Sunday, July 31, 2011

Hinduttva poisoning young minds globally

Any lessons from Norway on internal threat from xenophobic fanaticism of the Majority?

JOHN DAYAL

‎"The primary threat to democracy in Europe is not "Islamo-fascism" -- that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning -- but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority,” Prof Dilip Simeon wrote to me in a message on my Facebook profile. This was after I wrote that zealots and terrorists of all sorts live in a zone where it becomes difficult to tell them apart. Dilip is a younger contemporary from our days at St Stephen’s college. He faced a murderous assault in Ramjas College, Delhi, where he taught, and emerged as a major human rights voice after the anti Sikh violence in Delhi in 1984.

The Norway massacre of July 2011 is indeed Fascism with thick overlays of Racism and Xenophobia.
Islamophobia was common on the World Wide Web. So was Islamic intolerance of Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist and Sikh minorities in West and South Asia.

Islamic terror is well documented, more so since the bombing of the World Trade Towers in New York and the rise of Al Qaida. Despite Osama bin Laden’s assassination, it remains under the hawks-eye of the US and West Europe intelligence, who share their information on a real-time basis. It is also well documented in India where not only government agencies but also the common people – driven by the ceaseless propaganda by the Bharatiya Janata party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, lapped up eagerly by our Hindi and English language TV Channels -- keep track of all things “suspicious” in their neighborhood.

Analysis of majority terrorism have, for now, overwhelmed WWW portals in the wake of the Norway bombing-and-massacre by Christian gunman and bomber Anders Behring Breivik who singlehandedly killed 76 youth in his twin acts of violence. There is some emerging evidence that the killer, a drug user, may have himself largely used the Internet to keep abreast of, if not actually in personal touch with, political allies as far away as in the United Kingdom. He was also in touch with the WebPages, if not some webmasters, of the Sangh Parivar in India. In another chilling parallel, he too used large quantities of phosphorous and nitrogenous fertilizers in his car bomb, the same ingredients used by the perpetrators on the recent serial bombings in Mumbai, and in earlier bombings traced both to Islamic and Sangh groups.

This reporter has some experience of Xenophobia, both at the academic level and at personal level when he was living abroad as a journalist in the late 1980s, and saw Britani’s skinheads wreck havoc on lonely passers on the underground railways late at night both in London and in Germany, or desecrate Jewish graveyards. Recent visits show that neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism remains an issue in West Europe. Even in Poland, a devout Catholic country, the authorities are looking deeply at signs of emerging anti-Semitism and fascist youth groups who in a unified Europe can travel across borders with ease. The fact that Poland is where the Nazi Germans set up the notorious mass murder camps of Auschwitz makes the task of containing these groups so much more urgent. Poland, current President of the European Union, is however, taking transparent measures to check this political trend.

However, some other countries have apparently started going the xenophobic way in the wake of the economic meltdown, particularly in Germany, Ireland, even Greece, Spain and Portugal. At a recent international seminar in Holland, this correspondent came face to face with how governmetns can take wrong decisions when pressured by populist moves from opposition or ruling political groups and their cohorts in the masses. Holland itself has a not very clean image on racial issues despite the large number of descendants of migrants from former African and Indonesian Dutch colonies. But it is now monitoring, in a scientific way, hate speeches and hate documents. The lawmakers are also waking up to face right wing politicians who work on the people’s insecurities, economic or personal. Demanding cultural assimilation, specially from Muslim migrants, but also for instance from Sikhs, is the tip of the iceberg. Majoritarian xenophobia is dangerous, and Europe has long been Islamophobic, one can all the way back to the first Crusades to wrest Christian Holy Lands from Muslim control.

The examples that were cited from Ireland however took the xenophobic cake. Ireland – south or Republic of Ireland – has had good relations with India for more than a century, sharing an anti-colonial and anti imperialist history opposing British domination. Ireland also has a wonderful history of trade Unions. Former Indian President VV Giri was a respected trade unionist in Ireland before he came back to Indian politics. Irish freedom fighters borrowed the weapon of the peaceful hunger strike from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and many Irish youth dies in jail while on fasts-unto-death. Irish men and women themselves suffered anti-Celtic racism when they came down to England looking for work.

