#dnaEdit: Centre's new Muslim outreach must address discrimination, exclusion faced by community

As part of the NDA government’s latest outreach towards the Muslim community, minority affairs minister Mukthar Abbas Naqvi is slated to address as many as 100 “progress panchayats” across the country. The first, slated to be held at Mewat in Haryana, will see the government providing information on various schemes for minority welfare and take suggestions on how to improve their implementation. Since Naqvi took over from Najma Heptulla, there has definitely been more activity in the minority affairs ministry. Naqvi has travelled across the country to meet influential Muslim community leaders and has described the latest outreach as one targetted at rural areas and the weaker sections within the community. In the past, Naqvi has also been vocal about the implementation of schemes noting that “they should not just remain on paper” and that government officials should fan out to the grass roots and “monitor” their implementation.

It is notable that the outreach is following immediately after the BJP national council in Kozhikode where Prime Minister Narendra Modi had invoked Jan Sangh leader Deendayal Upadhyay’s words: “Don’t reward nor rebuke Muslims. Empower them. They are not items of the vote market nor are they substance of hate. Treat them as your own.”   

However, the difficulty that Naqvi will face is that too many incidents have happened in the recent past that have put the Muslim community in many parts of the country on the defensive. Take Mewat for instance. The police were collecting biryani samples to check for beef in the run-up to Eid. Beef is part of the staple diet of poor Muslims across the country because of the traditionally high prices of mutton. It was last year in September that a Muslim man was killed in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh by vigilantes over suspicion of slaughtering a calf and consuming beef in his house. Since then the menace caused by cow vigilantes forced even PM Narendra Modi to break his silence and term most of them as criminal elements.

The government has with it the Kundu committee’s recommendations which identified discrimination and exclusion as a cause of the marginalisation of the Muslim community. The UPA had created a union ministry of minority affairs to push through a 15-point programme dedicated to improving the condition of Muslims. But other than improving access to education and offering scholarships at the pre-matriculate, post-matriculate, graduate and higher levels, the committee found that the ministry had failed in its other goals. The committee found that the poverty levels among Muslims, in terms of consumption expenditure, was higher than the national average, and only better than Dalits and Adivasis. The committee also found that Muslim share in migration to urban areas, especially smaller urban centres, was very low. 

There is no reason to dispute this finding, considering the numerous instances of Muslims facing difficulty in finding housing in cities and being forced to live in urban ghettos. Given these realities, Naqvi would do well to address these issues and not restrict himself to the schemes pushed by the ministry. The criticism against the UPA was that they were using the Muslim community as a votebank. After promising slogans like “Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas” the BJP must not head on a course of symbolism. The Muslim community must also organise itself politically if it is to ensure that the arms of the state do better in ensuring their welfare. The existing political parties, including those like Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM, continue to offer lip service and nothing better.