Anonymous said...
I know I am going to regret responding to your tripe but here goes:
The Muslims in India are extremely poor and marginalized. 2006 Sachar committee report obviously is a pretty good indictment of the 'Muslims in India are doing so well'
This is something that irritates me, that all the blame for the fact that the bulk of the Muslim community is poor today is put on the governments of post-independence India.
But were all Muslims doing well in pre-independence India? Leave alone the British Raj were all Muslims rich under the Mughal Raj? Or the Delhi Sultanate? Or the many "Muslim" kingdoms in the subcontinent? Or for that matter, the Muslim paradise that is presumably current-day Pakistan?
News for you, old chap. The partition of India saw most of the well-off Muslims in what is now India move to Pakistan. Those remaining behind were therefore - you got it - largely the poor.
It is not my claim that things are great for Muslims in India. Surely not. But you have to recognize that the status of Muslims in India was not great on the eve of Independence - the bulk of Muslims were poor even then. So were the bulk of Hindus. Now, if you want to claim that poor Hindus have done better than poor Muslims in post-independence India, that's different but I am not aware of such an analysis, not even by the Sachar committee.
The Sachar committee gathered a huge amount of data but actually doesn't do a great job of *analyzing* the data. For a critique, see Steven Wilkinson's article "A Note on the Analysis in the Sachar Report" published in the Economic and Political Weekly, volume 42, Number 10, 2007.
Secondly, you just treat all Muslims as a homogeneous lot which is very far from being the case. The following excerpt from Wilkinson's article may interest you:
In fact, on many measures, Muslims are doing better in western and southern states than they are in the rest of the country. Just to give one example, although in general Muslim literacy rates are below the Indian average, in 10 of the 21 states studied (including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka) Muslim literacy rates are actually higher than average (SCR: 53). So there is clearly something that is state- or region-specific that seems to be making a major difference to Muslims' life chances.
(SCR = Sachar Committee Report)
As journalists, maybe you guys could research why shit like this happens to the Muslims in India (snipped)
It's been done by quite a few and the work continues. I don't suppose you're interested at all but in the unlikely event you are, try Paul Brass' book The production of Hindu-Muslim violence in Contemporary India. For a different approach, try Steven Wilkinson's Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. See also the exchange between Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Ashis Nandy and Akeel Bilgrami, esp. beginning 3:15 into the clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNHqJCaL ... re=related
A final remark: Yes, shit happens and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. There are also people fighting (often against considerable odds) to ensure that transgressions are punished and that they don't happen in the future. But the attitude in your comment is that it's someone else responsibility to fight for a just Indian society. You are apart from the society you critique despite your claim to be an "Indian Muslim."
I have seen this type of "academic" critique before. It's the stereotypical Pakistani criticism of India. From Indians, it's usually the prelude to settling in some "phoren" country. Settled abroad, or thinking of moving there, are you? Do so, but spare us your sanctimony.
APRIL 1, 2010 10:38 PM
)? My feeling is that the sense of humilation would have been so deep that there would have been some amount of street riots, or at least an LET assualt on India to regain some H&D.
We need technology.