The Maharashtra
government’s attempts at attracting the Muslim vote by promising reservations look
rather jaded, especially given how some other states have gone beyond empty
words to actually implement Muslim quotas which are working well.
An edited version of this piece was first published on Scroll.in
After 2 months or so of calm, the word “Muslim” is trending in
the media again. And that could only mean one thing: it’s election time in
India. Sure enough, the Maharashtra
Assembly polls are scheduled later on this year.
Electorally, the ruling Congress-NCP alliance in the state
has their backs to their wall, given their brutal drubbing in the recent
general elections at the hands of the BJP-Shiv Sena combine. Therefore, the
incumbents are flogging the old horse of Muslim reservation as a last ditched
attempt to gather the fabled minority vote.
As
per the Indian Express, the government has agreed on a 4.5% quota for Maharashtra’s
Muslims in government jobs.
In the recent past, the issue of Muslim reservations has
been a hot button topic, popping up with clockwork regularity at the time of
elections (and then quietly fading away after). For the 2009 general elections,
the Congress had the issue in its manifesto. 3 years of inaction followed,
after which the Cabinet suddenly decided to act on its promise and provide a
4.5% quota—a decision taken, coincidently, just before the elections were
announced for five states including Uttar Pradesh. The Election Commission,
however, barred the move and the matter stayed frozen till, you guessed it, the
2014 general elections. There a slew of “secular” parties promised Muslim reservations,
including the SP as well as the BSP. Earlier, a desperate Buddhadeb
Bhattacharya had also assured a Muslim job quota after more than 3 decades of
inaction on that front. The CPI (M), however, was routed in the ensuing Assembly
elections, a major cause of defeat being the shift in the Muslim vote to the
Trinamool Congress.
This self-serving politics, though, does not negate the
fundamental need for ameliorative measures, given just how backward Muslims are.
Nationally, the Sachar Committee has found that the position of Muslims as a
social group is worse than even that of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes. A
similar commission for Maharashtra has found that this gap is even wider in
the state: Muslims have a poverty rate of 49% as compared to 33% for SC/STs. The
state has also seen the highest amount of communal violence since Independence,
making the problem of economic development doubly difficult.
Of course, if the Congress-NCP government was serious about
Muslim upliftment, it would have utilised its 15 years in office to do
something about it, rather than grandstand a few months before the election. Belying
the convoluted way a number of parties have approached the issue of Muslim
reservations in the recent past, the matter is really not that complex. It is
often missed that a powerful mechanism for Muslim reservation already exists
under the OBC quota. OBCs, as defined by the Mandal Commission, can include
both Hindu as well as non-Hindu castes, as long as they are “socially and
educationally” backward. In fact, PS Krishnan, a retired bureaucrat and an
expert on the topic of reservations, estimates that almost 80% of Muslims in
the country are included in some or the other OBC list.
This mechanism has, consequently, been utilised with great
effect by all four southern states where, firstly, a very high proportion of
the Muslim population has been included in OBC lists, a figure as high as 90%
in Tamil Nadu. Secondly, separate sub-quotas exist in all 4 states for Muslim
OBCs specifically, since, given their backwardness, they were unable to compete
with other more-developed OBCs. In Karnataka, in fact, the entire Muslim
community is included in the state OBC list, a decision upheld by the Karnataka
High court in the 1979 Somashekarappa case. As in other forms of backward caste
reservation, the results of caste-based Muslim quotas have been seen to be quite
positive. An OBC Muslim sub-quota was introduced in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 and
within only the first three years of its existence, it has ensured that almost
30,000 backward caste Muslims have entered institutes of higher education.
On the whole, though, the issue of Muslim reservation is one
that the country has actually moved backwards on. A Muslim quota in government
jobs was first implemented in 1925 by the British government. In Madras
Presidency, The Justice Party, a party with a strong anti-Brahmin stance, implemented
Muslim reservations in the 1930s, as a result of which Madras State was the
first in Free India to have them. Post-independence, though, quotas for Muslim
Dalits was scrapped by the Presidential Order of 1950 which disallowed a Muslim
from being categorised as a Dalit. The ostensible reason for this was that
Islam was an egalitarian religion which did not have a caste system, showing
the touching faith the Indian government had in religion over actual empirical
data. This faith, though, did not extend to Sikhism, another religion without a
formal caste system: Sikh Dalits can
avail of scheduled caste reservations. Moreover, the recommendations of the Kalelkar
Commission (1953), which promised OBC reservations, were ignored and Muslims
had to wait till the Mandal Commission to see some traction on that front.
Even within that overarching OBC share, it has been seen
that without sub-quotas, Muslims are unable to gain any benefit from the
measure. This is a problem that has been overcome quite easily and with
effective results, by the southern states. If the Congress in Maharashtra was
serious about this issue, it should have simply taken a leaf out of, say, Andhra
Pradesh’s book and introduced a Muslim sub-quota within its already existing
OBC reservation set-up. Dangling it as a carrot, just that bit out of reach, at
election time is a move that can be seen through rather easily.
