Socio-Political Status of Muslims in India: Post Partition

Indian Muslims, second largest Muslim community after that of Indonesia, are part of India's global engagement. Their aspirations to play an assertive role in their future are not being welcomed sufficiently by their socio-religious leadership and the state institutions. Ultra nationalist groups want to keep them a hostage of a troubled legacy of partition and justify their development deficit. Their engagement with the Indian state, society and politics is defined by their aspirations and contestations.

India is the third largest Muslim dominated country, a nation home to 10.9% of the world's Muslims after Indonesia (12.7%) and Pakistan (11%). After the publication of Sachar Committee Report (2006) and periodic publication of religion based data in 2001 and 2011 by the Census of India, it is a well-known fact that the Muslims are the demographically largest and sociologically most significant minority of our country. The sociological significance of the Muslims as a minority group does not rest solely on their numerical strength. Rather, their social construction as a minority in the socio-political history of India is a crucial factor [1].Therefore, the assessment of educational status as a very significant indicator of human development for all including the Muslims remain an important task. The contribution of education to inclusive growth and development is widely recognized. "Education is found to be a more sustainable and more effective measure than other measures to reduce inequality in society. Unequal education reproduces social inequality [2]. "Much theoretical and empirical literature rightly lays emphasis on education as a necessary precursor to socioeconomic mobility. In fact, the positive outcomes of education are so huge and so crucial for human development that one often takes education as a single measure to assess the overall well-being of a population or a subset of it. In brief, the higher the proportion of a population with formal schooling, the wider is the stock of human capital and the greater the ability to achieve upward socioeconomic mobility" [3].

Conflict Studies Quarterly

Hindu-Muslim conflict and riots in India are enduring intergroup conflicts in south Asia, destabilizing the region for a long time. Despite having federal democracy and secular nationalism in the political system of India, the state and its various technology of power take sides with religious groups abetting the persecution of minority Muslims as religious or ethnic groups. Among the various ethnic groups and communities living in India, Muslims are among the most deprived communities in contemporary times. In the issue of minority conflict, a permanent solution in the federal system of government has become a dream. This paper analyses India’s divergent political systems and state ideology and its failure and success in respective cases to counter communal and ethnic violence. We argue that, rather than focusing on the weakness of the existing political systems of India, the common failure to adequate power sharing can better explain these conflicts and successive persecution of m...

Educational Exclusion of Indian Muslims: Issues and Problems, 2013

Abstract: Marginalisation due to the lack of quality education had remained a continuous trend of disadvantaged sections of Indian society. Muslims being the victims of the same problem remained a backward community in India. In this paper an effort has been made to look into the different educational indicators and status of Muslims with respect of these indicators. Though the government has taken certain specific measures to improve the academic performance of Muslims, all such measures are merely cosmic or demonstrative. They do not get to the root cause. The paper, while using the data of different government reports, shows that Muslim deprivation increases manifold. Taking major statistics from Sachar Committee Report (SCR, 2006), the paper shows that Muslims face discrimination at various levels, they are at a double disadvantage with low levels of education combined with low quality of education. Even if government accepted the recommendations of SCR in toto, surprisingly, no progress has been made in overall conditions of Muslims, including education sector, since the recommendations were made. There is need of broad based policy initiatives combined with main streaming of Muslims in regular ministries, departments and programmes of state as well as central government. Key words: Development, Education, Policy, Inclusion, Exclusion, Muslims, Backwardness, Madrasas, Mother Tongue, Minority

Pakistan journal of humanities and social sciences, 2024

Muslims of the sub-continent had been living together for centuries. However, the arrival of the British totally changed the political landscape of the united India. Due to unfavorable and drastic policies of Britain disrupted the political and cultural strata of the Indians. The outbreak of war of independence in 1857 revealed some strict segments from the side of British. Different constitutional measures were taken to run the administrative set up of the India. The Nehru Report of 1928 marked a significant milestone in India's constitutional history, proposing selfgovernance within the British Empire. However, its centralized structure and lack of safeguards for minority rights drew criticism, particularly from the Muslim leadership. The study examined the Nehru Report its salient features and what were the response of the Muslims of India and which strategies were adopted to shift the trends of Muslims politics in India at time when report burst a cloud of criticism from the Muslims. Qualitative method of study has been adopted to carry out this research to its final edge. Primary and secondary sources have been used in this research paper.

Muslim has Minority community in India. its Political Participation has very low.

