Columns: Fifth Column

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India Today, May 17, 1999
May 17, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
Fight the Ghetto Mindset

Muslim woes aren't unique but common to all Indians.

By Tavleen Singh

On a hot, hot evening in Banaras this past week I attended a public meeting that left me feeling very worried about Indian Muslims as a community and as a vote bank. The star attraction at the meeting was Mayawati but she was hours behind schedule. So I had plenty of time to listen and observe. The gathering was so totally Islamic in nature that when the muezzin called for prayer, which he did twice while we waited, the speaker had to shut up and allow the audience to attend to their religious duties. Anyone who tried to compete with the muezzin's call found himself shouted down by the crowd.

There were many who spoke while we waited for Mayawati and every one of them talked passionately and angrily about the "problems that Muslims have suffered in the past 50 years". Yet, not a single one explained exactly what these problems were. A local official, who was giving me a running commentary on the proceedings, said this was the largest gathering of Muslims he had seen in the city in a while. He also told me 40 per cent of the population of Banaras was Muslim and, in his view, most were likely to vote Congress. "They seem to be shifting away from Mulayam Singh," he said, "because of Sonia Gandhi. They see her, because of her foreign origins, as neutral whereas nearly all the other leaders trying for the Muslim vote bank are Hindu. Also, they will vote for whichever party they think can defeat the BJP."

Had the BJP Government in Uttar Pradesh discriminated actively against Muslims? No, he said, nothing of that sort had happened but Muslims saw the BJP as a Hindu party and therefore did not trust it. What about the fact that there had been no major communal riots? That did not matter, the official said, because most Muslims believed there had been no riots only because those who caused the riots were now in power.

Our conversation then turned to the question that had bothered me most all evening. What are these special problems that Muslims have faced for the past 50 years? That, he said, was a question those who governed Uttar Pradesh often asked themselves and local Muslim leaders: "But when we ask them they really don't come up with anything specific." This puzzled me and since I have learnt in communal matters to disbelieve officials because of the partisan role they often play during riots, I did not trust his answer. So I decided to ask some local Muslim leaders the same question.

There was a doctor who seemed to be a man of importance since he was seated on the stage. What were these problems that every speaker had complained of all evening, I asked. He said without hesitation that the main problem in the Muslim community was education -- or the lack of it.

How could this be blamed on the government? Surely it ought to be the responsibility of Muslim parents or community leaders to ensure that children got themselves an education? The doctor launched forth into a long dissertation on the importance of government patronage for Muslim schools. They already have concessions that Hindu schools do not get and despite this propagate mainly a sense of separateness in the Muslim children they teach.

Since the meeting I have talked to other Muslim leaders and spent considerable time analysing exactly what it is that Indian Muslims believe they have been deprived of in the past 50 years. I have been unable to come up with any answers. Yet, Muslims remain ready to vote en bloc for any new leader without realising that this has got them nothing special in the past except their exploitation as a vote bank.

Is it not time Muslim leaders started asking themselves exactly what it is that makes their problems different to those of other Indians? There is poverty. Vast numbers of Muslims live in poverty but so do vast numbers of Hindus. So surely this is one problem that needs to be viewed through a non-sectarian prism. There is unemployment. Speakers at the Banaras rally repeatedly emphasised that before Independence Muslims had more than 30 per cent of government jobs in Uttar Pradesh. They are now estimated to have 2 or 3 per cent. But when you investigate this you come up with the fact that often Muslims get rejected only because they tend not to be educationally qualified.

This brings us back to the education problem. Anyone, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, who is educated in one of those small-minded sectarian schools that religious institutions run will find himself, at the end of his education, almost unemployable. So what Muslims need to be demanding are more and better schools instead of more Muslim schools. If they have not done so already it is almost entirely because the leaders who have exploited the vote bank have made sure that even education is seen through sectarian eyes.

More than 50 years after Independence the fact that we still have the politics of vote banks, of Hindu and Muslim demands is almost as shaming as Hindu and Muslim drinking water must have been in the old days. It is worth remembering that differences of caste and creed were so ugly then that even water had a religion. To a large extent, urbanisation and municipal water have obliterated caste differences. But as long as Muslims continue to believe that their political and economic needs are different from those of Hindus, they will remain in their mental ghettos, their vote banks.

This is dangerous for India as a country -- but it is even more dangerous for Muslims as a community.

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