Left in the cold

A convention of Muslim organisations calls for speedy implementation of the Ranganath Mishra and Sachar reports.

I AM a domestic worker and have four children, the youngest is six months old. My husband is a rickshaw-puller, he remains ill most of the time and so I have to work. My eldest daughter is six years old she looks after the other children when I am gone. We have no ration card or any other proof of identity I cannot get my daughter admitted to school as they demand proof of birth and identity. I have neither. They ask money for making a ration card or giving admissions. I live on rent and do not know when my hutment will get demolished. I have worked in many places in Delhi and the National Capital Region ever since I remember.

These are the words of Rukhsana, 30, a Muslim and a migrant. She has not heard either of the Ranganath Mishra Commission or the Sachar Committee report.

In the tenure of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, the years 2006 and 2007 assume special importance as two important reports pertaining to minorities, particularly Muslims, were prepared by two commissions with the intent of framing remedial policies for the uplift of the indigent sections among them.

On December 4, the National Convention for Muslim Rights, held by leading Muslim organisations, along with representatives of political parties in the capital, urged the Union government to implement without further delay the comprehensive recommendations made by the two commissions.

The organisations included the Kolkata-based Democratic Forum for National Integration, the Delhi-based Muslim Intelligentsia Forum and the Hyderabad-based Awaaz . The delegates, comprising academics and experts, political party representatives and State government functionaries, concluded unanimously that the Union government had developed cold feet on the recommendations of the two commissions. Among the speakers were K. Rahman Khan, Deputy Chairman, Rajya Sabha; Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, Member, Planning Commission; Maulana Anisur Rahman Qasmi, Member, All India Muslim Personal Law Board; Zahid Ali Khan, editor of Hyderabad-based Siasat; and Anwar Pasha, Associate Professor at the Centre for Indian Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, headed by Justice Ranganath Mishra, was notified on October 29, 2004. The first UPA government, backed by the Left parties, had made a commitment in its Common Minimum Programme to establishing a National Commission to see how best the welfare of socially and economically backward sections among religious and linguistic minorities, including reservation in education and employment, is enhanced.

The commission was to suggest criteria for identifying socially and economically backward sections among religious and linguistic minorities and recommend measures for the welfare of these sections, including measures such as reservation in education and government employment, and suggest constitutional, legal and administrative modalities for the implementation of the recommendations. It submitted its report on March 10, 2007, and it was tabled two years later, in December 2009. The irony is that the report was tabled without an action-taken report, which made it unclear whether the recommendations had been accepted or not by the Union government.

We wrote not once but four times asking for a debate on the Ranganath Mishra Commission recommendations. I raised this at every session of the Rajya Sabha, said Ali Anwar Ansari, a Rajya Sabha member from the Janata Dal (United). He pointed out that it was on the instructions of the Supreme Court that the terms of reference were expanded to include the Dalits among Muslims.

Both the commissions had concluded that the Muslim community was not a monolith and homogenous one. The Sachar Committee used terms like Ashraf, Ajlal and Ajmal from the Arabic to show that the community was socially stratified, he said. Ansari lauded the West Bengal government's decision to give 10 per cent reservation for Muslims in government jobs. Nearly 85 per cent of the Muslim population in the State was covered under reservation, explained delegates from the ruling Left Front in West Bengal. In Andhra Pradesh, where a similar step was undertaken, the Supreme Court, in an interim order, upheld the validity of 4 per cent reservation to backward members of the Muslim community.

The Ranganath Mishra Commission said: Since the minorities especially the Muslims are very much under-represented, and sometimes wholly unrepresented, in government employment, we recommend that they should be regarded as backward in this respect within the meaning of that term as used in Article 16 (4) of the Constitution. The commission recommended 15 per cent reservation for backward minorities in education and jobs, with 10 per cent earmarked for Muslims (as they constituted 73 per cent in the total minority population in the country) and 5 per cent for other minorities.

Delegates at the conference demanded the speedy implementation of the commission's recommendation of 10 per cent reservation for socially and educationally backward Muslims and the extension of the benefits of reservation available to the Scheduled Castes among Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists to their counterparts among Muslims and Christians. In a resolution, the delegates demanded that any additional allocation should be made from the open quota without disturbing the present quota fixed for Other Backward Classes and the S.Cs. If necessary, the government should initiate the process for a constitutional amendment to ensure that over 50 per cent reservation can be provided, they said.