And yet, Ireland is now in the midst of installing a system to stop “birthing tourism”. Ireland has a policy like some other countries, which grant automatic citizenship to a child born in the land. Apparently, leveraging this law, many pregnant women from poorer countries would take a flight to Ireland in the last month of their pregnancy, deliver a child in Ireland, and then stay back as a family of the newborn “citizen of Ireland”. Efforts are now on to plug this “loophole”. Birth Tourism will be soon a memory. {For Indian Catholics, it may be salutary to remember that Ireland has hit out sharply at the Vatican, attacking the Pope on issues of protecting children from sexual violence.

What should ring alarm bells in New Delhi, indeed in the whole of India, is the real or make-believe environment in which the Norwegian young man of the unpronounceable name reached his delusional but fatal conclusions. His personal manifesto hails Hindutva, noting that the goals of the Sanatana Dharma nationalists were identical to Justiciar Knights, a future group, and therefore it could be key ally in a global struggle to bring down democratic regimes across the world. That future campaign would wage a campaign that will graduate from acts of terrorism to a global war involving weapons of mass destruction — aimed at bringing down the “cultural Marxist” order. Breivik acquired some 8,000 e-mail addresses of “cultural conservatives” not just across Europe but North America, Australia, South Africa, Armenia, Israel, and India – ensuring scrutiny of anti-Muslim groups far beyond Europe.

Western media noted that India figured in a “remarkable” 102 pages of the 1,518-page manifesto. “Hindu nationalists are suffering from the same persecution by the Indian cultural Marxists as their European cousins,” he noted, condemning the Dr Manmohan Singh government of “appeasing Muslims and, very sadly, proselytising Christian missionaries who illegally convert low caste Hindus with lies and fear, alongside Communists who want total destruction of the Hindu faith and culture.”

An interesting sweep, as he goes on to applaud groups who “do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when things get out of control.” His advice is that the Indian groups “instead of attacking the Muslims, should target the category A and B traitors in India and consolidate military cells and actively seek the overthrow of the cultural Marxist government. It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical.” Organisations figuring in that deadly manifesto include the BJP, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. They will have some explaining to do as the manifesto pledges military support “to the nationalists in the Indian civil war and in the deportation of all Muslims from India.”

Americans newspaper Christian Science Monitor’s Delhi based columnist Anders Behring notes that in the case of India, “there is significant overlap between Breivik’s rhetoric and strains of Hindu nationalism – or Hindutva – on the question of coexistence with Muslims.” Behrings records that Human rights activists have long decried such rhetoric in India for creating a milieu for communal violence, “and the Norway incidents are prompting calls here to confront the issue.”

The Hindu’s correspondent Praveen Swami, derided often for his apparent toeing of the line of the Indian Intelligence Bureau in his reportage, strikes a similar note saying “Like Europe’s mainstream right-wing parties, the BJP has condemned the terrorism of the right – but not the thought system which drives it. Its refusal to engage in serious introspection, or even to unequivocally condemn Hindutva violence, has been nothing short of disgraceful. Liberal parties, including the Congress, have been equally evasive in their critique of both Hindutva and Islamist terrorism,” he adds.

Human rights activists second the view that there are important lessons for India in the murderous violence in Norway: lessons it can ignore only at risk to its own survival.

It was left not to an Indian newspaper but to the Christian Science Monitor to recall that former East Delhi‘s BJP Member of Parliament Baikunth Lal Sharma ‘Prem' held a secret meeting with key members of a terrorist group responsible for a nationwide bombing campaign targeting Muslims. He has been quoted as saying “It has been a year since I sent some three lakh letters, distributed 20,000 maps of Akhand Bharat but these Brahmins and Banias have not done anything and neither will they do anything. It is not that physical power is the only way to make a difference, but to awaken people mentally, I believe that you have to set fire to society.”

