Author: Editorial
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 18, 2005
There is no gainsaying that the bulk of India's
Muslims require affirmative action to cease being economically and educationally
disadvantaged. Nevertheless, the manner in which the Standing Committee of
the Human Resource Development Ministry's National Monitoring Committee for
Minorities' Education (NMCME) is going about it, warrants serious concern.
Its recommendation for reserving seats for the minorities in the Indian Institutes
of Management, Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Foreign
Trade makes this amply clear.
While the NMCME has talked of minorities and
not Muslims specifically, there can be no mistaking its intent. Communities
like Christians, Parsees and Sikhs are by no means in any need of affirmative
action in education. It is only the Muslims who do. And even they, as a community,
will not benefit from the step.
The educational institutions concerned are
the premier ones of their kind in India and known the world over for their
excellence. The process of admission to each of them is fiercely competitive
and it is only the crème-de-la-crème among students who make
it. Consequently, teaching and evaluation is of a commensurate level.
Admitting people who cannot get in through
open competition, may lead to many of them ending up as failures and dropouts.
On the other hand, efforts to prevent this from happening will require a lowering
of the standards of instruction and evaluation, which will adversely affect
the quality of education. At a time when knowledge is increasingly the source
of power and progress in a globalising world, this will hobble institutions,
which have constituted India's cutting edge in the critical sectors of technology,
management and foreign trade and contributed greatly to its emergence as an
economic powerhouse and a super power in information technology software.
The damage will be permanent. It is does not
take much to destroy an institution but a great deal of effort to build one
or rebuild one that has been damaged. In the present instance the damage will
be to the ethos of excellence that characterise these centres of learning
and that, experience shows, is almost impossible to undo. In India's case,
the decline will be irreversible because the same minority vote-bank politics
which is behind the NMCME's breathtaking recommendation will abort any attempt
to set things right.
The most reprehensible part of it is the fact
that reservations suggested are not needed for helping Muslims to stride forward
and take their rightful place in the nation's life. The best among Indian
Muslims are as good as the best of any other community and do not require
a leg up.
The majority of the community which needs
affirmative action, a massive effort to boost the general level of education,
to bring them out of the proliferating network of madarsas, which do not train
people for productive roles in modern societies, and into the country's mainstream
system of education.
Once that is done, Indian Muslims, who have
repeatedly shown that they are second to none in areas as wide apart as sports,
the arts, administration and academics, will find their feet. On the other
hand, resort to controversial measures that divide and damage the nation without
helping them, will trigger a massive backlash that may jeopardise the measures
actually needed. But this, of course, is of no concern to people who view
Muslims merely as a vote-bank.