Emboldened at the ease with which the community has been able to secure fifty percent reservations in Aligarh Muslim University, the Jamiat Ulema e Hind has asked UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi for proportional reservations for Muslims in Parliament and the State Legislatures. Far from rebuffing this dangerous overture, which instantly raises the spectre of another Partition, the Congress party president assured Maulana Asad Madani that her party strove to fulfill Muslim expectations and would continue consultations with him.
I am not aware if any Congress party president before Ms. Sonia Gandhi has ever attended a rally of the Jamiat Ulema e Hind. Her presence at the function along with a heavy duty contingent comprising Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, former chief ministers Digvijay Singh and Ashok Gehlot, and senior leader Mohsina Kidwai, sent a signal that does not augur well for the nation’s social and political fabric. Communal reservations, unlike caste-based reservations, are inherently divisive as opposed to competitive. Hence they have the potential to explode in the faces of their sponsors, which is why even Left parties are opposed to them.
The anger of the Left parties has forced HRD minister Arjun Singh to clarify that the Centre had no role in the decision to reserve 50 percent of Aligarh Muslim University seats for Muslims. Singh claimed his Ministry merely gave a no objection certificate to the institution’s Academic and Executive Councils, after examining its charter. This convoluted explanation suggests that sections of the Congress party may also be upset over the move; after all, even Muslim writers concede that Aligarh was central to the Pakistan movement, and that right up to the 1971 war, Aligarh graduates used to migrate to Pakistan and join its government services.
Muslim intellectuals have taken umbrage at the controversy, pointing out that 50 percent communal reservations in AMU are consistent with the 2002 Supreme Court judgment in TMA Pai Foundation versus State of Karnataka. This is true, and indeed, it makes little sense for minorities to set up their own institutions if they do not have a minimum 50 percent reservation for their own community. Otherwise we would have the anomaly wherein minority-managed institutions receive land and other concessions from the Government and run highly remunerative courses for the general public. This defeats the very purpose of a minority institution as it fails to redress the issue of educational backwardness of the said community.
To my mind, the far more productive question is whether a nation committed to education for all should at all permit educational institutions to be set up on minority basis? It is in this context that one should examine the prevailing situation at AMU. It is being said that over the years, AMU had lost the “all India” character its student body once had, and degenerated into a virtual pocket borough of students of two neighbouring states; this had a deleterious impact upon the quality of its alumni and academic staff. The university thus de facto came to be controlled by a handful of families which manipulated the admission process to ensure their supremacy. Yet surely this could be remedied by simply restoring the original admission procedures.
Be that as it may be, those defending the new reservation policy point out that even without this provision, Muslims comprised up to 65 percent of the student body in most of the courses. In these circumstances, the reservation policy did not materially change the character of the alumni, but only gave the university’s critics a handle to beat it with. The pro-reservationists are unable to explain why the university needed an official reservation policy to rectify the defective admission system that allowed back-door entry (which does not happen in other Central universities). Their claim that the reservations are not aimed at excluding other communities may be technically true, but is nonetheless unsettling in these tense times.
It has been an eye-opener to learn that AMU previously reserved 50 percent seats for internal candidates (now reduced to 20 percent) and that the Vice Chancellor had the power to nominate another 20 percent (now cut to five per cent). The new policy reserves 25 percent of the seats for the general category of students, while 50 percent are reserved for Muslims on an all-India basis on merit. While the new policy seems more rational, it is inexplicable why admission to Muslim students on the basis of merit was compromised with in the first place. But the ultimate question that the community will have to answer is for how long, in this era of ever-increasing globalization, can it resist integration into the national and international communities on the basis of open competition and merit. How long will religious identity serve as the sole marker of the Muslim personality and community aspiration?
Sahara Time, 5 June 2005