In recent weeks, we have seen a sharp rhetoric coming from the BJP opposing the drat Communal and Targetted Violence Prevention Bill written by the civil society members of the National Advisory Council of the government of India. The BJP rhetoric seeks to rouse the common Hindu population by falsely trying to create ear among them from religious minorities. The BJP and RSS leadership, which targets individual activists as much as the NAC as a body, says the Bill crimeless the Hindu community while empowering the Muslims and Christians. This is a blatant lie. The draft bill – which has not yet been presented to the Union Cabinet and is still far away from the final shape that will be visible when it comes up before the Rajya Sabha -- merely ensures that a government response is triggered at the first indication of communal violence, and that the authorities are held responsible because it is their lethargy and complicity that has aggravated riots in the past.

Not surprisingly, mainstream political parties, among them the Congress, the Marxists and the socialist or Dravidian parties, have so far not challenged the BJP rhetoric. No senior leader has come before the media to denounce this blatant effort to whip up passions.

It has been left to the two persons outside the official power structure – Mani Shankar Aiyar and former Madhya Pradesh Chief minister Digvijay Singh – to come down to brass tacks and identify the Sangh Parivar for threatening Indian secularism and unity, and for itself being a purveyor of terror, including terror bombings.
Digvijay Singh is on record for saying repeatedly that bombings take place when the BJP is “politically cornered over something or the other. The timing of the bomb blasts is quite uncanny. Why does it always happen when the BJP is in trouble? That needs investigation”

Digvijay, an archetypal politician, speaks of the coincidences. “When the Tehelka issue was to be discussed in Parliament, the House was adjourned for three days. Then when the expose was to be discussed, the Parliament attack took place. When the Godhra incident took place, Congress was doing exceedingly well in the local body elections and Narendra Modi had won by only 6,000 votes as a chief minister and that too with great difficulty. During the recent Karnataka election, there was a bomb blast in Hubli on the very first day of polling. Similarly, two days before the polling in the second phase in Karnataka elections, there was a bomb blast in Jaipur. It really needs an investigation.”

Whatever investigations have taken place have unearthed a pretty large and well oiled ring whose nodes and modules involve Army officers, Sadhus and Sadhvi and men at the top of the RSS, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and other groups. The national Intelligence Agency’s charge sheets in court make for chilling reading.
Digvijay Singh adds to the charge sheets by way of background, ”In 1992 there was a bomb blast in the VHP office in Madhya Pradesh, where one VHP member died and two were injured while making bombs. Then in 2002, there was a bomb blast in a temple in Mhow. When the police arrested the VHP activists after investigation, they confessed that they were even given training to manufacture bombs. I have a videocassette of that confession. Again, in 2006, in Nanded, there was a bomb blast in the house of a RSS activist where two RSS activists died. After that in March 2008, there were bomb blasts at two places in Tamil Nadu. Then too VHP activists were arrested by the Tamil Nadu police who confessed that they were involved. And how did the Gujarat police suddenly find eighteen bombs planted on trees in Surat. RSS, VHP activists have been caught making bombs, material for preparing bombs have been found at their office and there are three-four clear cases where they have been arrested and a case has been registered. Why is not anyone looking into this?

It remains a moot question why there has not been a real investigation into rightwing majority extremism in India. Intelligence agencies are looking to the political leadership to show some willpower in decision-making. The central government is so beset with its own problems of shrugging off charges of corruption against half the Union cabinet –a crisis that also afflicts the BJP in Karnataka and other states – it has little energy and less time to devote to deeper threats to the Indian Union.

As far as the Church is concerned, it may support media-driven anti corruption campaigns, but is far too timid to either research or speak about issues as grave as racism, xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, and majority communalism.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Enemies and Friends -- sometimes hard to tell them apart