Regional integration theorists believe that a core state plays a crucial role in the growth of regionalism. The policies and priorities of states are shaped by its internal politics. Thus, India’s domestic politics is worth-exploring in the context of South Asian regionalism. South Asia once formed a single administrative, economic and political unit was divided on communal lines due to the concerns of its Muslim community. The status and position of Indian Muslims constituting the largest religious minority in India and the one-third of overall Muslim population in South Asia can have far reaching impact on the process of regional integration in South Asia. Their integration into Indian state and society can serve as a centripetal force for European modeled regional integration in South Asia. In this context, the paper explores the status of Muslim minority in India and its impact on the process of regional integration in South Asia.

The economic reforms and privatisation during 1990s opened some avenues for the youth in the community, as opposed to the previous decades during which government jobs were hard to come by. Gradually, a small but significant middle class is emerging as new professionals join the fields of media, IT and management. The recently published book - India's Muslim Spring: Why is Nobody Talking about It? by Hasan Suroor, a London-based veteran Indian journalist, focuses on the positive trends within the community. Another soon to be published book, Muslim Politics in Bihar: Changing Contours by Mohammed Sajjad, an assistant professor at Aligarh Muslim University's history department, highlights the community's response to challenges in the historical past, particularly during the partition. Al Jazeera's Saif Khalid in an email interview with Suroor and Sajjad tries to get a sense of the changes happening in India’s Muslim community.

While summarizing the central thesis of my presentation, I would prefer to ask the following questions. Do the Muslims of India bear responsibility for their present condition? Has it come about because they have gone wrong somewhere, somehow? Can it be attributed solely or even principally to the Muslim inability or incapacity? Where precisely would this line of argument take us? Can complex socio-cultural situations in a plural society like India, which has consciously provided space for linguistic and religious minorities, be explained in terms of assigning blame for perceived acts of omission and commission? My observation though in BOLD words is that Muslims cannot detach themselves from being responsible for this pathetic state of affairs of the community and low rate of literacy and poverty. As it is said that ‘to be oppressed is a sin’ therefore, they are equally responsible for the national loss due to their inadequate responses to the problems which are otherwise of great concerned for our national interest. Yet their inadequacy or negligence does not account the only principal reason of their backwardness in education and economy.

This piece, a very timely lament and agony on the pathetic political status of Indian Muslims, the second largest religious community in the country from one of the most vocal conscience keepers of democratic-secular Indian polity, Harsh Mander appeared in The Indian Express, Delhi (March 17, 2018) titled SONIA, SADLY. Harsh describes in detail how Congress led by Sonia (and now by Rahul Gandhi) despite calling for fighting the RSS and its Hindutva project found it convenient to abandon Muslims politically like RSS/BJP and many other political outfits. If RSS declared Muslims as INTERNAL THREAT NUMBER ONE, Congress too felt that Muslims were a liability and should not be seen as pro-Muslim. So Congress too falls prey to the Hindutva bogey of Muslim appeasement despite the fact that most of the Muslims in India (despite hundreds of years of so called 'Muslim rule' and 7 decades of democratic-secular rule) continue to be stagnated at the lowest level so far as wealth, jobs, businesses and other social indexes are concerned. This frightful scenario presents a great challenge to the Indian polity. Muslims of India must be congratulated that despite continuous denigration and abandonment by mainstream politics the former have not lost hope in democratic-secular polity of the country. This hard hitting piece of writing by Harsh Mander is being produced with thanks to The Indian Express. It is an exclusive work of Harsh Mander. In this post my name appears due to formatting limitation of academia. edu

Rediff.com, 2023

A New Book on Muslims in India’s Politics, 1947-1977, wherein Pratinav Anil is able to foresee some agency and assertion on the part of India's Muslims. His hope emanates from the citizenship rights movement of Muslims in 2019-2020. On the Muslim question in the Indian Republic, Anil is harshly critical against Nehruvian policies and programmes. He characterises this era of Nehru-Congress hegemony as Islamophobic. One of the targets of his polemics is Mushirul Hasan's 1997 book, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims since Independence, which, according to Anil, is 'an inventory of elite political maneuverings in which Muslims are little more than spectators'. He puts other scholars such as Rafiq Zakaria, Moin Shakir and Omar Khalidi, in almost the same league. In his own words, Anil's 'primary aim is to recover Muslim agency'. Admittedly, he is 'repurposing the minority question to reflect on the majoritarian character of Indian democracy'.

2024

An important turning point in Indian history, the Partition of 1857, had long-lasting effects on the Muslim population, including marginalized inequity. The difficulties Muslims encountered after the partition were exacerbated by discriminatory laws, socioeconomic disparities, and cultural conflicts, creating a complicated story of marginalization. With an emphasis on the interdependence of historical, social, and economic elements in maintaining marginalized inequality, this work tries to capture the complex character of the difficulties encountered by the Muslim population in India following the Partition of 1857 to the contemporary independent India.