The recent judgement of Allahabad High Court is saddening as well as disturbing. This has disturbed the peace of mind that the Indian Muslims were enjoying for some time. A long battle for restoring the minority character of AMU seems to be becoming their preoccupation for now, throwing aside in the process such acute problems as poverty, the mother of all round backwardness which afflicts the Muslim community in the country. To ameliorate the grave situation the Central Government must intervene positively and take up steps necessary for restoring the minority character of AMU.
It is no secret that the Muslims have fallen behind all other social groups in the country. Their share in services alone is enough to put any democratic government, as well as the society, to shame. The question is not who is responsible for this paralyzing backwardness, Muslims themselves or successive discriminatory governments, both at the Centre and in the states. The all important point is that the Indian Muslims suffer from all round backwardness.
Backwardness of a section of the country should not be tolerated at any cost in a democratic society. We are living in a fast globalizing, if yet not globalized, world. As a result the human conscience is also coming out of nationalistic isolation. Surely this awakened human conscience should not permit brutal military intervention like that of America in Iraq. But no one should be in illusion that the awakened or rising human conscience would maintain silence or remain a mute witness to gross injustices being meted out to marginalized groups the world over. Intellectual and academic intervention violating national boundaries is destined to emerge as a powerful weapon which no government, specially if it happens to be democratic one, can afford to ignore. We, as a far-sighted nation, must see what is looming large on the horizon and set our house in order before intellectual intervention descends on us as a big crisis.
The Andhra government seems to be more far-sighted than others. Keeping aside the fear of such baseless allegations as minority appeasement, it has given 5 per cent reservation to Muslims both in services and in educational institutions. This heartening step was taken soon after the Allahabad judgement that derecognized AMU as a minority institution. The Andhra government’s decision, therefore, is bold and far-sighted which merits to be emulated all over the country.
The country needs to come out of the psychological atmosphere that the unfortunate Partition had created in 1947. Let us be a bold and brave nation and accept our mistakes courageously. The Partition set into motion a not so invisible wave of discrimination against the Muslims, even secret circulars were issued in this regard, which gradually threw Muslims out of services. As it was not enough, the recurrent communal riots badly damaged the narrow-based Muslim economy which is revolved around scattered small scale industries and petty retail businesses. The visible, semi visible and invisible “practical official discrimination” coupled with the communal riots have conspired to bring about the all round backwardness in which the Muslims find themselves today.
Numerically the Indian Muslims are not a small group. A hundred and forty million strong social group perhaps should not qualify to be a minority. But the term minority needs to be redefined, not in terms of numbers but in the sense of socio-political, educational and economic backwardness. Viewed in this perspective, the Indian Muslims as a whole are a minority which is suffering from paralyzing poverty and illiteracy. To rectify the grave situation they have fallen in, the Indian state, as well as the society, must become broad-minded and give economic and educational reservation to the numerically strong but politically marginalized Indian Muslims.
Surely any such step would arouse a lot of hue and cry both from the left and the right. But the right thinking people, who fortunately abound in our society today, must stand and tell them to shut up. India’s historic character is such that it would not tolerate for long the militant rightist politics. And as far as the leftists are concerned, let them practice the irrelevance of dialectic materialism and get lost in the dustbin of history.
[October, 2005]
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