Political myopia, fascist bigotry and lunacy
Or, How Christians can be hurt as much by shortsighted friends as by daft enemies
JOHN DAYAL
An absolutely hate-filled and lunatic analysis of terrorism by Janata Dal leader and lawyer Subramanian Swamy, and a well meaning but myopic policy paper by the redoubtable former IAS officer and National Advisory Council member Harsh Mander show how minorities in general, and micro minorities in particular, can face political and developmental disenfranchisement at the hands of foes and friends.
Writing a column on Terrorism in the Mumbai edition of the DNA daily newspaper, Swami says Hindus cannot accept to be killed in a “halal fashion”, continuously bleeding every day till the nation finally collapses. Painting a scary scenario to hold readers’ attention, he says, “There will be no doubt about Islamic terror after 2012” when he expects a Taliban takeover in Pakistan and the Americans to flee Afghanistan. “Then, Islam will confront Hinduism to complete unfinished business.
The lawyer, who has so far made the Congress and Sonia Gandhi his main targets, says the Hindu leadership has not united the people against the victimisation of Hindus in Kashmir, Mau, Melvisharam and Malappuram. “If half the Hindus voted together, rising above caste and language, a genuine Hindu party would have a two-thirds majority in Parliament and the assemblies. Muslims of India, he says, are being programmed by a” slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.”
“Hindus must collectively respond as Hindus against the terrorist and not feel individually isolated. If one Hindu dies merely because he or she was a Hindu, then a bit of every Hindu also dies. This is an essential mental attitude, a necessary part of a virat committed Hindu”, he says. Swamy forgets that in Kashmir, Mumbai and Gujarat, a very large number of people killed in terror actions have been Muslims, as also the occasional Sikhs and Christians.
For Swamy, what is required is a “collective mindset as Hindus.”If any Muslim acknowledges his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj (greater Hindu society) which is Hindustan. Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors were Hindus. Others, who refuse to acknowledge this, or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration, can remain in India but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected representatives).”
Swamy’s arguments take the discourse back to Guru Golwalkar, Savarkar and the other founders of the RSS and thier theology of a Brihat Bharat in which there would be no place for followers of the so-called non-Indic religions, unless they agreed to a second class, vote-less position. Living in the dream world of a Larger India, Swami says “however small the terrorist incident, the nation must retaliate massively.”
His other remedies are ones repeated by the RSS every week in the Organiser and the Panchjanya, their official organs: “remove article 370 on Kashmir,”, “clear the mosques adjacent to Kashi Vishwanath temple and the 300 masjids at other temple sites, device a Uniform Civil Code, rename India as a Hindu Rashtra in which non-Hindus can vote only if they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus, name the land as Hindustan, stop attempts to “change India’s demography by illegal immigration, conversion, and refusal to adopt family planning,” and of course, “enact a national law prohibiting conversion from Hinduism to any other religion , re-conversion will not be banned.”. [ http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/comment_analysis-how-to-wipe-out-islamic-terror_1566203-all]
Swamy’s last sentence gives away his game again. It is not just Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism he is against. Many a Muslim, and most Indian Muslim organisations, has denounced terrorism and fundamtnlaism. Swamy is against all non-Hindu minorities. He is against Churches and pastors preaching there, he confesses, as much as he opposes the Constitutional freedom to convert to another religion. All conversions, he stresses more than once, can only be to Hinduism. Those who do not know Swamy’s mindset may feel surprised at the outburst of the former Union Commerce Minister, because he is married to a Parsi lawyer, and one of his daughters is married to a Muslim.
Unlike Swamy, Harsh Mander positively loves the religious minorities. The Indian Administrative Service officer was working for Action Aid on a sabbatical when he resigned from government service denouncing the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Since then, he has done wonderful work to ensure justice for the victims, himself rising to be made a member of the National Advisory Council headed by United Progressive Alliance chairperson Mrs Sonia Gandhi. In the NAC, Mander is in charge of issues concerning religious minorities, specially the Communal and Targetted Violence Prevention Bill, which is now nearing completion, and the Food Guarantee Bill, which has been completed. A major input in the Communal Violence prevention bill is the recognition that it is not just Muslims who are victims of such actions, but also Christians, and therefore the Bill has provisions to help Christian victims.
It is therefore frightening, no less, to read a long report written by Mander on why government’s affirmative action must be openly targetted only at Muslims. Christians would be right in presuming that Mander does not want the grants diluted by being passed on to the Christians or the Buddhists.
As reported in the Times of India of 21 July 2011, Mender’s Centre for Equity Studies prepared report dubs the Centre's minority welfare schemes and the Prime Minister’s 15-point programme as non-starters, blaming government's timidity in declaring the schemes as Muslim-oriented for fear of opposition campaign of minority appeasement. “The diffidence on the Muslim-word led to schemes being dubbed as "minority" or "area based", thereby diluting targeted community approach. “
He asks the government to openly resolve to improve the lot of Muslims by making a dedicated 14 per cent budgetary allocation for the Muslim community on the lines of sub-plans for SCs and STs. With the findings raising an alarm, NAC has sought a "detailed response" from the minority affairs ministry on the study.
Mander’s r report questions the efficacy of schemes launched with fanfare for amelioration of minorities — in education, self-employment and infrastructure among others. He dismisses UPA's minority outreach as tokenism. The Ministry for Minority Affairs is the target. Mander says it lacks institutional and political authority to ensure compliance of its objectives from other arms of government. He says the anxiety over appeasement charge led to Multi-Sector Development Programme for Muslims morph into one for "minorities" and ultimately to an "area-scheme" — aiming to improve infrastructure in 90 districts with over 25% Muslims.
Mander’s Centre for Equity Studies, which publishes his report, terms the allocations for minorities as small — 19 per cent of population got 5 per cent budgetary allocation, with per capita allocation of a mere Rs 797. It recommended that the PM’s 15-point programme implemented by various ministries be turned into an independent minority sub-plan having earmarked funds in each ministry and monitors to check their use.
