11-06-2006, 01:52 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Muslims and Indians </b>
The Pioneer Edit Desk
Is Sachar the new Mandal?
There is a creeping disquiet as to the manner in which the report of the Justice Rajinder Sachar committee - inquiring into the state of Muslims in Indian society, and their demographic and economic profile - has been force-fed into public debate. Selected portions of the report have been leaked. The Prime Minister has reacted to and validated these leaked reports and said that education of Muslims is the top priority of his Government. The Congress has reacted predictably by assuring the minorities of its unstinted support. Finally, taking their cue from ambiguous passages quoted from the Sachar report, familiar sections have begun to raise the demand for reservations for Muslims. The entire focus will now shift to this contentious if bogus issue. Everybody knows religion-based quotas are constitutionally untenable - so the Government will make a big song and dance about not conceding them while using the rest of the Sachar recommendations to resort to unabashed patronage in the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh election. This minorityism script is so familiar and so distressing that one wonders if the Congress has learnt anything at all from the polarised politics of the late 1980s - of how "hard secularism" is self-defeating and leads only to a Hindu backlash, inevitably even if gradually. The whole idiom of the Sachar report episode reflects certain obsolescence, a throwback to the age of the Mandal Commission and its report. In these circumstances, exactly what the (partial) implementation of a report achieves matters less than the political noise generated while announcing it. Dividing a cake kept small by an artificial scarcity is not the route to national prosperity. Neither is making strange, almost insulting comparisons of how Muslims stand vis-Ã -vis Dalits or the relative opportunities for Muslim and Hindu OBCs.
<b>The language the Prime Minister is using and the philosophy of the Sachar report is completely contradictory to contemporary India. </b>This is no longer a land of scarce capital or of stunted ambitions. The state no longer has a monopoly on setting the parameters of national well-being. Why just a Muslim child, any young Indian - with the drive, academic aptitude and marks - should be able to become a doctor or an engineer or get a management degree if he or she so desires. There should be an abundance of seats, and it is the duty of the state - or of a state-regulated, equal-opportunity system - to ensure that no candidate who gets admission into a technical college, for instance, misses out because his or her parents can't afford the fee. A combination of bank loans, of merit and need-based scholarships, of "special area" fellowships - designed for regions with poor educational indices - should be used to ensure that, to use a familiar phrase, "no child is left behind". Built into this is a compelling argument for an urgent expansion of seats available to students. The Government cannot do it alone, and should not do it alone. Just as the growing demand for school-level education in English is increasingly met by the private sector, higher learning too must come to be accepted as legitimate business. <b>The question of educating India - or of unleashing its entrepreneurial genius into millions of small businesses - concerns every Indian. By reducing it to a closely-held Muslim issue, Justice Sachar and the UPA are not helping India.</b>
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The Pioneer Edit Desk
Is Sachar the new Mandal?
There is a creeping disquiet as to the manner in which the report of the Justice Rajinder Sachar committee - inquiring into the state of Muslims in Indian society, and their demographic and economic profile - has been force-fed into public debate. Selected portions of the report have been leaked. The Prime Minister has reacted to and validated these leaked reports and said that education of Muslims is the top priority of his Government. The Congress has reacted predictably by assuring the minorities of its unstinted support. Finally, taking their cue from ambiguous passages quoted from the Sachar report, familiar sections have begun to raise the demand for reservations for Muslims. The entire focus will now shift to this contentious if bogus issue. Everybody knows religion-based quotas are constitutionally untenable - so the Government will make a big song and dance about not conceding them while using the rest of the Sachar recommendations to resort to unabashed patronage in the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh election. This minorityism script is so familiar and so distressing that one wonders if the Congress has learnt anything at all from the polarised politics of the late 1980s - of how "hard secularism" is self-defeating and leads only to a Hindu backlash, inevitably even if gradually. The whole idiom of the Sachar report episode reflects certain obsolescence, a throwback to the age of the Mandal Commission and its report. In these circumstances, exactly what the (partial) implementation of a report achieves matters less than the political noise generated while announcing it. Dividing a cake kept small by an artificial scarcity is not the route to national prosperity. Neither is making strange, almost insulting comparisons of how Muslims stand vis-Ã -vis Dalits or the relative opportunities for Muslim and Hindu OBCs.
<b>The language the Prime Minister is using and the philosophy of the Sachar report is completely contradictory to contemporary India. </b>This is no longer a land of scarce capital or of stunted ambitions. The state no longer has a monopoly on setting the parameters of national well-being. Why just a Muslim child, any young Indian - with the drive, academic aptitude and marks - should be able to become a doctor or an engineer or get a management degree if he or she so desires. There should be an abundance of seats, and it is the duty of the state - or of a state-regulated, equal-opportunity system - to ensure that no candidate who gets admission into a technical college, for instance, misses out because his or her parents can't afford the fee. A combination of bank loans, of merit and need-based scholarships, of "special area" fellowships - designed for regions with poor educational indices - should be used to ensure that, to use a familiar phrase, "no child is left behind". Built into this is a compelling argument for an urgent expansion of seats available to students. The Government cannot do it alone, and should not do it alone. Just as the growing demand for school-level education in English is increasingly met by the private sector, higher learning too must come to be accepted as legitimate business. <b>The question of educating India - or of unleashing its entrepreneurial genius into millions of small businesses - concerns every Indian. By reducing it to a closely-held Muslim issue, Justice Sachar and the UPA are not helping India.</b>
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