Sachar Report

[Stephani Kapnick]

TheSachar Committee was a seven-member high-level committee established in March 2005 by former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The committee was headed by former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court Rajinder Sachar to study the social, economic and educational condition of Muslims in India. The committee submitted its report in 2006 and the report was available in public domain on 30 November 2006. The 403-page report had suggestions and solutions for the inclusive development of the Muslims in India.[1]

In 2004, the Congress Party returned to power in India after having been in opposition for eight years, an unprecedented length of time for a party which had ruled the country for forty four out of fifty-seven years between 1947 and 2004. It returned to power as head of a coalition, winning 145/543 seats in the Lok Sabha. One of its initiatives was the commissioning of a report on the latest social, economic, and educational conditions of the Muslim community of India.[citation needed]

The committee was composed of seven members. The committee was headed by Rajinder Sachar, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court. The other members of the committee were Sayyid Hamid, M.A. Basith, Akhtar Majeed, Abu Saleh Shariff, T.K. Oommen and Rakesh Basant. The committee did not include any female members,

The committee, which was appointed by the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was headed by former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court Rajinder Sachar, as well as six other members.[2][3][4][5][6] The committee prepared a 403-page report, titled "Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India: A Report", and presented it to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, on 30 November 2006, 20 months after obtaining the terms of reference from the Prime Minister's Office.[7] This report highlighted issues facing the Muslim community and their representation in Indian public life,[8]

The report made observations on the high birthrate in the Muslim community in comparison to Hindus: the committee estimated that the Muslim proportion will stabilize at between 17% and 21% of the Indian population by 2100.[9]

The Sachar Committee highlighted and presented its suggestions on how to remove impediments those preventing Indian Muslims from fully participating in the economic, political, and social mainstream of Indian life. The report was the first of its kind to reveal the "backwardness" (a term used in Indian academic and legal discourse for historically dispossessed or economically vulnerable communities, not meant to be pejorative) of Indian Muslims. An issue highlighted was that while Muslims constitute 14% of the Indian population, they only comprise 2.5% of the Indian bureaucracy.[10] The Sachar Committee concluded that the conditions facing Indian Muslims was below that of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.[11]

The Sachar Committee Report brought the issue of Muslim Indian inequality to national attention, sparking a discussion that is still ongoing. The committee recommended setting up an Equal Opportunity Commission to provide a legal mechanism to address discrimination complaints, including in matters such as housing.[12] In response to the committee's findings, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram proposed an increase to the National Minorities Development and Finance Corporation's (NMDFC) budget, citing new duties and expanded outreach that the institution would take on to implement the committee's recommendations.[13]

Out of the 76 recommendations listed in the Sachar Committee Report, the Government of India has approved 72 recommendations which includes the approval of the Communal Violence (Preventive, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill, 2005, increasing the number of and grants for Madrasas and schools in minority concentration areas, some for girls only, increasing the allocation for the minority commission and Waqf Board, reservations and grants for Muslims, loans to Muslims, increasing the number of Muslim teachers, health and police personnel at Government cost, housing for Muslims, representation of minorities in local bodies, dissemination of available schemes in Urdu and so on.[14]

The Sachar Committee used 2001 census data trty. Banking data was received from different sources such as the Reserve Bank of India, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, Small Industries Development Bank of India, National Minorities Development and Finance Corporation, and the National Backward Classes Finance and Development Corporation. Corroborative data was also obtained from government commissions and organisations such as the National Commission for Backward Classes, the State Backward Classes Commission, and the National Council of Educational Research and Training. Finally, data from other sources, including ministries, departments, public sector undertakings, universities, and colleges were used in preparing this report.[citation needed]

In November 2013, Gujarat government contended before the Supreme Court that the Rajinder Sachar Committee was "unconstitutional," and that it only sought to help Muslims. It has strongly criticized the manner in which the PMO set up the Sachar Committee in 2005 to survey the socio-economic conditions of Muslims, while ignoring other religious minorities. This affidavit was filed in response to the centre's stand that the scheme was valid and that the Modi Government was to blame for the deteriorating condition of Muslims in Gujarat.[15][16][17]

There are many reasons to remember Justice Rajinder Sachar, who died in Delhi at the age of 95, on April 20. He was a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, a civil rights activist proud of his socialist credentials, and a man whose instinct it was to take on the establishment. This trait was surprising as he belonged to a prominent political family: his father, Bhim Sen Sachar, was twice the chief minister of Punjab, for eight months in 1949, and then between April 1952 and January 1956.

In effect, the Sachar report punctured the myth of Muslim appeasement. No longer could anyone accuse the Indian state of favouring Muslims: the report showed that they lagged behind other communities, barring the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, on just about every socio-economic index. On some indices, such as education and government employment, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were actually ahead of Muslims by a margin. Muslims constituted just 3.2% of all officers in the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Police Service and the Indian Foreign Service. The findings came as a shock to the nation.

The report also busted the stereotype of the Muslim community being a monolith. In a chapter titled The Muslim OBCs and Affirmative Action, the report showed that the community was as riven by caste as any, and that there were remarkable differences between North Indian Muslims and their counterparts in the South. Muslims had progressed in those parts of South India where they had been the beneficiaries of reservations for many years.

The report pointed out that Muslim men sporting beards or skullcaps were detained for interrogation from public spaces. Their religious markers rendered them suspect. Muslim women, in their interaction with the committee, complained that those who wore hijab found it difficult to find corporate jobs, and the ones in burqas were treated impolitely in public places. It spoke of the difficulties Muslims face in renting homes in non-Muslim localities, a factor that pushes them to live in community-dominated ghettoes. This, in turn, deprives their children access to good schools, most of which are located outside Muslim neighbourhoods.

It is perhaps an irony that a man like Sachar, who was instinctively anti-establishment, acquired nationwide fame for producing a report as chairperson of a government-appointed committee. For years, after retiring as chief justice of the Delhi High Court, he travelled to all parts of India as a member of fact-finding committees, unraveling and publicising civil rights abuses.

In a recent article published in the official journal of the BJP, Kamal Sandesh, national spokesperson, Gopal Krishna Agarwal described the Sachar Committee Report (2006) as a symbol of Muslim vote bank politics. He argues:

Does it mean that Modi-led BJP is also involved in Muslim vote bank politics? These apparent contradictions actually point towards two basic questions. First, is it possible to read the Sachar Report as a political project? If yes, what is nature of this politics, which primarily revolves around the issues of social justice, backwardness and underrepresentation of Muslims?

A political story of Sachar ReportThe dominant view is that the idea to have an official commission to examine the socio-economic backwardness of Muslims originated in 2004, when Manmohan Singh was sworn in for the first term. That is factually incorrect.

Muslim backwardness as a political category began to take shape in the late 1980s. The Mandal Commission evolved a method for identifying OBCs among non-Hindu communities. It paved the way for the inclusion of a few Muslim backward castes in the OBC list.

The rise of Muslim Pasmanda (marginalised) politics was the obvious outcome of this development. This new kind of Muslim politics questioned the caste-based social stratification among Muslims and demanded that Muslim Dalits be included in the Scheduled Caste category.

There is virtually no difference between the suggestions given by the NCRWC and the recommendations of the Sachar Commission Report. In fact, the basic premise of the Sachar Report stems from the NCRWC, which strongly advocated for inclusion of all marginalised groups in the public policy discourse.

Interestingly, political parties treated these official reports as political objects. The BJP appreciated the NCRWC report wholeheartedly, but found it difficult to accept Sachar Report. Similarly, the Congress remained sceptical about NCRWC, but highlighted the Sachar Report as its achievement.

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