While Subramanian Swamy’s rantings are easily dismissed as the delusional outpourings of a demented Hindutva fundamentalist, Mander’s report seems to hit at the very basis of constitutional guarantees to “all” religious minorities, and may aggravate and empower the Hindutva forces.
Not many know that the very formation of the Ministry of Minority affairs by the UPA in 2006 two years after it came to power after the rule of the BJP-dominated NDA has been challenged by anti-minority forces.
There have been several court cases against the ministry, challenging its very existence. One argument, facile as it may be, is of course that why are separate ministries, Plan and budget components and other affirmative action required at all when the Constitution guarantees every citizen equal rights and equal protection. Why then, it is argued, should we have special provisions for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, for instance, or for women in terms of reservations, and certainly whey for religious minorities when the nation is secular and the movement holds all religions in equal respect. This argument flies in the face of the fact that three thousand years of a religion-sponsored hierarchy has created situations which have kept Dalits and Tribals, even women, and certainly several religious groups outside the pail of development, denying them equity in national progress.
It, perhaps, is not widely known that that Ministry has been made party in Writ Petition no. SCANO No. 2245/2008 of Vijay Harish Chandra Patel in the High Court of Gujarat, Writ Petition (PIL) 84 of 2008 of S. G. Punalekar in the High Court of Bombay and Writ Petition no. (298/08 and WPC No. 9569 of 207) in Delhi High Court.
One Vijay Harish Chandra Patel challenged the Prime Minister’s New 15 Point Programme and filed a public interest litigation challenging the steps taken by the Union of India and the Planning Commission to utilize the national resources in favour of a particular minority community, which according to the petitioner is discriminatory, arbitrary and violative of various constitutional provisions.
Chief Justice K. S. Radhakrishnan ruled that “funds used to minimize inequalities among minority Communities by adopting various social and welfare activities like public safety, health, slum development, improving the deficiencies in civic amenities, economic opportunities, improving standard of education, skills and entrepreneurship development, employment opportunities, eradication of poverty etc., would no way violate the constitutional principles of equality or affect any of the fundamental rights guaranteed to the members of other communities.”
S. G. Punalekar in the High Court of Bombay also challenged the scholarship schemes of the Ministry of Minority Affairs including PM’s New 15 Point Programme for the welfare of minorities in the public interest as violative of Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution of India. The High court recently dismissed this PIL.
In Delhi, the petitioners said that Muslims of India could not be treated as minority community that the treatment of Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsis and Muslims as a “minority” is irrational from a constitutional point of view. The High court is yet to pass a judgment on this PIL.
Sources in the Union government say the Ministry of Minority Affairs has been able to win some cases and sustain their argument because of the approach adopted of not focusing on any particular minority but on all the identified minorities and that the disadvantaged and economically deprived amongst them.
Harsh Mander’s report denies this well settled and sound government policy.
The All India Christian Council and the All India Catholic Union have been struggling with the Union government to set up a Justice Sachchar Commission to assess the economic and development infirmity in the Christian community, especially among the Tribals and the Dalits, the boatmen, fishermen, landless labour and other deprived communities. This campaign started when the government first set up the Justice Sachchar committee after decades of campaigning and advocacy by Muslims groups. The data in the Sachhar committee report has greatly strengthened the Muslim cause and has given a tool to NGOs and community leaderships to strengthen the struggle for their rights in the development pie.
Unfortunately, the government has not given heed to the Christian demand, partly because the Church leadership has not been as vocal in its interaction with the government, remaining satisfied with minor crumbs.
If the government were to listen to the Mander report, it would entirely undo whatever little headway has been made towards the empowerment of the poor in the Christian community through the advocacy in the Working Group on Minorities of the Planning Commission now involved with the 12th Five Year Plan Document. A minority sub plan, which Mander suggests, will be feasible only if it covers all minorities and is not confined just to the Muslim community. Our argument in the working committee has been that the major budgetary and plan allocations for minorities have not percolated to the Christian community, whatever be the reason, and whether the fault lies with the government or with the church leadership.
Another danger if the government were to accept the Mander recommendations is the threat to secular unity, and giving additional ammunition to people like Subramaniam Swamy. At present, the dialogue between Christians and other minorities is very little. The formal dialogue is limited to casual and occasional contact by the Catholic Bishops Conference of India and its equivalent federations in the protestant churches meeting once or twice a year with sundry Maulanas and Granthis, RK Mission, the Bahais and the Brahmkumaris for some lip service to common issues of peace and brotherly love. There never has been a serious political dialogue between minorities on issues of development and demands to the Union and State governmetns.
The result has been that Christians have had to chalk their own destiny or accept whatever little may come out of, on a pro rata basis, from government’s plans for the major minority community, the Muslims. Christians have therefore felt discriminated and isolated, feeling that Muslims have taken away all the development booty earmarked in the Budgets. This in a way creates a distance between Muslims and Christians and shatters whatever element o unity could be created.
The government would do extreme damage to micro minorities such as Christians if it goes by the Mander thesis, without making adequate provisions on a pro rata basis for the uplift of the Christian community. The government must acknowledged that islands of gross underdevelopment occur in all religious minorities, and specially in Christianity where the Dalit Christians and other groups are not even officially acknowledged, and millions of believers are not even counted in the Census as Christians. Their needs have to be addressed. Therefore an “inclusive” thesis, which will ultimately save the government from the charge of “appeasement” or “vote bank politics”

