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Remain cynical or overcome cynicism, choice is ours
Muslims face an urgent choice they must not sit over. They must decide between remaining cynical or overcoming cynicism. It is a critical choice and will determine how we see the world and would be seen by the rest of it.Should history see us as being hysterical or harmonious? Progressive or regressive? People are not noted for what they fail to achieve, but for what they do.
On Sunday, I attended a conference, where one of the speakers was a cleric leader from Bihar, Maulana Wali Rahmani. I have no doubts Rahmani has great knowledge about Islam. I also know that he is a patriot. But left to him, we are doomed.
Rahmani thinks the Right to Education Act will kill madrassas, since it will outlaw children from attending them. He is wrong. He has not read the new Act.
Therefore, aside from the fact that every child must get modern education, Rahmani does not know that there is nothing in the new law that forbids Muslim kids from getting a religious education. In case you thought Rahmani was just another cleric, you should know that he is the general secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and a former deputy speaker of Bihar Assembly.
I have always said that one of the problems with India’s Muslim political leadership is that it largely overlaps with the religious leadership.
Clerics like Rahmani would do better to stick to their area of expertise. They should be given due respect for the services rendered by them, like teaching us how to say our prayers and how to bury our dead. When they try to sound more knowledgeable then they are, they should be simply ignored, not engaged.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a story, which appeared on the front page, about a perceptible increase in minority employment.
Several Muslims called me up to enquire if this was indeed true. I told them two things: I am not a fiction writer and Muslims need to step back and look at how far they have come.
News reports, especially ones that reveal a statistical trend, must always be backed by hard data. In an infographic alongside my story, we put out numbers to show how much minority employment had gone up by, both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms.
Considering our population and backwardness, even a 15% rise would look very small. True. But employment is a function of education and skill. There will never be anything like mass enrollment. You can’t just troop in like that.
According to the Sachar Committee’s findings in 2006, Muslims held fewer than 5% of government posts and made up only 4% of undergraduates, though they make up 13.4% of all Indians.
The share of minorities, including Muslims, in government employment is rising steadily on the back of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s directive in 2007 to focus on their employment, latest government data reveal.
The directive had come after the Sachar Committee, which probed disadvantages faced by Muslims, the country’s largest minority, found the community lagging abysmally on various socio-economic parameters.
So after much effort, minorities constituted 9.24% of total government recruitment last year and in fact had risen from 6.9% in 2007 to 8.3% in 2008.
We have become so cynical that even a news story, evidenced from hard data, looks too good to be true.
Between 2008 and 2009, the share of minorities on government rolls jumped 24%, the data reviewed by HT show.
In absolute numbers, 15,172 people from various minority groups were hired in 2009, up from 12,195 in 2008 and 12,182 in 2007.
Disaggregated employment data for Muslims is not available, since the PM’s directive was to focus on minority employment on the whole, even though it came in the context of Sachar’s findings.
“Some way or the other, Muslim employment would have gone up since they make up 90% of all minorities,” minority affairs minister Salman Khurshid said.
“This indicates inclusive development, which necessarily cannot happen without minorities,” retired chief justice Rajinder Sachar, who headed the Sachar panel, told me.
Khurshid said the UPA government was now pushing the private sector to improve workplace diversity voluntarily, without instruments like reservation. “The PM is engaging the private sector directly on this,” he said.
With a helping hand we can improve our lot. This has been proven. This is not to suggest that we sit back on our laurels.
There is enormous sluggishness in way government schemes are implemented. This sluggishness affects us more, because we are more backward.
We have to push ahead, complain and raise a stink when things don’t work. In fact, all citizens should. But skepticism hinders success. Don’t let it take root.
(6 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)
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Ashish Reply:
July 5th, 2010 at 1:52 am
@KD,
good points. But, all of pvt sector initiatives may not be just for making money out of education.
Read this; nice story on pvt sector participation in education http://bit.ly/coz1na
[Reply]
KD Reply:
July 5th, 2010 at 8:49 am
Hi,
Thanks for the link – it sounds too good to be true though. What does Melinda-Gates foundation gain from its altruistic activities ? I doubt if its all just the intention to do go for the people, although I could just be another cynic.
In general, there is always a solid long-term profit-making business plan that drives short-term investments. May be its the tax breaks or something else, I am not sure.
[Reply]
shan Reply:
July 5th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
@KD you are quite right but you should qualify , so far indian businessmen are concerned you are hundreed percent true. Not so for the protestants, that is what Max Weber reffered to “the calling”. Wareen Buffet donated yesterday two billion , as to his children he said “they had a good head start”.
Also as I understand USA IS FOUNDED ON THE BASIS OF MERIT , that is why the inheritance tax is so high , it does not automatically pass on to the children , in fact this the fundamental concept of CORPORATION or Inc, that you cannot have a fiefdom the personal liability will be so high , you are compelled to corporatise, this may happen in india but only in theory . IN WEST THERE IS A CULTURE OF CHARITY ROOTED IN PROTESTANT RELIGION , THERE IS NO SUCH THING IN HINDUISM TILL VIVEKANANDA TRIED TO INTRODUCE THESE WESTERN VIRTUES.
KD Reply:
July 5th, 2010 at 7:42 pm
I dont know about that – Protestants use charity as a means to promote their religious beliefs.
Yeah, I know that convents provide excellent education but there was no invocation of saraswati in our class prayers – it was all “O Father we thank thee” type of invocations.
Hinduism had the gurukool parampara where pretty much the whole education system was free and considered a sacred act. Students were expected to live on ‘bheeksha’ from the society, as a means to overcome their ego and learn to work towards the benefit of society. There are no modern day equivalents of that system, not on any large scale as far as I know.
May be we are digressing from the topic a little bit. But its an interesting topic anyway.
shan Reply:
July 6th, 2010 at 12:55 am
@KD , you have stirred a hornet’s nest by those invocations. all the memory keeps flooding in . I was madly in love with a girl called shabnam , who was a cross between madhu bala and preity zinta. and she used to be a student of a american missionary school. She told me they had the choice between bible and moral science. Now though she studied in a firingee school , the family was taliban . So I was threatened with murder so much so I left the shores into a self exile still thinking about her. Last I heard about her is that her husband apparently started growing long beard after 9/11 , and suddenly vanished , apparently fighting jihad in Chechnia, hasn’t given her talaq, occasionally they receive letters asking for money.
KD Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 3:06 am
Cross between Madhu Bala and Preity Zinta ……….I dont blame you for falling ‘madly’ for her – I’d call it ‘falling wisely’ instead.
Jokes apart – I think there may still be light at the end of this tunnel for you if he is fighting in Chechnya. What kind of a moron, by the way, would leave his country and a beautiful wife to join some foreign mercenary organization !
shan Reply:
July 13th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
@KD Thanks for the sympathy, whether i was wise or not depends which angle you are looking at , live the life with pain or cherish and savour the failed past.Chechnia would fit in to the transmorgation.
D Mishra, UK Reply:
July 23rd, 2010 at 1:56 am
Shan, no culture of charity in Indian culture ?? Not true. The greatest Hindu king- Ashok- set up a network of inns, schools and hospitals all over India. The earliest world Umiversities were in Taxshila and Nalanda and had bursaries for poor and international students.
In their heyday, there were 10,000 students in Nalanda.