Opinion Would Sonia call Nehru anti-Muslim?

Don’t be fooled by the Congress party’s conspiratorial silence on this demand. After all,the main recommendation of the Ranganath Mishra Commission,not rejected by the UPA government,is to introduce a separate 15 per cent religion-based quota for minorities—10 per cent for Muslims and 5 per cent for others. Please note that the Commission wants this quota for all Muslims,and not only for backward Muslims. In other words,even the children of Khurshid,Azim Premji and the like would be eligible to benefit from this quota. Many Muslim groups have already accused the Congress of “stabbing the community in the back” for its decision to introduce only a 4.5 percent minority sub-quota within the 27 per cent OBC quota. Their grudge: “OBC Muslims would now have to compete with Christians,Sikhs and Parsis for the 4.5 per cent quota,whereas the remaining 22.5 per cent would be for Hindu OBCs.” These Muslim groups are bound to intensify their agitation for the implementation of Mishra Commission’s recommendations. And mark my words: the Congress party—beleaguered by the UPA government’s scams and non-performance and hence desperate to consolidate its Muslim vote bank in the run-up to the next parliamentary elections—is bound to play its minority quota card aggressively.

What is overlooked in this entire debate is that Muslim OBCs—in UP itself,over 40 different backward communities such as Ansaris,Baghban,Ghosi,Kabaria,Madari,etc—are already included in the 27 per cent quota,which is a non-religious category. The Congress is thus guilty of communalising the entire quota policy. Recall that the Sachar Committee report had egregiously proposed a communal head-count in the Armed Forces,to which the Congress party had given its silent consent. Only a massive public outcry,especially a firm ‘No’ from the chiefs of the Armed Forces,compelled the UPA government to junk this dangerous move.

Worse still,the Congress is guilty of dumping the wisdom of our Constitution-makers who had summarily rejected the idea of religion-based reservations. The issue was discussed threadbare in 1947 by the Constituent Assembly’s Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights and Minorities headed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Its members included Dr B R Ambedkar and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Presenting his committee’s report,Patel had said: “Our mission is to satisfy every interest and safeguard the interests of all minorities to their satisfaction within the framework of the overall national interest.. In the long run,it would be in the interest of all to forget that there is anything like a majority or a minority in this country and that in India,there is only one community—Indian.”

Hailing the rejection of communal reservations as a “historic turn in our destiny”,Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had said,“A safeguard of this kind would have some point where there was autocratic or foreign rule; it would enable the monarch to play one community off against the other. But where you are up against a full-blooded democracy,if you seek to give safeguards to a minority,you isolate it. at the cost of forfeiting that inner sympathy and fellow-feeling with the majority.” Later in 1961,Nehru warned again: “This way lies not only folly but disaster.” Would today’s Congress leaders label Nehru anti-Muslim for saying this?

The Constituent Assembly was debating the issue of political reservation for religious minorities. But its guiding logic is equally relevant in the current debate on communal reservations in jobs and education. If our Constitution-makers’ good judgment and farsightedness are jettisoned,as the Congress under the myopic and history-illiterate Sonia-Rahul leadership is doing—look how it quickly consented to Constitutionally untenable quotas in the Lokpal Bill—,the day isn’t far off when every institution and every policy in India would be fragmented by the quota mindset.

Yes,all Indians,irrespective of their caste and faith,must have equal share in satta (power),sampatti (prosperity) and sammaan (prestige). But we need an entirely new non-Manmohanomics vision and strategy of development to reach this goal,one with minimum reliance on quotas. Hasn’t experience shown that quotas are a highly inadequate way of transforming the lives of the poor and deprived—be they Hindu or Muslim?