People's Democracy

 Increasing Socio-Economic Gaps:

The Communal Dimension

 Nalini Taneja

DESPITE propaganda by the Sangh Parivar, at least those free from a communal bias know that there has been little Muslim ‘appeasement’ in this country, and that in general Muslims have been more backward than other communities in terms of standards of living and access to economic assets. Discrmination in acquiring jobs is also not an unknown story, and some of these aspects of religion and economy as shown in Barbara Harriss’ book, India Working, were discussed in earlier columns as well.

We now have additional data which shows that during the decade of the 1990s the differences in socio-economic development between Hindus and Muslims actually increased, and that in at least one important respect the Muslim Indian on the average was worse off at the end of the decade than he was at the beginning. Some of this data, based on the estimates given by the National Sample Survey Organisation, has been presented by C Rammanohar Reddy in a report (September 30, 2002) available on the Macroscan website.

The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), the autonomous body of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, made estimates of a few indicators in 1987-88 and many more for 1993-94 and 1999-2000, the last mentioned being the 55th round countrywide survey. The results of a comparison across these three time points have been put together by Reddy with reference to education and literacy, access to land, employment, and relative levels of monthly per capita expenditure on items of consumption.

LITERACY RATES

According to these estimates, in terms of literacy, the gap improved somewhat in the urban areas, although it remained the same in the rural areas, between 1993-94 and 1999-2000. The illiteracy rate for Hindus in the rural areas was 50 per cent in 1993-94, while for Muslims it was 54 per cent. At the end of the decade it was 44 per cent for Hindus and 48 per cent for Muslims.

What emerges from these figures is that there was a slow but steady improvement in literacy levels of both religious groups at the end of the decade. This may be partly due to this being the hectic period of the National Literacy Mission’s and the NGO initiated adult literacy programmes as well.  Yet the gap remained what it was: a difference of 6 per cent points.

In urban India, the Muslim illiteracy rate that was as much as 14 percentage points higher in 1993-94 as compared to Hindus, had narrowed a bit to 11 per cent points by the end of the decade. Yet even this 11 per cent gap is much wider than the gap in rural areas, where it is 6 per cent. In the urban areas, the non-literate population is 30 per cent among the Muslims and 19 per cent among the Hindus.

ACCESS TO LAND 

In terms of access to land the picture is not so mixed. In rural India, where literacy gap between the two communities did not close, the 1990s is also the period of further marginalisation of Muslims in terms of access to land.  In 1987-88, 40 per cent of rural Muslim households cultivated little or no land, compared to 34 per cent among Hindus. By 1999-2000 the proportion of households so adversely affected had risen in both religious groups, but more so among the minority community: 51 per cent among Muslims and 40 per cent among the Hindus.

Globalisation policies have had disastrous consequences for agriculture and particularly so for the poorer sections in the rural areas, as underlined by Utsa Patnaik in so many of her articles in the PD, but community wise differentials have increased, as would have those between the lower castes and others in the rural areas.

EMPLOYMENT STATUS        

With regard to employment status, the report shows a steady decline for Muslims in the towns and cities in so far as employment possibilities are concerned. Beginning with a position that was actually better in 1987-88, i.e., Muslims in the work force had lower unemployment rates than the Hindus (4 per cent versus 5.5 per cent), a situation that continued in 1993-94, there was a complete reversal by 1999-2000. By the end of the decade, Muslims on the average had a slightly higher level of unemployment (5 per cent versus 4.7 per cent). This change, according to the report, has been largely but not entirely on account of deterioration in the position of working Muslim women. In the villages, however, Muslims already had a higher unemployment rate even in 1987-88 suffered from a higher unemployment rate and continued to so in 1999-2000.

These disadvantages were further reflected in the relative levels of monthly per capita expenditure on items of consumption. According to the National Sample Survey Organisation Reports No.438 and 468 (Government of India) cited, in rural and in urban India, the proportion of both Hindus and Muslims in the bottom 20 per cent of the population increased in 1999-2000 as compared to 1993-94, a result no doubt of the globalisation policies. But a substantially larger proportion of Muslims fell in this category by the end of the decade, and as the above statistics show, the decline was greater in the urban areas where the situation for them had been slightly better than in the rural areas. Statistics with regard to different kinds of employment and on gender further underline this increasing gap.

“Only 27 per cent of Muslim households in the towns and cities had a working member with a regular salaried job (43 per cent in Hindu homes), 52 per cent were self-employed and 15 per cent worked as casual labourers. Unemployment among Muslims was higher in the rural areas but only marginally more in the towns.”

CONSUMPTION LEVELS

In general, at the end of the nineties, the deprivation in socio-economic development is more acute in the case of Muslims as compared to Hindus (as per cent of total in each religion), and the divide is far greater in urban India, where a proportionately larger number of Muslims reside. A larger proportion of Muslims than Hindus suffer from low levels of consumption, as computed from expenditure on food, clothing, entertainment and other items of consumption. “Average consumption expenditure by each member of a family was less than Rs 300 a month in 29 per cent of rural Muslims, while the corresponding proportion for rural Hindus was 26 per cent. (These are people who belong to the bottom 20 per cent, grouped according to consumption.) The difference is much wider in towns and cities where as many as 40 per cent of Muslims belong to the bottom 20 per cent, nearly double the 22 per cent figure for Hindus… Correspondingly, at the higher end of the economic scale, the proportion of Hindus belonging to the top 20 per cent of consumption expenditure was higher than Muslims in the villages, and thrice as many in the towns.”

GENERAL BACKWARDNESS

These figures point towards general backwardness of Muslims as compared to Hindus and also compared to other minority religious groups. They also underline the precariousness of their existence as citizens, and the extreme deprivation and denial of human rights that social discrimination can drive them towards. It needs to be underlined that although caste prejudices are still strong in this country, the emergence of political parties representing OBCs and the process begun by Mandal and the adoption of his report by the VP Singh government, and the falling in line of other political parties as well, has somewhat eased the situation or at least brought them as factor in politics and therefore also as factors in the calculations of mainstream political processes. With regard to the Muslims, bourgeois political parties have expressed little concern, and as Muslims become more marginalised, this unconcern is bound to get augmented. It will soon be seen that they count for less. Social discrimination is increasing by the day, as Hindutva campaigns get more and more virulent. The politics of the Shiv Sena in Maharastra and the pogrom and its aftermath in Gujarat have contributed to further deprivation among Muslims, a trend that one cannot guarantee is not growing elsewhere too. Its presence was always there.

With the twin effects of globalisation and communalism, the sheer numbers of those who are marginalised and outside the fold of the organised working class and the trade unions is bound to grow larger. The informal sector, where few rules apply and where social discrimination is much more rampant, will allow the play of caste and religious prejudices to flourish. This will feed into the growing forces of fascism and lumpenisation Therefore, as we in the Left fight our struggles for the deprived and the marginalised, it is necessary that we give faces to those who constitute these deprived and marginalised.