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

A crore of Christian youth may get good education at government expense if the Church wakes up

More than Rupees 3,500 crores to be had in scholarships and assistance

JOHN DAYAL

More than Rupees 3,500 crore has to be had from the government just for the education of Christian children from primary to doctorate and foreign studies in the next six years – if only the Church and laity wake up and help. Ballpark estimates say almost a crore of boys and girls of economically disadvantaged rural and urban families from the pre-primary to PhDs, engineering, medical and professional courses students could be assisted.

The money is in the government’s Plan budgets. And this is apart from the money that is spent on minority-concentrated districts – and hopefully block level units in the future – by various ministries such as those of Social Welfare, rural development and even of water supply for the befit of the minorities after the Justice Rajender Sachchar committee excavated the bitter fact that these areas continued to suffer from lack of development even when compared to “general” districts in the backwards group.

According to the data available with the Planning Commission’s Working group on Minorities, the Budget provisions under the ongoing Five year Plan for the period 2010 is Rupees 2,600 crores, making a total of Rs 7,000 crores for the 11th Plan. For the 12th Plan now under preparation, a massive sum of Rs 15,000 crore is envisaged for scholarship and other schemes under the Ministry of Minorities Affairs. This is for all minorities to be distributed on a pro rata basis. The Christian community is about a fifth the size of the Muslim community according to official records. Their share of the entire amount is 20 per cent, a whopping figure. Rule of thumb statistics put the number of Christian students at one crore, including Tribals who continue to get benefits under the Scheduled Tribes quotas.

This figure does not include Dalit Christians who are neither counted a Scheduled Caste, nor as Christian unless they so register themselves. In starts such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Naidu, even in Kerala and Maharashtra, many want to be listed as Hindus so that they can get the Scheduled caste benefits denied to them so cruelly under the Presidential order of 1950. [The case has been before the Supreme Court for a number of years, and it is not clear when there will be a ruling on it.]

