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The Muslims constitute about 12 percent of our population. On every index of development – income, education, health, share in government services, share in private enterprise, role in self employment, membership in legislatures – the level of their achievement is substantially below their share of the population. The only index on which they figure higher than 12 percent is poverty. Why?

I submit that the root cause, the basic, primordial cause of Muslim backwardness in India in Pakistan. The partition in 1947 robed the Muslims of India of leadership. I do not mean political leadership, for surely a maulana Azad or a Rafi Ahmad Kidwai or even a Syed Shahabuddin represented and represents the true interests of the Muslim of our subcontinent more than did a mere Jinnah or a Liaquat Ali Khan. I mean leadership at the grass roots, at the local community level in schools and universities, in village chaupals  and dhabas, in the bazaars and the mandis, even in the mosques and the madras.

Those whose personal wealth and income, level of education, social mobility and economic ascension would have ensured political clout, economic strength, social cohesion and moral authority for the Muslim community as a whole, abandoned their less well-endowed brethren to make their own private fortunes in an alien land. The Muslim middle class of pre-partition India virtuality vanished as the muhajir took off for a new home.

True, the fate the muhajir have met in their Dar-ul-Islam is infinitely worse than any diaadvantage they left behind in the faithful can go to their Friday namaz in the confidence that they will return alive to their hearts and homes; in Karachi, going to the neighbourhood mosque for the weekly prayer has become a daunting, dangerous gamble with death. However, it is cold comfort for an Indian Muslim to know that he is better placed than his ralatives in Pakistan so long as he is not at least as well placed as the Indian Hindu, the Indian Christian or the Indian parsi here at home.

At the same time, it is important to look at the issue in terms of absolute levels of achievement of the community in question and the country as a whole rather than in terms of competitiveness among communities. When we do that I think we shall find that the disparity in achievement is much more marked among Muslims whose mother toungue is Urdu , Malyalam, Marathi or Gujrati, Bengali or Assemese. Indeed, in so far as Tamil Muslims are concenred, the position is almost the opposite of the Urdu-speaking Muslims of India. They tend, as a community, to have not only the same level of education as tamilians in general but also much higher standerds of living owing to long-standing economic ties with Singapore, Hong Kong, the Gulf and other parts of the world, reinforced dramatically in recent times by remittances from west Asia. The same goes for the malayali muslim and to a limited extent, for the Marathi and Gujarathi Muslim, Acute backwardness is most pronounced among Urdu-speaking Muslims.

I suggest this is because Urdu-speaking Muslims are to a substantial degree denied the opportunity of schooling in their mother toungue. The tamil muslim knows no Urdu; his mother toungue is Tamil. Therefore, access to education in his mother toungue is as equal for the tamil muslim as for a Tamilian of any other religious community in the cow belt since partition. Two factors have been mainly responsible for this.

One, state governments in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other states of the Hindi Heattland have prescribed unrealistic levels for the minimum number of Urdu-speaking children required to provide elementary education in Urdu. Consequentaly Muslim children wanting an education often have no alternative but to opt for elementary education in Hindi and go on to secondary and higher secondary education in Hindi rather than in Urdu mediam. Second, for Muslims who crosss the schooling threshold, the disincentive to raise their knowledge of Urdu to university standards is compounded by the knowledge that university education is virtually unsvailable in Urdu, in any subject other than Urdu language and literature. Those who stay with Urdu are thus either relegated to low levels of literacy or left with little alternative to the madrasa stream. Equally, teachers who are comfortable with Urdu find opportunity for adavancement in the national mainstream trimmed and so confine themselves more and more to their narrow little worlds; the narrowness is then transmitted to the children under their care. Thus, after independence the Muslim middle class has tended to be alienated from its mother tounguel urdu has been forced into the ghetto, the mushira and the mujara. Little wonder then that the post-partition Muslim middle class is disproportionaly smaller than the share of Muslims in the total population; little wonder too that the urdu-speaking Indian Muslim is disproportionaly less represented in the Indian middle class than the non-urdu speaking Indian muslim.

Excerpted from “Confessions of a secular fundamentalist” by Mani Shankar Aiyar