In an article in RSS mouthpiece The Organiser, former Union HRD Minister and BJP MP Murli Manohar Joshi has attacked the findings of the Sachar Committee, citing a Centre for Policy Research (CPR) paper to strengthen his arguments. However, the CPR, an independent think-tank based in Delhi, has denied the existence of such a report and has written to Joshi, asking for a clarification. Joshi now says the paper he was referring to was by the Centre for Policy Studies, a Chennai-based think-tank with distinct saffron tilt.The Sachar Committee report had made a case for gross under-representation of the country’s Muslim community in government jobs, and much lower standards of living in general than those indicated by all-India averages. But in the article titled “Don’t plan on fake assumptions. Learn from history and work for national growth with unity” published on January 27, Joshi argues that the Hindu poor are more numerous than Muslim poor (in absolute numbers), the school enrollment ratios for Muslims are on the rise, and that Muslim Waqf properties are massive enough to take care of their lot. According to “some estimates”, contests Joshi, “waqf properties if properly managed should give a return of at least Rs 8,000 crore to Rs 12,000 crore on a conservative estimate: Are these funds insufficient to take care of the educational, health and entrepreneurial needs of the Muslims?” Joshi backs his arguments with a report, ostensibly put together by the CPR, establishing that according to “data compiled by the Sachar committee, the picture that emerges is hardly of a community under distress or seize (sic) but a resurgent group trying to catch up with others. also to surpass them in certain respects.” However, the CPR has denied the existence of such a report. In a letter sent to Joshi on March 3, the president and chief executive of the CPR, Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, has said the centre “has released no such report on the Sachar Committee’s findings, could you kindly issue a clarification about the report you cite. This would only be fair to the authors of the report. And it would also prevent people from erroneously assuming that the Centre for Policy Research is putting its credibility behind a report it did not produce.” The letter goes on to say that while “individual faculty members have, on occasion, expressed their views on the Sachar Committee Report. they are uncomfortable with CPR’s name being used (even if erroneously) to lend credibility to someone else’s arguments.” When contacted by The Sunday Express, Joshi said the article was mistakenly attributed to the CPR. “I meant the Centre for Policy Studies in Chennai which does research, reviews policy etc. This paper I have quoted is a year-old. If I had just written what I felt, you would have said Joshiji keeps saying all this anyway. Therefore, I have quoted the paper verbatim,” he said. The Centre for Policy Studies in Chennai was founded in 1990, and has amongst its trustees and founder members S Gurumurthy, Govindacharya, Balbir Punj and others known to be close to the RSS. The author of the paper which Joshi has quoted is J K Bajaj, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies, who has earlier done a study on the religious demography of India. His specialisation, according to the institute is “theoretical physics”.
