The Sachar report: A flawed number game
By Nitish Sengupta
The Sachar Committee Report, an often-quoted 404-page document, is disappointing, both in its method of analysis and in the way it has collected and presented some dubious statistics. A fundamental fact that has been ignored is that almost 95 per cent of elite Muslims in India, who largely depended on jobs, went over to Pakistan after Partition. Those who stayed back in India were, by and large, the rural community, the self-employed and the service providers. A great majority of them, under the influence of powerful mullahs, kept away from modern education and, in consequence, modern jobs and professions. Thus, the figures for Muslim percentage in government jobs practically started from a zero base. This point should have been mentioned in the report’s overall analysis. Its omission is a serious statistical error.
Then again, the Committee conveniently ignored the fact that the social and economic position of a community does not necessarily depend on the jobs that its members hold in the government or the organised sector. If that had been the case, I am afraid the position of Parsees, to take one example, would be extremely backward. The Sachar Committee’s Report completely ignored that there is a much larger number of self-employed people, tradesmen and service providers among the Muslims who do not seek government jobs.
Another area where it has gone completely wrong is in creating an impression that India’s entire educational and economic system has gone out of its way to exclude Muslims. Whereas, in actual fact, we have all gone out of our way to give placement to them wherever they merit selection. There are indeed, some very serious errors, on the statistical front.
Prof A.R. Hashim has pointed out that in looking at the position of Hindus in general, the Sachar Committee first excluded the Scheduled Castes and Dalits from the general Hindu community and then compared them with the Muslim community. The Committee also pointed out that the position of the Scheduled Castes and Dalits is little or no different from that of the Muslim community. To exclude such a big chunk from the Hindu community and thereafter compare the residual Hindu community with the Muslims is a serious oversight.
Another Muslim scholar, Prof Imtiaz Hussain, also trashed the report on the ground that it ignored the status of Muslims in terms of jobs held in all the South Indian states and others like Gujarat and West Bengal. He pointed out that in all the southern states the Muslims are much better off than what the Sachar Report has made them to be. He questioned the statistics presented by the Sachar Committee in relation to the Census data which shows that the Muslims are better off in several states.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, chief minister of West Bengal, has pointed out that the report ignores the Muslim peasantry who benefited from the state’s land reforms programme. Insofar as the organised private sector is concerned, one point which has escaped the Committee’s attention is that many of our business organisations are still dominated by the caste system. Consequently, a company dominated by banias generally looks out for banias. In that process too Muslims and minorities suffer as much as people belonging to other Hindu castes. This need not necessarily be an anti-Muslim bias.
Clearly, Justice Sachar simply chose to ignore available evidence to make out that the Muslim community is not doing any better than the other communities. He should have taken into account examples like Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, the richest corporate Indian, Habil Khorakiwala of Wockhardt, the Cipla group, or for that matter, people like Habib Rahman, chairman ITC Hotels, Israt Hussain, a top associate of Ratan Tata, and many others. He should also have objectively made a community-wise analysis of the employees of such successful enterprises as Azim Premji’s Wipro. Is merit their main criterion for recruitment? Does this amount to discrimination and anti-Muslim bias? Or do successful Muslim industrialists reserve jobs for fellow Muslims irrespective of their merit?
I also wish the Sachar Committee had taken into account the brass manufacturers and traders of Moradabad, the glass workers of Ferozabad, the textile operators of Bhiwandi, the carpet makers of Kashmir and the Zari workers of Varanasi. Sadly, these people do not find any mention in the Sachar Report which chose to concentrate only on certain levels of government jobs and worked out the position of Muslims only on that account.
That is not all. The Committee has not taken into account the overwhelming eminent position occupied by Muslims in Bollywood, including the fact that almost 50 per cent of top actors and actresses are Muslims, if not more. Does that smack of discrimination?
It remains a mystery as to why the government did not think it appropriate to assign this work to the National Minorities Commission or even to its own department of minority affairs and, instead, chose to appoint a separate committee. Equally mysterious is the fact that without choosing to discuss this matter in the country’s sovereign Parliament or allowing an informal debate, the government has announced that it has accepted all the recommendations of the Sachar Committee.
Neither the government nor the Indian nation at large deserves the accusation by the Sachar Committee that they have been anti-Muslim all along. Indian Muslims occupy a pride of place in our democracy, and Gujarat (2002) and Babri Masjid (1992) are exceptions, not the rule.
