Why India's 150m Muslims are missing out on the country's rise
GEORGE BUSH likes to point out that India has a vast Muslim population—the world's second-largest after Indonesia—yet not a single al-Qaeda member. Even if this is true, it is far from the only measure of well-being. According to more conventional ones, India's Muslims are faring terribly. They are disproportionately likely to be in prison, unemployed, illiterate and poor. India's economy is growing fast, but the gap between Muslims and other religious groups is widening. Headlines refer to Muslims as the new dalits—the group, once known as “untouchables”, at the bottom of the Hindu-caste heap That Muslims are lagging has been known for a while. But discussing why, or what to do about it, has been taboo in a country proud of its peculiarly religious brand of secularism. Mohammad Hamid Ansari, chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, says that his organisation ritually files an annual report showing how poorly India's Muslims are doing. Each year it somehow gets lost on its way to parliament.
That is why what is known as the Sachar report, after the former chief justice who chaired a government-appointed committee to investigate the condition of India's Muslims, is creating so much heat. And why it was tabled in parliament only on November 30th, weeks after it was finished and presented to the prime minister.
India's non-Muslims sometimes suggest that the troubles of their neighbours in prayer hats are self-inflicted: obscurantist imams who equate education with the rote-learning of the hadith, sayings attributed to the Prophet; four-wived husbands with more children than they can feed; and a lack of drive to better themselves, perhaps brought on by a nagging feeling that they would rather be in Muslim Pakistan. None of this is true; the last accusation is particularly unfair.
Madrassas such as the Darul-Uloom in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, which proudly boasts of a curriculum largely unchanged since 1866, hardly equip their students to face the future, but only 3% of Muslim children attend them. Nor is it clear that the rulings of the orthodox, on anything from the evils of television to matters of family law, are obeyed. On polygamy, the most recent study (which is 30 years old) suggests that Muslim men are less likely than members of India's other religions to have a harem. And hardly any Indian Muslims hanker after life in Pakistan.
The problems faced by Muslims are in fact more prosaic. Not enough of them have jobs and too few can read or write. This is not new. But according to Abusaleh Shariff, an economist who compiled much of the data in the Sachar report, there are two areas where the gap between Muslims and the rest has widened dramatically over the past ten years or so. He says that both literacy rates for Muslim girls and poverty rates among urban Muslims show something close to a worsening even in absolute terms.
Part of the explanation for this phenomenon lies in where India's Muslims live. First, they often occupy the old parts of big cities like Delhi, not the fast-growing new suburbs where wealth is created and spent. Or they live in the slums. As a result, measured by monthly expenditure, over 40% of Muslims living in cities fall into the poorest quintile of the population, compared with 22% of Hindus.
Second, despite large Muslim populations in southern and western states such as Kerala, there are far more Muslims in the north and east of the country, which is poorer and less well governed. That in turn has an effect on their schooling. In rural Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state and home to about one-fifth of its Muslims, only 30% of small towns have a primary school. For every kilometre a girl is from a school, her chances of attending it fall. In Kerala, where schooling is more plentiful, Muslim girls do well.
Poor schooling explains another of the report's findings, which is that Muslims fail to get jobs with the country's largest employer—the government. Some of this is plain discrimination, particularly where the more menial types of government work are concerned. But entry into the highest levels of government service is meritocratic, judged on exam papers written by anonymous students. The problem here is rather that too few Muslim students stay at school long enough to sit the exams.
For the government of Manmohan Singh, the findings of the report offer a temptation. Indian politicians are fond of using quotas for minorities in everything from jobs to education to secure their political support. With the approach of a state election in Uttar Pradesh, due in the next few months, this will become more and more attractive. This would give the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party yet another opportunity to accuse the government of pandering to minorities, especially Muslims. And the Supreme Court, which is so vigorous it sometimes seems to be running the country on its own, might object too, since India's constitution prohibits discrimination on religious grounds.
Many Muslims argue that they are better off helping themselves, rather than holding out for the government. In fact they often seem to fare worse where they have more political clout, which easily translates into unreliable token promises, for, say, an increase in the number of teachers literate in Urdu, the language of Indian Islam. The leaked figures on government jobs show that Muslims do better in Gujarat, scene of an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002, than in Bihar, where governments depend on their votes.
“Muslims do well in education where the initiative rests with them,” says Mushirul Hasan, vice-chancellor of Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi. “Where they are dependent on government patronage they fare badly.” Muslim educational societies have begun to improve education in Kerala and the booming southern cities of Bengalooru (Bangalore) and Chennai (Madras). More are needed if Muslims are not to fall further behind as India prospers.
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