Muslims fight a daily battle with stereotypes

Muslim bodies blame the police and the media for overplaying the involvement of Muslims in violent activities and often underplaying the role of other groups, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Dec 1, 2006, 02:15:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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"Every bearded man is an ISI agent"..."Muslim boys are the first to be picked up by the police when something goes wrong". These are some of the grievances that Muslim bodies took to the Sachar panel.

They even said there were more "policemen in Muslim localities than schools, industries, public hospitals and banks". Security personnel enter Muslim homes on the slightest pretext. The report also said that Muslims are forced to live with an "inferiority complex".

The committee also talked about the public ridicule that Muslims have to face when they wear their identity — burqa, beard and the cap. "Muslim men are usually the first to be picked up from public places," the report said.

Blaming the police and the media for overplaying the involvement of Muslims in violent activities and often underplaying the role of other groups, the report said the political mileage sought from such incidents hurt the community. The panel has recommended that the police should be sensitised towards Muslims.

In an oblique reference to the communal riots in Gujarat, the committee said the large-scale sexual violence against Muslim women has had a ripple effect even in places that not directly affected by the violence.

There is also an "underlying feeling" of injustice regarding the compensation to riot victims — Muslims said they were discriminated against and cited delay in disbursement of the compensation.

The committee found that this sense of insecurity comes from the fact that there are just 3.2 per cent Muslims in police forces and four per cent in the Indian Police Service. "The lack of adequate Muslim presence in the police force accentuates this problem in almost most Indian states," the report said. Muslim presence is even lower among IAS (three per cent) and Indian Foreign Service (1.8 per cent).

Many Muslim women complained that finding a job for veiled women was getting increasingly difficult in the corporate sector. Muslims said their children had problems getting into good educational institutions though most prefer educating their children in general schools than madrasas.

The report also said that Muslims, especially the youth, feel alienated because of their poor representation in the bureaucracy and in politics.

Thirty per cent of Muslim-majority villages have no primary schools and believe that the content in schoolbooks is communal. Muslim children who go to madrasas are treated as terrorists.

Email Chetan Chauhan: chetan @hindustantimes.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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