Shocking revelations

The Sachar Committee, a high-level committee on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India, was constituted in March 2005. It came up with shocking revelations about the low status of Muslims, who had slipped behind the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in terms of socio-economic and educational indicators. Delegates at the convention said that a complete review of the implementation of the committee's proposals and a debate in Parliament were needed. They asked why the government had ignored the widespread demand, which was also made by the National Minorities Commission, for a 15 per cent budgetary sub-plan for the development of the Muslim community. They pointed out that the government had not even accepted the M.A.A. Fatmi Committee's recommendations. (Fatmi, who was a Minister of State in the Human Resource Development Ministry, headed a high-powered committee that prepared an action plan.)

The Sachar Committee's report was tabled in the Lok Sabha on November 30, 2006. Nine months later, on August 30, 2007, follow-up Action on the recommendations of the Sachar Committee was placed in Parliament, but no discussion was held despite a demand from political parties.

Speakers at the conference observed that the follow-up action did not contain any new policies or mention time-bound targets or a clear-cut financial allocation. What was reiterated and emphasised was the Prime Minister's 15-point programme for the welfare of minorities, which pre-dated the Sachar Committee's recommendations. And the situation seemed to have improved only marginally in some sectors. The government had set up a three-year timeline in 2007 for ensuring 15 per cent priority-sector lending by banks to members of the minority communities; by 2010, only 13.77 per cent lending was achieved.

Similarly, 90 districts with a concentration of minority communities were identified for the implementation of a Multi-Sectoral Development Programme for Minorities (MSDP). Political parties, including the Left parties, had demanded that blocks be identified as units for the implementation of the programme instead of entire districts. In any event, these 90 districts, selected under the targeted policy, covered only 35 per cent of the Muslim population. The allocation, too, was meagre. The Eleventh Plan had envisaged an allocation of Rs.30.5 crore for each district over five years for the development of the minorities; of this, only Rs.1,440.29 crore was released for 89 districts until November 30, 2010, which came to slightly over Rs.16 crore a district, almost half of what was allocated by the Plan.

The scheme for providing quality education in madrasas was allocated Rs.325 crore under the Eleventh Plan, but an outlay of only Rs.95 crore was made over a period of three years. The delegates from West Bengal pointed out that the State's budget provision for madrasa education for a single year, 2009-10, was Rs.526 crore, surpassing the Plan period's total allocation for five years. Even the total expenditure of Rs.7,000 crore on all Central and Centrally sponsored schemes for the minorities over five years constituted a minuscule 0.32 per cent of the total outlay for the Eleventh Plan. And less than half of what was allocated had been spent in the first three years of the Plan period.

P.S. Krishnan, former Member Secretary of the National Commission for Backward Classes, said that in Hutton's (J.H. Hutton's census of 1931) Census report, only the untouchables among Hindus were included as such; the untouchables in other communities were not considered. He recommended that a portion of the Plan should go to the minorities with specific allocations to Dalits and backward Muslims. The Minister of State for Minority Development and Madrasa Education in West Bengal, Abdus Sattar, said that the Union government refused to consider a sub-plan for minorities despite the Sachar Committee placing Muslims below the S.Cs and the S.Ts in some indicators.

The Chairman of the West Bengal Minorities Development Finance Commission, Mohammad Salim, made a fervent plea for a discussion in Parliament on the Sachar Committee recommendations. Conditions were created so that no discussion takes place. The appeasement theory has been laid bare by the findings of the report, he added. Salim also pointed out that the MSDP was a brainchild of the United Front government, and the Left parties had insisted that the block should be the unit of implementation for it to be effective. The demand, made more than a decade ago, was still valid, he said.

The Sachar report is a diagnostic one; the Ranganath Mishra report is the operative part, he said, adding that the government needed to act on both with equal urgency.

Focussing on the issue of education for Muslims, M.A.A. Fatmi said that he was disturbed that the recommendations of his committee pertaining to education were not even considered. The recommendations had addressed all areas including adult literacy and higher education.

We said that wherever there was a population of 250, a school should be opened; we recommended that Kendriya Vidyalayas be opened in Muslim majority areas and that an Urdu university be started. Had that happened, this would have helped lots of Muslim children, he said.