While it is possible that there is a grain of truth in all these explanations, something more important seems to be happening here. In order to understand it, we need to go back to the Sachar Committee Report. Those who have commented on the report have either tended to condemn it for being yet more proof of the old Congress politics of minority-appeasement, or have celebrated it for all the data the report has brought together so convincingly to show the actual state of affairs with regard to Indian Muslims. Far from being a pampered minority, as projected by the right-wing political opinion, the Sachar Committee Report highlights the deprivation and disadvantage faced by a large majority of Indian Muslims. It breaks the stereotype. For example, against the popularly held view, the report tells us that less than five per cent of all Muslim children in

India attend madarsas for school education.

Apart from placing these facts in the public domain, the report tries to do something radically different. In independent India, over the last nearly six decades, the Muslim question has remained trapped in the past, locked in memories of Partition and communal violence. Everything has revolved around issues of identity. Against this, the Sachar Committee analyses and articulates the Muslim question in a very different language, a language that shifts the discourse on Muslims from ‘identity’ to ‘development’.

How does it do so? It does so by using categories that classify and divide the Muslims on the basis of their social and economic status. It identifies the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) among the Muslims and distinguishes their position in Indian society from the so-called general category Muslims. It highlights the caste-like divisions among them, the Ashrafs, the Ajlafs, and the Arzals. It also argues for the listing of Arzals, the “ex-untouchables” among them, as Scheduled Castes along with similar categories from the Hindus, Sikhs and the Neo-Buddhists.

... contd.