How Many Ways to Count Us?

The Justice Sachar committee report is generating loud debate. A look at recent books that visited the status of Muslims

The sachar committee report, billed as the number one dossier on the state of Indian Muslims today, will finally be public after being tabled in Parliament. A voluminous account, it is said to be the finest and most detailed survey of the state of the largest number of Muslims living in a democracy anywhere in the world. However, the report has some stiff competition in the form of a few books put out on the subject over the past two years or so.

By a long shot, the best is Omar Khalidi’s Muslims in the Indian Economy. More than comprehensive, it is an intelligent account of the state of Muslims in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Deccan and Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. MIT-based scholar Khalidi has chosen areas with significant Muslim populations, which have a link as the Muslims here are mostly Urdu-speaking. You could say that is a disadvantage, as he does not look at Kerala and West Bengal, or even Assam, where more than 20 per cent of the people are Muslim. But what he covers, he covers very well, with the historical, economic and the political well woven into the narrative. He has taken data from all possible sources, government data, reports, statements made in assemblies and Parliament. He has not simply analysed the “latest” or simply government department data threadbare, or arrived at grand conclusions, but he has tried to get data on the private sector, large spheres of economic activity well outside the government. Even the recently constituted PM’s high level committee doesn’t tackle that.

Another good book attempting to analyse and interpret data in an area rife with controversies and sensitivities of all kinds — Muslim women — is Zoya Hassan and Ritu Menon’s Unequal Citizens (Oxford University Press, Rs 295). A fascinating Muslim Women’s Survey (said to be “the first baseline survey among Muslim women in India or anywhere in the world”) was conducted by the authors across 9541 Muslim and Hindu respondents in 2000 attempting to understand to what extent the fact of their religion and identity can be correlated to the social and economic backwardness they experienced. The conclusions are fascinating. The scholars find that the “subalternity of Muslims in India” is complete. By discovering the vast differences in the Muslims in the north as opposed to Muslims in the south, they conclude that it is not simply identity that can explain the poor state of these women — there is a high degree of correlation between their asset holding pattern, level of education generally and the state of the women. The authors also hold patriarchal patterns as generally responsible for the dismal state of the women. Using interesting and modern data like the access to media, Hassan and Menon draw some conclusions that go against the grain of the prejudice about veiled and burqa-clad women that several amongst us take as fact.

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Also two years ago, Abusaleh Shariff and Mehtabul Azam put together Economic Empowerment of Muslims in India (Institute of Objective Studies, Rs 240). Shariff, incidentally, is also the member-secretary of the Sachar Committee which submitted its report to the PM this month. The book is a snaphot of where Muslims in India stand today. In the conclusions detailed in the end, the book makes a case for reservation for Muslims in government jobs. It also talks of the need for providing soft loans for Muslims to start their own ventures. The need to recognise and use the already existing institutions for spreading awareness about education is also underlined. Using the 55th round of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) data — the latest being the 61st round — the authors list interesting and varied indices across several socio-religious categories. In fact, what the Sachar Committee reveals about the status of Indian Muslims virtually scraping the barrel like that of the SC/STs had actually been “scooped” here!

Many books have dealt with the same difficult subject in recent years. Some have also gone beyond government departments and it may be argued that the PM’s high-level committee is simply revisiting known signposts. But the fact that Justice Sachar’s comprehensive data has the imprimatur of “government data” makes it valuable. The analysis may have been all stitched up, the situation detailed will be debated loudly in the House and even interpreted. But the point, as one bearded political philosopher famously remarked, may be “to change it”.