The recently released census figures on religious groups kicked up enough bad faith to clog all possibilities of reasoned discussion. In the immediate aftermath, it seemed it would not be possible to salvage the issues from the bungled presentation of the figures themselves and then the BJP’s unabashed attempts to put them to instant political use. But the dust may be settling now. Maulana Kalbe Sadiq, vice-president of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), has proposed that the Board talk about family planning and literacy in the Muslim community when it meets in December. The aim, he stressed, should be to emphasise that the community’s strength lay in the quality of life of its members, not in its numbers, and that the only way ahead is the one that leads to modernisation. Those sentiments and their unambiguous articulation in the public sphere are entirely welcome.Maulana Kalbe Sadiq’s intervention has the potential to bring an introspective calm and defuse the escalating war of spectres — the Hindu at risk from the proliferating Muslim versus the besieged Muslim for whom Islam is forever in danger. The fact is that even the ‘‘adjusted’’ figures of the census show a worryingly high growth rate in the Muslim community even as it continues to lag behind all other groups in terms of literacy and employment. The fact is that those sets of statistics — high fertility rates, low literacy rates and high unemployment rates — are all tied together. But it has become extremely difficult to raise these secular concerns either in the national conversation or within the community for fear of crusading communalists on the one hand and knee-jerk secularists on the other.The AIMPLB is not ‘the’ representative forum for the Muslim community. The Muslims are no monolith and must not be seen to be so for reasons of either convenience or bigotry. But it is also true that the Board has been making a visible effort in recent times to guide the debate towards issues of social reform and development. Recently, it took up the challenge of framing a model nikahnama. It may not have gone far enough — it did not prohibit the practice of triple talaq. But on triple talaq then, as on family planning and literacy now, the board can’t do it all. Others in the community must stand up and make themselves heard.
