EDUCATION

Hasan Abdullah on New Agenda of Muslim Indians

The vertical and horizontal stratifications in Indian society, including the Muslim community, are well known. However, for most people, even today, the primordial identities such as religion and caste arouse passions (despite) the rational and larger identification as a human being.

The perceived discrimination and threat to life, whether realistic or exaggerated, on the part of Muslims, in addition to a host of other factors, provides an objective basis to the category called Indian Muslims. And, as society becomes increasingly competitive and self-centered, this primordial identity is exploited by the reactionary forces to serve the vested interests disguised as those of the community.

Today there exists only a fringe, apparently well-funded and with questionable sources of funding, which is trying to keep Indian Muslims completely isolated.

The self-appointed vote-brokers of the community, though exposed by the demolition of the Babari Masjid have quickly adapted themselves to the emerging situation. They have kept the agenda of Babari Masjid and Muslim personal Law at the back burner and are trying to emerge as the saviors by projecting the agenda of employment and demanding reservation in jobs and education for Muslims. Nevertheless, today they are forced to admit the absence of a monolith Muslim community.

Of late, the integrity of the reactionaries championing Muslim interests', is becoming increasingly suspect in the eyes of ordinary Muslims who perceive and identify themselves as Muslims consider their primordial identity as overriding all their other attributes. The process has accelerated on account of several factors, the most important being the emergence of a sizable educated middle class among the Muslims in the North who will no longer allow the continuation of the agenda of yesteryear.

The agenda has to change, and reflect, in however distorted a form, the aspirations of this emerging section of educated Muslims. Taking a cue from the 'Mandal' phenomenon, the issue of reservation of seats in educational institutions and government jobs has come to occupy the centre-stage of reactionary politics. Fed on isolationism all their lives and faced with the prospects of unemployment in an increasingly competitive, demanding and also shrinking job market, and with the ascendancy of reactionary forces in all spheres of life, locally as well as globally, the educated Muslims appear to be getting misled by the propaganda on reservation.

But significantly enough, education is being stressed and sincerely espoused by senior educated Muslims, and the backwardness in this aspect is being perceived to be the fundamental reason for the poor socio-economic stage of the community. Now it would be no longer feasible for the vested interests to perpetuate the iniquitous social order through bribing (in the lager sense) the minuscule educated class and maintain their hegemony.

What is most significant about developments is that the Muslim community in North India, the abode of reactionaries and the most backward in all senses of the word, is not only involved, but is leading the educational movement.

It should be noted that the people and organizations associated with the mission of spreading education among Muslims are trying to carry the entire community along. If on the other hand the theologians of all the significant sects appeal to Muslims to support these efforts, on the other we find eminent intellectuals and almost every one of the (non-Left) Muslim educated elite lending their support to this renaissance.

Also it is significant that the discredited political leaders are, by and large, missing from the scene, although they are trying to appropriate the issue of 'reservation for Muslims' about which a section of people involved in the education mission are also quite agitated. There are several other important indictors reflecting this shifting focus towards education.

The replacement of the Babari Masjid by education as the focus of attention by the dominant section of Muslim community is a development of immense import.

It, therefore, becomes obligatory on the party of the progressive people of the country to participate in this. awakening and not to let the reactionaries hijack and sabotage or distort the vital process of the churning.

(Source: The Indian Observer, 15 May, 1996)

" It can safely be asserted now that the father of Muslim Nationhood was not Mr. Jinnah but Sir Syed: That all the arguments that Mr. Jinnah later advanced for partitioning the subcontinent were not only the same which Sir Syed used while opposing the Congress, but were apparently copied from the latter's utterances, because even the words used by Mr. Jinnah are, at places, the same as in Sir Syed's speeches and writings". (Rafiq Zakaria, Rise of Muslims in Indian Politics, Somaiya, p. xii)