A ijaz Ilmi is chairman of the Executive Board of Siyasat Jadid, a popular Urdu newspaper brought out from Kanpur and Lucknow. He is a senior political analyst with the television channel News X, and writes on Muslim, national and international issues in various newspapers. In this interview with Yoginder Sikand, he reflects on the present Indian Muslim leadership.

One often hears the argument that one of the principal causes of the overall marginalisation of the Indian Muslims is that they lack a responsive and representative leadership. How do you view this argument?

I don't see why Muslims should be led by Muslims alone, or why any other community should be led only by members of that particular community. Why must we expect only Muslim leaders to speak for and about Muslims? Muslims are also Indian citizens, and so why should their issues not be taken up by non-Muslim political leaders as well?

Very often, one hears the complaint that Muslim backwardness is a result of government neglect. The Muslim media continuously reinforces this view. I do not deny that successive governments have been neglectful of Muslims, but my point is that blaming the government alone is a convenient way to absolve the Muslim haves of their complicity in reinforcing Muslim backwardness.

Our marginalisation is definitely a result of government neglect and bureaucratic apathy, but it is also because self-styled Muslim leaders and well-to-do Muslims have done precious little for the community's economic and educational advancement, continuously harping on emotional, identity-related and what are narrowly conceived as 'religious' issues.

What Muslims today require is, definitely, a sympathetic government and a sensitive bureaucracy, but they also need effective community leaders and social activists, and not just politicians, to make sure that government schemes -- and there are so many of them, some of them specifically for minorities -- reach the grassroots and their intended beneficiaries.