The late-November release of the Rajinder Sachar Committee report, which found that India's Muslims have been systematically excluded from state institutions (save for the dubious privilege of being imprisoned), resulted in weeks of spirited, countrywide debate. That report has of course confirmed something that everyone already knew; the challenge now is what to do about it. Once the battle lines are drawn, words like appeasement, introspection, reservation, sub-plan allocation and affirmative action fly regularly across the ideological divide. But there should be another way to think about the report's assembled facts and figures. What is most crucial about the report's pages is the kind of politics they will ultimately be able to catalyse.
Being the brainchild of India's economist-prime minister, the thrust of the Sachar report is not so much on the problems of security or identity faced by the Muslim communities of the 13 Indian states with the highest Muslim populations, but rather on the question of economic equity. What the Sachar panel mapped out is what Amartya Sen would call the 'economic un-freedoms' of the Indian Muslims. The real success of the Sachar committee would be if its report became a milestone in the efforts to deliver equity to the Indian Muslim community; if discussion sparked by Mr Sachar were to go beyond newsroom debates, and become part of the popular parlance in ground-level Muslim politics. This would hopefully lead to a situation wherein education and employment become larger 'Muslim issues' than are the Babri Masjid and fatwas in the larger society.
As with all contested terrains in a developing society, the idea of equity brings with it its own politics. For India's Muslims – or, for that matter, any marginal group – equity is among the three major issues that shape the community's political anxieties, the other two being security and identity. While it is impossible to talk of a monolithic Indian-Muslim political agenda, it is still possible to say that the Sachar committee report gives a thrust in one particular direction: towards a politics of equity.
OBC dead-end
Politics for Indian Muslims in the time after Partition revolved around the quest for security. The community's overwhelming support for the Congress party was perhaps due simply to the promise of safety that Jawaharlal Nehru had made them. However, this politics was also rooted in the feudal history of the country. The feudal Muslim elites were comfortable playing the mai-baap (top dog, the provider), while the masses slowly slid into a state of social hopelessness. In the post-Nehru era, the Congress party grew increasingly apathetic towards the demands of the Muslim underclass, and simultaneously began its flirtations with popular sentiments among Muslims that were founded on identity.