Vice President Hamid Ansari on Monday made a strong pitch to develop strategies to address problems of identity and security confronting Muslims in the country and sought an “affirmative action” from the government, which espouses the policy of “growth for all”. “This is a political statement which does not befit the office of a Vice-President”, VHP’s Surendra Jain said.
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An assertion of Muslim patriotism that flies in the face of the right wing propaganda seeking to dub India’s largest minority as ‘anti-national’.
Till recently there was practically no comprehensive assessment of Muslims of the whole country, except few academic researches at smaller scale.
Delivering his inaugural address at the “Golden Jubilee Session of All India Muslim Majlis-e- Mushawarat”, Ansari said “Muslims were an integral part of the freedom struggle against the British rule”. And also a recognition by the Vice President, who can not be described as illiberal by even his worst critics, that the community has tried to deal with the challenges through adjustments and specific response patterns.
Tracing the condition of Muslims since Independence and the work in the past decade to delineate the contours of the problem, Ansari said studies bring forth sufficient evfidence to substantiate the view that “inequality traps prevent the marginalised and work in favour of the domkinant groups in society”.
In August, 2013 the Post-Sachar Evaluation Committee, headed by professor Amitabh Kundu of the Jawaharlal Nehru University was formed that submitted its report in October, 2014 to the Minority Affairs Minister Najma Heptulla. It makes specific recommendations to remedy these.
“Various reports of different committees have asserted that there are backward Muslims and Christians too”. Instead there seems to be a hint in his words that the opposite is happening, and insecurity amongst the minorities has reached new heights.
Each of these, he said, is a right of the citizen.
Habibullah favoured the formation of the promised Equal Opportunity Commission – a statutory body to check discrimination against the minorities in jobs and education.
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“The government needs to provide security to Muslims and ensure that all the welfare schemes reach the beneficiaries, which is not happening”, he said, adding that past governments were equally to blame.
