Over the past couple of days, Indian media has been busy highlighting an isolated incident where a Muslim candidate was denied a job based on his religion.

The incident is totally unfortunate and I have always supported standing by merit, over any religious or economic background. But what annoys me is that the same media does not bother to take up the same issue which has always been there and in fact practiced more by the same community that is playing the victim card now.

A quick search on India’s most popular job portal monster.com for the keyword “Muslim” throws up the 100s of job posting which speak a lot about this issue. And only the job postings from the past 60 days are shown by Monster. I am sure there are thousands more of older posts on the portal!

Well now try the same search for the word “Hindu”. Unlike earlier, now you find only 4 postings matching the keyword. And strangely NONE of them are actually about hiring only HINDU candidates.

Above post (and one more copy by the same poster) is definitely a case of typo, where the poster spelled “Hindu” instead of “Hindi”. There is no “Hindu” language!

The third post(above) was specifying that the candidate understands Hindu Law. Again, not discriminating that only Hindus apply for the post.

The fourth post (above) also had the word “Hindu” along with other religious words like “Sikh”, “Mosqueus”, “Churches” etc while describing the place. And again it was not mandating that the candidates are Hindus only.

Even on other site similar to monster, I could only find references to the word hindu in contexts related to knowledge of Hindu Calendar etc, and none of the posts really seem to discriminate by specifying that they are hiring Hindu candidates only.

A recent post by OpIndia highlights how this discrimination has been in practice in India by all communities. Below are some examples for that post:

Such discrimination is unfortunate and I strongly believe and follow that no candidate should be discriminated based on his religion, economic background, sexual orientation, dressing etc.

The only thing that bothers me with pseudo-secular Indian media is that when someone is denied a job for practicing Hijab, it becomes a sensational news. But when the same person openly posts a job posting that the job is only for candidates practicing Hijab, the same media seems to approve of it. Irony!

Update: Adding few more examples of such discrimination that has been existing since long that would never be taken up by Indian Media.