Lessons in inclusivity

The minority education agenda needs cautious handling

Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced government scholarships for 50 million students from minority communities — half of them for girls — for pre- and post-matric education as well as technical and professional courses over the next five years. In addition, teachers in madrasas, which impart religious education, would be trained in “mainstream subjects” such as Hindi, English, math and science. Since Muslims account for the biggest minority in India, it may be safely assumed that this community will be the biggest beneficiary of this largesse. In terms of political messaging, the scheme, which unusually is still to acquire a catchy acronym, is an inspired move, an early augmentation of Mr Modi’s second-term slogan of sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas.

 
Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis would be included in this scheme, though as relatively affluent communities they are less likely to avail of these benefits. As a Hindu majoritarian party, such subsidies enable the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to elude accusations of minority “appeasement”, that it has consistently levelled at the Congress. Ironically, this move also marks an implicit acceptance of the findings of the 2005 Sachar Committee report, which highlighted the overall alienation of the Muslim community from access to quality social services and jobs. 
 
How far the plan succeeds depends on how efficiently it is implemented. Muslim clerics, who have rarely been vanguards of progressive thought, have been quick to express their appreciation, saying that such a mega-education programme would enable Muslims to participate in nation-building (though why they should think Muslims have not participated in this project so far needs explanation). For the plan to succeed, however, it is vital that it remains free of narrow socio-political agendas. For instance, the plans for “modernising” teaching in madrasas by training teachers sounds unexceptionable on paper. Teaching them English, which is widely accepted as a link language globally, math and science is a sensible way of broad-basing the curricula in these seminaries. But several commentators have pointed to the fact that the curriculum includes Hindi. It is unclear why Hindi should be included to the exclusion of other Indian languages, especially when Muslims also form large minorities in states that are not Hindi-speaking (Jammu & Kashmir, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and so on).

 

Not surprisingly, the inclusion of Hindi as a “mainstream” subject has raised misgivings that the madrasa-education proposal is tied in with the pro-Hindi BJP’s broader linguistic agenda. Also, it is worth wondering whether the political messaging overwhelms the educational objective. As the Sachar report pointed out, only 4 per cent of Muslims attend madrasas — a proportion that may well have fallen since Muslims’ enrolment in primary schools has been growing rapidly. The larger proportion attend maktabs, which provide supplementary religious education in addition to enrolment in public schools. This raises the broader issue of whether scholarships should have been extended to poor Indians (with a focus on girls) in general rather than differentiating on religious grounds. Muslims, who form a large proportion of the poor anyway, would have benefited that way too.