THE JOINT Committee on Muslim Organisation for Empowerment (JCMOE) held a convention recently and buttressed the demand of reservation for Muslims.  Apart from community leaders, political leaders sympathetic to Muslims also attended. While many such conferences have been held under different banners, the convenors have invariably been the same.

The reservation demand was formally raised by the Association for Promoting Education and Employment of Muslims (APEEM) in its convention held in Delhi, back in 1994. Sitaram Kesri, the then Union minister of social justice and welfare had also attended the convention and made a strong plea for a separate Muslim quota, which led manY to conclude that the convention was nothing but a Congress ploy to win back its lost Muslim vote bank.  

Despite many things in common, the recently concluded convention appears to be more significant, for two explicit reasons. One, serious deficits of Muslims in the public sphere, namely public employment and education is no longer a matter of conjectures. It is a fact established by none other than the prime minister’s high powered panel. Secondly, the Lok Sabha polls are round the corner. It is around this time the race for poaching every politically significant constituency intensifies.

Why reservation for Muslims? The standard arguments for are as follows. The educational and economic status of the community has slipped to the status of SCs (Dalits). The reason is obviously latent discrimination, which excludes the community from the schemes of distributive benefits, and nothing but a fixed quota is necessary for ensuring fair representation. It is also argued that a democratic state is morally bound to ensure equal participation of diverse ethnic groups in public spheres. Impossible though it may seem for any system to ensure that distributive benefits simply mirror its societal diversity, the huge persisting disparities along religio-ethnic axes is a deeper political issue. This has led many democratic countries around the world to opt for preferential policies for disadvantaged minorities. As a fixed quota for other disadvantaged communities is in place for representation in public employment and institutions of higher learning, fairness demands that same remedial measures be taken for Muslims.   

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