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SCMP Reporter

Resentment has finally boiled over in India at the systematic exclusion of Muslims from government agencies.

Thousands of angry Muslims converged on Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's official residence in New Delhi last week to demand job quotas and to protest against the government's discriminatory employment policies.

The demonstration in the capital's high-security area took security forces by surprise.

N. A. Farooqi, secretary of the socio-religious group Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, which organised the protest, said it resorted to the protest because the group was denied permission to submit a letter to Mr Vajpayee.

Mr Farooqi said: 'According to the latest census, there are 140 million Muslims in India but there is not a single Muslim in the country's premier intelligence organisation - the Research and Analysis Wing - the elite Special Protection Group, which is responsible for the security of the prime minister and former premiers, and various other sensitive VIP-related and intelligence-gathering organisations.'

The systematic exclusion of Muslims - India's largest religious minority comprising 14 per cent of the population - from government agencies is hardly a secret but officials refused to comment.

The demonstration added to the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Last week, right-wing Hindu leader Bal Thackeray called on Hindus to form saffron suicide squads to attack Muslims because the government had failed to protect the country from Islamic terrorism - a charge related to a raid on a Hindu temple in Gujarat in September that left 31 people dead.

There is not one Muslim heading the police force or the civilian administration in the 73 districts of India's most populous province, Uttar Pradesh. Muslims account for barely 2.98 per cent of Indian Administrative Service officers and the community's representation in the Indian Police Service and Indian Foreign Service (IFS) is 3.14 per cent and 2.64 per cent, respectively.

If all federal government and state government jobs are taken into account, including public sector undertakings such as Indian Railways, Indian Airlines and the Steel Authority of India, Muslims make up barely 1.6 per cent of class one officers, 3.9 per cent of class two officers and 4.4 per cent of technical supervisory staff.

Community leaders said the recruitment of Muslims in the army, air force, navy and para-military organisations such as the Border Security Force and Indo-Tibetan Border Police had virtually stopped since Mr Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in New Delhi in March 1998.

'Quotas for Muslims in government jobs must be fixed without any delay as the scenario is becoming increasingly dismal, and the community's sense of alienation is growing dangerously,' Mr Farooqi warned in a letter handed to Vijay Goel, the minister in charge of the Prime Minister's Office, after the demonstration.

Mr Farooqi said Muslims were deliberately denied jobs in schools, colleges, hospitals and judicial services, heightening the community's frustration.

Former MP and ex-IFS officer Syed Shahabuddin said fixed-job quotas were the only solution to help India's economically and educationally backward Muslims. Successive federal governments have, however, maintained there is no provision in the constitution for reserving government jobs for religious communities.

But Mr Shahabuddin, who edits the monthly Muslim India magazine, said an article of the constitution empowered federal and state governments to identify backward communities and to have protected quotas in government jobs for them.

He said Mr Vajpayee should follow progressive states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Assam which reserve a percentage of government jobs for Muslims.

Before independence and partition in 1947, Muslims accounted for nearly 35 per cent of government jobs in undivided India. But the community's share of jobs plummeted because the majority of Muslim civil servants and officials opted to live in Pakistan.

Mr Farooqi said: 'After the exodus of Muslim bureaucrats, New Delhi pursued an undeclared policy of recruiting as few Muslims as possible. Muslim representation at national level is so abysmally low after five decades of discrimination that now the only way out to ensure social justice is to fix job quotas according to the community's population.'



Muslim anger at exclusion from top government jobs