is the crux of the problem. True, there are also a good number of Muslims that attend only religious schools. But instead of obfuscating the issue by focusing on the 4% enrollment in madrassas, one needs to take an objective look at the overall inadequacy of education of Muslim students and suggest an appropriate solution: mainstream education for one and all.
Today, it is imperative that the Indian Muslim community fight the ogre of illiteracy (in modern education, that is) by adopting the prescription of English education and modernity given by Sir Syed Ahmed one and a half centuries ago. They also need to ensure that that they successfully challenge and oppose the opportunistic Muslim leadership offered by these so-called fringe groups.
The Indian Muslim leadership has also a role in this. It needs to foster among the Muslims a sense of greater self-reliance through the community's own private initiative in education, charity, co-operatives and social reform, and offer an alternative to the route of community improvement through politics.
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