Fight the Ghetto Mindset
Fight the Ghetto Mindset
Tavleen Singh
India Today
May 17, 1999
Title: Fight the Ghetto
Mindset
Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: India Today
Date: May 17, 1999
Muslim woes aren't unique
but common to all Indians.
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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