The Andhra Pradesh High Court's order striking down the proposed 4.5 per cent quota reserved for minorities (carved out of the 27 per cent already reserved for the non-creamy layer OBCs) has again opened the debate on reservations and brought into focus the situation of Muslims.

Over the past 50 years, we note how the politics of elections has convinced the Muslims that consequent to each election, things would change dramatically in favour of the community. With a population of close to 160 million, Muslims of India tend to assume that they play a significant role in influencing the formation of governments. During the process of each election, different Muslim leaders loudly proclaim the impact the community would have on the election, and how they would "teach a lesson" to those parties that do not espouse their cause.

Youth

There is no bigger untruth than this because successive elections have proved that the community has only a marginal influence. Muslim votes are so divided that barring a few right wing parties, they end up being distributed among national parties, regional parties and fringe Muslim parties. Significantly, for the past 50 years the community has not produced a single leader with a pan India footprint. Elected Muslims represent local constituencies, local interests or their own institutional interests and do not carry weight with the vast majority of the community spread across India.

It is also interesting to note that while the young generation of Muslims wish to move on as modern citizens of India, with a confident sense of shared citizenship, wanting to exercise constitutional rights, the Muslims of my generation imagine them to be where the community stood in the 50s and 60s, bereft of education and carrying the cross of Partition. The young Muslim of today is tired of the rhetoric of "Muslim alienation", the condescending op-eds encouraging him to merge into "mainstream" society, to contribute to India's burgeoning economy. All this seems to assume that he has spent his life in a backwater or another planet. The young Muslim is tired of being stereotyped, so when the horrors of Mumbai and Pune occur, and he hears the same clichs - Muslim alienation, local Muslims supporting Pakistani terrorists, the disgruntlement in Muslim youth after 9/11 and so on - he is gripped by a depressing dj vu.

But this does not mean that the Government should not come forward with affirmative action for the community. Successive commissions set up by the government of India have provided adequate proof that a large number of Muslims live in deprivation, extreme poverty, lack of modern education etc. And therefore, it is incumbent on any democratically elected government to think of the welfare of its minorities, particularly when such a large minority seems pushed into a corner.

The issue is how do governments implement affirmative action in a country like India where governmental job opportunities and seats available in educational institutions are limited compared to the number of candidates, without raising the bogey of one community being favoured over another and thereby causing further fissures in an already sensitive situation. Over the past 60 years, we note how the Dalits have borne the cross of reservations. We forget the 6000 years of injustice that they have borne and speak condescendingly of those who have availed of the benefits of reservations. This fundamentally arises from the fact that the decision to provide reservations for Dalits and Adivasis is largely viewed as one arising out of political compulsions and not because of the genuine need to uplift the poorest and maltreated sections of society. Even when government introduced reservations for OBCs, it was widely perceived as a political decision rather than a measure to raise the status of OBCs.

Awareness

So obviously there is a trust deficit between the action taken by the government and the perception of the public at large. The fact is that successive governments have not sensitised India on the concept of affirmative action. This is a long and difficult route but minus adequate information, dissemination of accurate statistics, and a broad political consensus, this confusion will remain. Also it is extremely difficult for any government to develop a political consensus in an economy that has limited space. The fact is that there is widespread poverty in India that has moved on to envelop all castes and communities. Granted that there may be poverty amongst some minorities, Dalits and Adivasis, but it cannot be denied that large sections of upper caste Hindus are also singularly poor.

Criterion

There are a huge number of Brahmins, Kayasths and Rajputs who live below the poverty line, are not adept at businesses and are yet unable to get access to available opportunities, thanks to reservations. Therefore, even as there is need for affirmative action perhaps the best mechanism would be to have reservations based on income. This would be the fairest way of distributing limited opportunities, avoiding conflict in society and also preventing particular communities from carrying the stigma of 'reservations'.

But given the fact that the above suggestion may be considered nave in the current political context, it becomes necessary to make massive efforts to sensitise the 'non-reserved', classes of the need for affirmative action. In the meantime all communities may introspect on the justice of 'reservations' and the need to educate their youth to be able to compete on equal footing.