Abstract
Publication of the Sachar Committee Report on the Social, Economic and Education Status of the Muslim Community of India in November 2006 was an important landmark in the life of the Indian nation. Although visualised as a routine exercise of fact-checking about the status of country’s largest religious minority, it ended-up doing much more than what an official report generally achieves. This was because almost all sections of the Muslim population of India welcomed it with a great deal of enthusiasm. They saw in the report a realistic attempt at presenting the ground realities of their social and economic life.
Such a representation also provided a counter to the communal narrative and the right-wing propaganda, which presented the Muslim community as being a pampered minority. The report presented an opposite picture and undermined the view that the Muslims of India had been receiving undue favours or ‘appeasement’ from the Congress-led governments in post-independence India. Based on officially collected quantitative data, the report showed that a large section of the Indian Muslims had, in fact, been experiencing economic marginalisation over the decades after independence. When the official data was disaggregated on caste lines, it also showed that the officially classified Other Backward Classes (OBCs) among the Muslims had been doing worse than their counterparts among the majority community. On certain variables, they had been doing even worse than the Scheduled Castes. The report also provided a counterpoint to the view that looked at the Indian Muslims as a homogenous religious mass, obsessed with their religious identity, and foregrounded the realities of their everyday lives, their ‘development deficits’ and the all-pervasive experience of exclusions and marginalities that characterised a large majority of them.
The book being reviewed here is an attempt to take forward the themes opened up by the Sachar Committee Report. The study focusses on the diverse categories of Muslims in Uttar Pradesh (UP), the largest state of India. Based on an extensive survey carried-out across different regions of the state, it explores questions of their education, employment and poverty. Although the authors work broadly with the notion of socio-religious communities (SRCs) as proposed by the Sachar Committee, the book goes further and also operationalises the category of Dalits among the Muslims of UP, even though they are not included in the official list of Scheduled Castes. Such an approach enables them to construct a socially disaggregated sample of the community, which can be meaningfully compared with the corresponding social groupings of the majority community.
By doing so, they are also able to provide a clearer and quantified view of the internal stratification among the Muslims of UP. Interestingly, in the past when sociologists and social anthropologists reported the presence of caste-like divisions among them, a section of the Muslims elite had contested such a claim. They often insisted and underlined the point that unlike Hinduism, Islam had no place for caste in its religious canons and preached equality of all. There was no such reaction from the community when the Sachar Committee presented its data by dividing the Muslim population on caste lines. Quoting Imtiaz Ahmed, the authors rightly argue that hierarchy does not need to be an outcome of the ideology of purity and pollution, as is the case with Brahmanical Hinduism, it could also be ‘premised on privileges and descent’ (p. 3). A wide range of social science literature has indeed claimed that a section of the Muslims in almost all the South Asian countries continues to be treated as untouchable, within the Muslims communities as also by their upper caste patrons from the majority community. However, in absence of its legal recognition, their exclusion and marginalities have not become a part of the policy agenda in the state system. A study such as this could create a ground for such recognition and become a source for policy initiative, provided there is the political will to do so.
The book presents the field data across five chapters. The first three of these are organised around ‘non-economic’ variables reflecting their ‘backwardness’: social deficits, educational deficits and representational deficits. While doing so, they not only compare the Muslims with the majority community but also provide facts about the intra-community deficits by comparing the OBC and Dalit populations of the UP Muslims with their counterparts among the so-called upper castes. Even though its extent varies across regions for UP, the study finds that the upper caste Muslims indeed practice untouchability in relation to the Dalit Muslims. As the study reports, ‘OBC and Dalit Muslims were considered lowly and treated in an undignified manner by their UC co-religionists and also non-Muslims UCs’ (p. 35).
The trajectories of their representation in the democratic political institutions of the state and the country are also not very different. While Muslim representation is generally lower than their numbers in the population, the relevant chapter also shows intra-community imbalances on caste lines with very few among the OBC and Dalit groups being elected to the local, regional and national bodies. It is not only the Dalit among Muslims who virtually find no representation because of them not being included in the SC list but also the OBC Muslims fare poorly in comparison to their counterparts in the majority populations. The story of educational access and educational achievements also has a similar trajectory.
Their marginality in the labour market and on the scale of social and economic development is predictably unlikely to be any different. As was shown by the Sachar Committee Report, Muslims are mostly self-employed but own much lesser agricultural lands than their counterparts in the majority community. Hence, a much smaller number of them are farmers. They also do not find it easy to get jobs in the government sector. Here too, most of those who manage to find employment in secure state sector tend to be from the Muslim upper castes. When the authors calculated monthly per capita consumption expenditure, they found ‘a pattern in which each Muslim group is placed one step lower than the comparable Hindu group’ (p. 193).
To those familiar with the realities of Muslim marginalisation, this book may not provide any surprising findings. However, such studies prepare the ground for relevant policy action, whenever there is the political will to make a positive difference to the prevailing inequalities and exclusion. Indeed, perhaps the most valuable contribution of this study is its ability to show minute differences across sub-regions of UP and across social groups, within and across sections of SRCs.