UPA policies roadblock in Muslims’ mainstreaming says Sachar member

5 July 2011 - 7:00pm
MNN
New Delhi: Salman Khursheed’s controversial statement linking Sachar Committee report with ghettoization, has stirred a debate around the way the government should or shouldn’t have approached and implemented the committee’s recommendations. In an ironical twist to the story, Rakesh Basant, a former member of the Sachar Committee and a professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad says that it’s not the Sachar report but the Congress led UPA government’s policies which have become a roadblock in the overall mainstreaming of Muslims in India.

“Making the Ministry of Minority Affairs the nodal agency for implementing the Sachar Committee recommendations was a grave error, and has probably gotten in the way of mainstreaming this process,” writes Basant in his article published on the website of the Centre for Advanced Study of India (CASI) University of Pennsylvania.

Almost after five years after the report was submitted, Basant criticizes the government for narrowing down the recommendations of Sachar for petty political gains. According to him the main recommendations of the Sachar report like an Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), favor general programs with better inclusion of all under-privileged groups including Muslims rather than Muslim-specific programs. They in turn could have facilitated the mainstreaming of Muslims and other marginalized groups.

“The UPA has not only picked up recommendations in isolation, but has also highlighted the community-specific programs and its implementation in its election manifesto and other communications…Apparently, the mainstreaming measures recommended by the Sachar Committee had much less political utility than promises of community-specific benefits and programs,” adds Basant.

Instead the government recasted them into community specific programmes and emphasized too much on minor recommendations like those related to Urdu and Madarsa education when it was reported that less than four percent of Muslim children go to Madarsas.

“Typically, community specific recommendations, which were quite minor in the overall framework of the report, are being focused upon and actually enhanced. As a result, the main recommendations, which were not community specific, are getting sidelined and even being re-cast as Muslim-specific,” adds Basant.

According to Basant, if the government is serious about preventing the ghettoization of the community then the implementation task of the Sachar recommendations should be given to line departments instead of the Minorities Affairs Ministry (MMA).

“The policy-making and implementation task should lie with a general ministry – such as the Ministry of Home or Finance – to obviate this bias,” adds Basant.

Basant further adds that policy action shouldn’t be seen only through the “minority lens…It is important to recognize that mainstreaming would require a significant change in the nature of politics.”

Surprised at the selective use of recommendations, Basant says that “such actions would make the BJP’s claims of minority appeasement seem more credible to voters in the majority community.”

Casualty of Politics over Sachar

Basant also highlights the fact that one of the biggest casualties due to the politics over the Sachar report, was that interesting and newer insights about Muslim women were never used to “broaden the discussion on gender injustice vis-à-vis Muslim women.”

For instance, Basant points out, “child mortality among Muslims is lower than in other communities and the sex – female to male – ratio is higher. Moreover, both these sets of indices have been improving faster for Muslims than for others in recent years despite the slower rates of improvement in other development indices.”

“Son preference seems to be lower among Muslims than among Hindus, which could potentially explain Muslim advantage. Moreover, despite no significant differences in access to public health services, a higher proportion of Muslim mothers tend to seek treatment for diarrhea, which is one of the leading causes of child death. Moreover, the data shows that Muslim women are not less autonomous than Hindu women in areas such as healthcare access and the use of women’s earnings.

“Gender issues among Muslims are usually identified with Muslim personal law. Such a focus not only results in the exclusion of general gender-related concerns in education and employment that Muslim women face on a continuing basis, it also disregards a completely contrary picture that emerges from the analysis of sex ratios and infant/child mortality rates. Should we not use these insights to broaden the scope of the discussion on the status of women in different communities?” he further asks.