Taken all together, one has to come to the sad conclusion that the Committee has erred both in its analysis and its conclusions. Mr Justice Rajinder Sachar has been a very respected friend for many years. But I am afraid, in this report he has side stepped from the position of a judge and taken on the rule of a lawyer who was assigned a certain brief and went on to collect evidence which suited that brief.
n Dr Nitish Sengupta, an academic and an author, is a former Member of Parliament and a former secretary to the Government of India
US financial flight ended with a thud
By Thomas L. Friedman
I have a friend who reminds me that if you jump off the top of an 80-storey building, for 79 storeys you can actually think you’re flying. It’s the sudden stop at the end that always gets you.
When I think of the financial-services boom, bubble and bust that America has just gone through, I often think about that image. We thought we were flying. Well, we just met the sudden stop at the end. The laws of gravity, it turns out, still apply. You cannot tell tens of thousands of people that they can have the American dream - a home, for no money down and nothing to pay for two years - without that eventually catching up to you. The Puritan ethic of hard work and saving still matters. I just hate the idea that such an ethic is more alive today in China than in US.
Our financial bubble, like all bubbles, has many complex strands feeding into it but at heart, it is really very simple. We got away from the basics - from the fundamentals of prudent lending and borrowing, where the lender and borrower maintain some kind of personal responsibility for, and personal interest in, whether the person receiving the money can actually pay it back. Instead, we fell into what some people call YBG and IBG lending: “you’ll be gone and I’ll be gone” before the bill comes due. Yes, this bubble is about us - not all of us, many Americans were way too poor to play. But it is about enough of us to say it is about America. And we will not get out of this without going back to some basics, which is why I find myself re-reading a valuable book that I wrote about once before, called, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business (and in Life). Its author, Dov Seidman, is the CEO of LRN, which helps companies build ethical corporate cultures.
Seidman basically argues that in our hyperconnected and transparent world, how you do things matters more than ever, because so many more people can now see how you do things, be affected by how you do things and tell others how you do things on the Internet anytime, for no cost and without restraint.
“In a connected world,” Seidman said to me, “countries, governments and companies also have character, and their character - how they do what they do, how they keep promises, how they make decisions, how things really happen inside, how they connect and collaborate, how they engender trust, how they relate to their customers, to the environment and to the communities in which they operate - is now their fate.”
We got away from these hows. We became more connected than ever in recent years, but the connections were actually very loose. That is, we went away from a world in which, if you wanted a mortgage to buy a home, you needed to show real income and a credit record into a world where a banker could sell you a mortgage and make gobs of money upfront and then offload your mortgage to a bundler who put a whole bunch together, chopped them into bonds and sold some to banks as far afield as Iceland.
The bank writing the mortgage got away from how because it was just passing you along to a bundler. And the investment bank bundling these mortgages got away from how because it didn’t know you, but it knew it was lucrative to bundle your mortgage with others. And the credit-rating agency got away from “how” because there was just so much money to be made in giving good ratings to these bonds, why delve too deeply? And the bank in Iceland got away from how because, everyone else was buying the stuff and returns were great so why not? “UBS bank’s motto is: ‘You and us.’ But the world we created was actually ‘You and nobody’ - nobody was really connected in value terms,” said Seidman. “Parts of Wall Street got disconnected from investing in human endeavour - helping business to scale and take up new ideas.” Instead, they started to just engineer money from money. “So some of the smartest CEO’s did not know what some of their smartest people were doing.”
Charles Mackay wrote a classic history of financial crises called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in London in 1841. “Money… has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
And so it must be with us. We need to get back to collaborating the old-fashioned way. That is, people making decisions based on business judgment, experience, prudence, clarity of communications and thinking about how - not just how much.
Speed-dating civilisations, courtesy the new Russia
By S. Nihal Singh
The world is conscious of the Davos gatherings, but less familiar is the annual event, Dialogue of Civilisations. Meeting in the salubrious Greek island of Rhodes, it is the other Davos, a Russian-sponsored one to boot, but one encompassing much of the world, including Israel and the United States. Unlike last year, Iranians and Saudi Arabians did not come, but the diversity of representation, numbering in the hundreds, was impressive and the meeting split into panels to wrestle with the issues of the day.
The eminence grise of the conference was V.I. Yakunin, whose co-chairman is India’s Jagdish Kapur. It was, however, the former who laid down the law and when an Israeli launched into an attack on Iran at the concluding session last Sunday, he was administered a slap on the wrist. The conference, he said, was not one of States, but one representing civilisations, and people could not be held responsible for their government’s declarations. But there was plenty of Bush-bashing in the panels, on religion for one, and otherwise. Damir Mukhetdinov, rector of the Islamic Institue of Nizhny Novgorod in Russia, raised the question of the Archbishop of the Orthodox Church of Georgia blessing Georgia in the fighting in South Ossetia.