The government releases these funds under several schemes, including the Maulana Azad Foundation, free coaching and allied schemes, equity to the National Minorities Development Fund, Research and monitoring studies, grants in aid to state governmetns, schemes for leadership development among young women, interest free subsidy on academic bank loans for studies abroad in addition to separate funds for centrally sponsored scholarship schemes.

The leadership of the Muslim community ahs woken up this fact. Deeply focused and committed NGOs have been set up to ensure that every student who qualifies for the merit cum means and other scholarships gets the benefit and is not left to the mercy of fate. Muslim NGOs and religious leadership, according to their statements, may have been successful in ensuring that over 80 lakh students have scholarships this year, specially in states such as Andhra, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh with large Muslim populations, because of the initiative taken by the community leadership.

There is unfortunately a hiatus in the mass communication of such scholarships despite the claims of the central and state governments. An additional problem is the red tape, an uncaring state bureaucracy, and the lack of cooperation from both private second and public sector banking institutions. The forms have to be taken from local education officers, or downloaded from the internet website of the government, not an easy task in rural areas or where the 2G and 3G networks do not exist, and internet cafes are continuously harried by the police looking for “suspects”. Once the forms are procured and distributed, they have to be correctly filled up, the signatures of uncooperative principals appended to them, income certificates wrested out of empowers of the parents – and difficult if the family in unemployed – various other certificates received, and then the entire bunch uploaded to the department’s website, with the papers submitted to the appropriate authority.

Muslim grassroots experience has shown that this is an impossible task for a child or a parent to do unless expert assistance is available. This is where the special NGOs and volunteers have entered the scene to help the students. The results have been miraculous.

The same NGOs are now pressing on the Governmnt through the Ministry of Minority Affairs and the Planning commission that at least 6 crore Muslim students be given scholarships in the 12th Five year Plan. They have assured the government that they would be able to assist as many students of the community across India to avail of the scholarships. The NGOs have also urged the authorities to streamline the scholarship process, specially as the students rise to higher classes in their institutions to ensure that scholarships are available for the entire course and not just for one year. This, they feel, will encourage the students to complete their studies instead of dropping out if the scholarship is terminated because they do not get a 50 per cent score in some year.

Compare this with the Christian situation. It to the best of this writer’s knowledge, no catholic or protestant church group, nor any lay association, has set up such a extensive and committed support infrastructure to assist its student community. The catholic Bishops Conference or its constituents in the Latin, Syro Malabar and Syro Malankara Rites, the National Council of Churches in India representing almost 30 Protestant churches and the Evangelical Fellowship of India do not have the institutions to do this work. This has been left to the Dioceses or individual regional churches. But even in their sectarian – denominational – way, they are almost entirely ineffective.

In almost every state, when the Bishops of the dioceses are informed of the availability of the scholarships, all that they do is to ask Parish priests to announce it after Mass one day. School principals put the scholarship details on the notice board.

The lay organisations, wherever they exist have not even done this, though some of them offer pitifully small scholarships for the poor of the parish by way of charity.

The result of course is that most students are out of the coverage of these schemes, both for the pre Matric classes and in higher education.

A large chunk of the money has lapsed. And there is pitifully little database for advocacy groups to work with the Planning Commission’s Working Group of Minorities drafting the Minorities component of the Plan. Christian leadership has done almost no research on how much of the government’s scholarships have been actually used countrywide. The Muslim monitoring of the government schemes has to be seen to be believed. After the Sachchar commission report, the country’s largest minority has understood that information is power, and an important tool in influencing the making of government policy. The church leadership is yet to understand this.

The minorities are of course demanding that their quota be built into all schemes as a special component, much on the lines of the Scheduled caste ad Scheduled Tribes quotas that are constitutionally built into all government plan spending. It is a moot question that the government will accept this demand, beset as it is by charges from the Bharatiya Janata party that it is appeasing minorities in general and the Muslim community in particular. The phrase “vote bank politics” has become a stick in the hands of the Hindutva forces to beat the government and force it to withdraw from pr-active measures for the amelioration of the poor of the minorities, who are doubly disadvantaged. Their women and the Dalit components have thier future blinded three-fold.

The situation will be corrected once the community becomes pro-active, and its leadership assumes