Clearing the Air 

By Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi and Supriya Sharma

To be clear, inadequate funding plagues government schemes for all marginalized groups, not just for Muslims. Welfare measures for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, for instance, are chronically underfunded. But the difference is that Muslims have been largely excluded from one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of the Indian state to counter historic discrimination—affirmative action in the form of reservations in public employment, education, and legislatures. This, despite the fact that most Muslims are converts from communities that carry the historical burden of caste.

Some believe this may explain why, on certain metrics, Muslims even slip below Dalits and Adivasis.

A recent study on intergenerational mobility in India— found that at the 29th percentile of the distribution of parents in the bottom half of Indian society, Muslim sons ‘have considerably worse upward mobility today than both Scheduled Castes (38) and Scheduled Tribes (33), a striking finding given that, compared to Muslims, STs tend to live in more rural and remote areas’.

The authors of the study tentatively propose an explanation for this divergence between Muslims and SCs and STs: ‘we find suggestive evidence that the basket of affirmative action policies targeted to India’s scheduled groups (but not to Muslims) has played a key role in their rising mobility.’

Data from the National Sample Survey conducted in 2017– 18 throws up an even more granular picture of how Muslims have now fallen behind Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. A key metric to gauge the educational levels of a social group is the gross attendance ratio or the total number of children attending school as a proportion of the total number of children from the group. Of every 100 Muslim children, 85 are in school. The corresponding number for SC and ST children is 90 and 87.

Even when it comes to attending college and university, Muslim enrolment numbers have decreased by 8 per cent, while SC and ST enrolment has gone up.

Muslims form 14.20 per cent of India’s population. But the All India Survey on Higher Education found only 4.65 per cent of the 41.3 million students enrolled in colleges and universities in 2020–21 were Muslim. In comparison, students from Scheduled Caste groups that form 16.6 per cent of India’s population accounted for 14.20 per cent of the enrolment, while students from Scheduled Tribes, that constitute 8.60 per cent of the population, accounted for 5.80 per cent of the enrolment.

Income data also shows Muslims slipping behind.The per capita annual income of Muslims is lower than Dalit Hindus in several states, data from the Indian Human Development Survey of 2004–05 and 2011–12 shows.

As we reported in an earlier chapter, demands that Dalit Muslims (and Dalit Christians) be recognized as Scheduled Castes have been growing. But there is still a long way before this can become a reality. As a halfway measure, some states have included Muslim communities in the list of Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Even these half measures are coming undone. In April 2023, the BJP government in Karnataka scrapped OBC reservation for Muslims, distributing the quota between Hindu communities. Even though the Muslim reservation had been granted on economic grounds, India’s home minister praised the move, saying the quotas amounted to minority appeasement and deserved to be done away with.

CONCLUSION: The Hindu Right has it backwards. Far from being pampered by the Congress, Muslims are at the bottom of the heap. If the Congress is guilty of anything, it is of failing to uplift Muslims despite enjoying the longest stint in power.

…There is no evidence to show that governments have spent inordinate amounts of taxpayer money on Muslims. Where does that leave Muslim appeasement?

Appeasement is baked into the Indian Constitution itself.

What is seen as an unfair advantage are cultural and educational protections enshrined in Article 29 and Article 30 of the Indian Constitution. Clause 1 of Article 29 states: ‘Any section of citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same.’ 

Clause 1 of Article 30 spells it out more unambiguously: ‘All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.’

These clauses did not emerge out of a vacuum. Decades before India became independent, its leaders recognized the need to safeguard minorities.

In 1930, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in Young India:

“There is no surer method of rousing the resentment of the minority and keeping it apart from the rest of the nation than to make it feel that it has not got the freedom to stick to its own ways…Therefore we in India must make it clear to all that our policy is based on granting this freedom to the minorities and that under no circumstance will any coercion or repression of them be tolerated. Indeed we should go further and state that it will be the business of the state to give favoured treatment to minority and backward communities.”

In hindsight, it could be argued that India’s recognition of minority rights was ahead of its time. The rest of the world took almost four decades to catch up.

• The article is excerpted with permission from the book “Love Jihad and Other Fictions” by Sreenivasan Jain Mariyam Alavi and Supriya Sharma, published by Aleph Book Company. Views expressed are the author’s own 

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