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Dividing India

Dividing India

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.


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