Muslim middle class needs to assume leadership
The complicity of two UK-based doctors of the Indian Muslim community in the mercifully abortive car suicide attack on Glasgow (United Kingdom) airport on June 30, following which Dr. Mohammed Asha — an Iraqi national — is hospitalised in a critical condition, has blown a hole in prime minister Manmohan Singh’s proud boast that because of India’s democratic political culture, Indian Muslims are immune to the message of Islamist extremism. Worse, the fact that the accused Indian Muslims are highly educated and successful medical practitioners also blows a hole in the popular liberal argument that Islamic militants tend to be recruited from within the ranks of poor, uneducated and unemployed Muslim youth. The latter, runs the popular belief, are easy prey to the blandishments and propaganda of religious preachers and extremists invoking selected passages from the holy Koran.
It is submitted that the prime factor behind the growing influence of radical Islamists within India’s 120-million strong minority community is the failure of middle class Muslims to assume political and social leadership roles within the community. During India’s freedom movement, great and highly intellectualised Muslims such as Maulana Azad, Dr. Zakir Hussain, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan among others, endured considerable abuse, ridicule and endangerment from Muslim League and Hindu right wing activists in favour of partition and transformation of India into a theocracy. As a result Indian Muslims — for all the social discrimination and lack of opportunities they still suffer in independent India — enjoy wider political and social freedoms than their counterparts in all Muslim majority countries.
The failure of the new Muslim middle class in India to take the baton from community leaders of the freedom movement has resulted in leadership of the community devolving by default upon the clergy, dominated by orthodox mullahs and clerics. Given to narrow interpretations of the holy book, the clergy lacks the secular learning necessary to prompt the Muslim community to enjoy and exercise the rights conferred on minorities by the Constitution as full and equal citizens of India. Moreover control of Muslim education institutions has also devolved upon the clergy which favours madrassa religious education over modern secular learning. Consequently millions of under-qualified Muslim youth are unable to take advantage of latter day India’s economic boom by entering the jobs market. To complete a vicious circle, chronic unemployment and under-employment makes Muslim youth vulnerable to literal interpretations of the good book and the anti-social messages of religious fundamentalists.
Therefore in this moment of great opportunity for education and social advancement for India’s Muslims, the brightest and best from the community’s educated middle class need to step forward to discharge their natural role as leaders of the community. This may necessitate a challenge to the clergy with unpleasant consequences. But side-stepping or fudging the issue at this critical time in the nation’s history would be grave dereliction of duty.
Improving land use for better civic environments
The road traffic chaos which is a defining characteristic of 21st century India’s citizen-unfriendly cities, of which the ban on Delhi’s Blue Line buses is the latest manifestation, is the outcome of widespread ignorance about efficient land use and haphazard urban planning. Quite plainly, government officials across the country invested with civic planning and governance authority are not up to the task. Moreover it’s also quite obvious that on the development agendas of the Central and state governments, civic planning and governance — notwithstanding the belated launch of the Jawahar National Urban Renewal Mission — is a low priority item.The populist argument is that viewed relatively, India’s cities are oases of luxury. Therefore the rules of equity and natural justice justify massive deployment of wealth generated in urban India into rural development, even at the cost of ruining the country’s cities.
This argument is dangerously flawed. Far from being a zero sum game, rural-urban development is inter-dependent. The relative wealth of urban India needs to translate into rural prosperity by way of remunerative prices for farm produce. This desideratum is best achieved by steady development of rural infrastructure, elimination of middlemen and promotion of a vibrant agri-produce processing industry for the mutual benefit of rural and urban citizens.
Yet at the bottom the frightening chaos of India’s crowded cities is less rooted in resource constraints than it is in inefficient land use. The neatness and order which are striking features of western and incrementally east Asian cities, are the outcome of efficient and/or near-optimal land usage. To their eternal credit, civic and town planners of major western cities such as London, Paris, Rome and Barcelona began constructing underground rail transportation systems as soon as their populations crossed the 2 million threshold. Not one Indian city has been similarly blessed.
The state governments of Delhi and West Bengal somewhat belatedly commenced construction of metro rail systems recently. And even though they are only partially complete, these subterranean transport systems have radically changed the civic environments of the two cities for the better. The fact that by going underground, civic administrations of the world’s great cities have in effect doubled land usage and ensured that two rivers of commuters perennially flow above and under ground, seems to have completely escaped the attention of civic planners and administrators within the centrally planned Indian economy — an obtuseness which is testimony to the quality and calibre of civic planners produced by the education system.
Plainly, there is an urgent need to introduce contemporary civic administration and planning study programmes — perhaps in collaboration with reputed institutions abroad — in all of the country’s colleges and universities to produce adequately trained and qualified urban planners. Civic administration and planning is too important a task to be learned on the job by untrained generalists and rustic yokels choking India’s wealth generating cities to death.