A Chinese of the Beijing Pedagogical Institute, Baichun Zhang, raised the awkward point of not being an atheist but in the process of “evolving” as a religious man. And the Chinese people, he declared in the presence of uncomfortable Orthodox clerics, could live without God. He held his ground despite protestations of the clergy, one of whose members said that the Chinese civilisation was based on religion. Confucius was sceptical of religion, Mr Zhang maintained.
The setting was enlivened by the splendid robes and flowing beards of the Orthodox clergy, who actively participated in the discussions. Predictably, it was the Vicar Bishop of the Serbian Patriarchate, Reverend Anastasiy, who was harshest in his criticism of the US’ policies towards Yugoslavia and Kosovo. But the American participants were given full play and spoke passionately about their humanitarian projects. Bishop Gregory Holley of the American New Life Foundation was eloquent in how his organisation set about saving people around the world and their souls.
The Russian agenda of the conference was not hidden. For one thing, the Russian World projected its mission to spread Russian culture around the world and connect with the diaspora. The latter task is particularly interesting because Russians who left their country at the advent of Communism were viewed as traitors, unlike now when they are welcomed with open arms. In fact, the motto of Russian World is taken from the famous dissident poetess Anna Akmatova. The point is that it is a new Russia taking its strides in the world after burying Communism and the humiliating years of chaos in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union.
The size of the Russian diaspora is amazing. There are four million in the US, half-a-million in New York City alone. Russian World recognises that Russians abroad have contradictory feelings to their motherland; some are not sympathetic to it. But their love for Russian culture is unconditional, the culture that is untainted by the Communist past. Its spokesman says that the Russian World is not nostalgic about the past; rather, it is all about the future.
Russia has come to the realisation that an attribute of being a great power in today’s world requires not merely economic and military power but also international networking, based on a variety of foundations which include interacting with their counterparts in different parts of the world. It is, perhaps, symptomatic of the Russian attempt at multi-polarity that China was given two days of round table discussions on its past, present and future. India was adequately represented and Europe was very prominent.
An impressive catch of the conference was the presence of the former Georgian foreign minister, Salome Zurabishvili, now the leader of the Way of Georgia Party in opposition to President Mikheil Saakashvili. Inevitably, the Russian-Georgian clashes came into play as did the question of Kosovo. Despite Mr Yakunin’s pleading, national viewpoints could not be obliterated although there were voices of reason seeking a way out of dogmatic positions. The nation state is very much alive.
What then is the value of jamborees such as the Dialogue of Civilisations? There are several. From the Russian point of view - one shared by several other countries - it provides the alternative view to the US-centric and US-led worldview. After all, the Russians are pleading for a multilateral view of the world and see legitimacy in their efforts to show the better side of Russia’s rich cultural heritage. Second, the annual event, the sixth in a row, provides a useful setting for an intellectual discussion of contentious problems such as those of Palestine; it was interesting to hear an Israeli political philosopher, Israel Shamir, talk about the virtues of one State of Israel comprising Jews and Palestinians. An Israeli Palestinian was, however, more predictable in his approach. Jerusalem, he said, “is bleeding”.
Perhaps, the major outcome of the conference was consensus on the present world economic crisis, best summed up by the Austrian chancellor, Gusenbauer. The era of neoliberalism is fading. Confrontational strategies through military means will not work in future. The world has to solve iconological problems together. These ideas are not revolutionary in themselves but the fact that representatives of the North and South and the East and West could agree on the truth of these principles was no mean feat.
There were iconoclasts. Rostislav Rybakkov, of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Science, said there was little point in a dialogue between religions if every religion believed that its God was superior to the Gods of others. He believed in the validity of the Indian concept of “unity in diversity”. And what future can a country have, a Lebanese asked, if religion was essential to a citizen’s identity, as it was in his troubled nation.
These skirmishes aside, a pervasive sense among the conference was that there was something rotten in the state of the world. The post-World War II international economic and financial institutions had become outdated and needed change and expansion to bring in countries like India and China.
No dramatic formulae were presented to chart a course for the future, but the conferees left with the feeling that change was in the air as was the end of the era of American economic supremacy. Perhaps, the participants were as wary as Americans are about the shape of things to come.
My conscience is also my God, I always listen to it
By Samir Soni
In a temple, I fail to understand how people connect with God in the presence of thousands of people. Attaining unity with God is a private affair. After travelling a lot in search of God, I experienced Him within me. And I often meet Him when I am sitting alone or watching the sea. My father has taught me that hard work and being good to all are the ultimate ways to find God. Unfortunately, people today are fighting in the name of God.
To me religion is like a finger that points towards heavenly glory. Religion can be a good way to connect with the divine, but it wreaks havoc when people start believing that their way is the only way to reach Him.
Whenever I am unsure of things, I keep chanting “Help me God” till I fall asleep and it works perfectly for me. I feel rejuvenated when I wake up.
Whenever we are in trouble, it is God’s way of testing us. He puts us in an ocean knowing that we can’t swim. And just when we are about to drown, He pulls us back. But then, He repeats the same till we learn to swim. He strengthens us so that we can solve problems. Over the years, my God has taken the shape of my conscience. I listen to my conscience and don’t do what it doesn’t permit to.
(As told to Fozia Yasin)
- Samir Soni is an actor
My Nobel campaign
By Maureen Dowd
I’m not sending Paul Krugman Champagne.
He won the Nobel prize in economics this week, and while I’m sure that’s delightful for him, it has raised the bar to an impossible height for his fellow columnists at the Times. We used to strive for Pulitzers, or simply regional awards, or even just try to top each other on the paper’s most emailed list.
Now we’re supposed to compete for Nobels?
It’s a total disaster. Any minute, Krugman might swagger into the office wearing that big old 24-karat-gold-plated medal around his neck like a World Wrestling championship belt, talking about how beautiful Sweden is.
So I must aim higher. Much higher.
A Nobel in economics is out. I didn’t take economics in college because all the classes started at 8 am. Physics, chemistry and medicine are out. Literature? They’ve given up giving it to Americans. So it’s going to have to be the Nobel Peace Prize.
I tried to think of a horrible war going on that needed my mediation skills. And then it hit me: The conservative donnybrook over Sarah Palin, the peppery debate raging about whether she is an embarrassment who should fade away or an impudent but promising wine picked before its time. Republicans have been slugging it out over whether Palin is dragging John McCain down or whether his campaign is mishandling her. The governor’s favourability rating is now 32 per cent, according to the new Times/CBS News poll, plummeting 8 points from earlier this month, and her unfavourable rating soared 9 percentage points to 41 per cent.
On Tuesday, Matthew Dowd, the former Bush strategist who offered a famous apologia for helping get W. re-elected, offered a scorching assessment of Palin’s not being ready, saying that McCain “knows that in his gut. And when this race is over, that is something he will have to live with… He put somebody unqualified on that ballot, and he put the country at risk”.
Christopher Hitchens endorsed Barack Obama on Slate calling Palin’s conduct “a national disgrace” and writing: “Given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses”.
Christopher Buckley endorsed Obama on the Daily Beast, writing of McCain’s embrace of Palin: “What on earth can he have been thinking?” (The endorsement led to Buckley’s resigning from the National Review, founded by his father.)
On The Colbert Report on Monday, the conservative columnist Kathleen Parker stuck by her assertion, which she said caused the base to treat her like a traitor, that Palin should have bowed out. She said she’d gotten some secret emails from Republicans in the White House agreeing with her. William Kristol, a Palin fan who thinks she has been horribly managed, wrote in the Times that McCain should fire his campaign for malpractice. David Brooks, speaking at an Atlantic Magazine event, called Palin “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party,” bemoaning the fact that she did not fit in with the late William Buckley’s desire to have a party that celebrated ideas and learning.
I started my campaign to win a Nobel prize by trying to make peace between the two conservatives at odds on our Op-Ed page. I called Kristol and asked him if he thought Palin could grow into the next Reagan, reminding him that he was outnumbered by conservatives recoiling from her. “Conservative eggheads are my friends,” he said, “but politically they’re a contrarian indicator. If they’re down on Palin, things are looking up for her. With all due respect for my fellow eggheads, they are underestimating the importance of a natural political gift or star quality. It matters a lot”.
He suggested that she has a shrewdness and toughness - “like Andrew Jackson” - beyond what you get with a Yale law degree or Harvard business degree. “That may be hard for my conservative intellectual friends to grasp,” he said. I didn’t seem to be soothing the waters. I called Brooks, who conceded: “Her political delivery skills are incredible”. So you agree with Kristol that she might be a star in the party? Could Palin be the nominee in 2012?
“The short answer is no,” Brooks said. “She has reinforced the worst of talk-radio culture. The party will need a leader to strike out in a new direction, a fiscally conservative President more like a high-tech Teddy Roosevelt. Someone with gravitas”.
So much for brokering a peace accord. I’ll have to leave the eggheads boiling.
Deccan Chronicle