In June 2025, Himal Southasian launched a podcast series titled Partitions of the Heart in collaboration with Karwan-e-Mohabbat, hosted by the peace activist Harsh Mander. The inaugural season, called ‘Muslim Life – and Death – in Modi’s India’, focuses on the deepening crisis of Muslims in the country. Since 2017, Mander and Karwan-e-Mohabbat have done the extraordinary and difficult work of documenting a rising wave of hate and crimes against India’s Muslims, and of lending support and solidarity to victims of communal atrocities. In Mander’s words, “We live in deeply troubled times of visceral, everyday hate, violence, fear and division. The first step towards healing our growing fractures is to talk and listen to each other.”
This series is part of the effort to bring forward meaningful conversations on the increasing marginalisation and vilification of Muslims in India. In the season’s first episode, Mander spoke to Hilal Ahmed, an academic and writer about his positionality as a practising Muslim and as a scholar looking at Muslim lives and the Muslim experience.
This interview was recorded on 28 February 2025. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You can listen to audio versions of this conversation on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Glossary
SC, ST, OBC: Scheduled Castes (SC) , Scheduled Tribes (ST), Other Backward Classes (OBC) are demographic categories in India of groups that have been historically discriminated against and marginalised, and therefore identified for affirmative action.
Delhi violence: In early 2020, riots broke out in largely Muslim neighbourhoods in Northeast Delhi while protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act were taking place across the India. More than 50 people, most of them Muslims, were killed and incidents of police brutality and complicity were reported
Sachar committee: A high-level committee headed by Justice Rajendra Sachar and constituted in 2005 by Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister at the time, to examine the social, economic and educational status of Muslims in the country
PLFS: Periodic Labour Force Survey conducted by the National Statistics office to estimate employment and unemployment indicators
Harsh Mander
Salaam, namaste, zindabaad friends.
I am Harsh Mander for one more episode of talking about the crisis of India’s Muslims as part of my larger podcast series, Partitions of the Heart. I am doing this with Himal Southasian. Himal is an extraordinary publication that for 35 years has been looking at Southasia beyond the borders that the turbulent politics of our subcontinent have drawn. Today, I am delighted to have a conversation with Dr Amirullah Khan. In the larger public space, Amir is one of the finest development economists who also focuses specifically on the deprivation of India’s Muslims. He is a professor in the Indian School of Business and all over the place. We are delighted to have you with us.
Amirullah Khan
Thank you so much.
HM
The Sachar Committee was an important moment – one of the most statesmanlike gestures taken by the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to set up this committee. And I think the context for me was – that in the entire movement of the Babri Masjid, a word that Mr Lal Krishna Advani kept using was appeasement. The message to the people of India was that earlier governments have done too much for India’s Muslims, they have treated them as a vote bank and they have neglected India’s Hindu majority and instead placed all or much of India's resources for India’s Muslims. That’s where the word “appeasement” came. And I think in his very quiet but very scholarly-kind of way, Dr. Manmohan Singh wanted the facts to be placed before the nation. And when the report came out, what became very clear was that India’s Muslims suffered relatively similar development deficits to the two most acknowledged disadvantaged communities, which is India’s Dalits and India’s Adivasis. That was, I think many of us knew it, but that factual reality came out.
Prime Minister Modi again – repeatedly – used the word appeasement in his last election speech before the last elections. In fact, on the ramparts of the Red Fort, he talked about three evils and one of them was appeasement, which literally – I think if you unpack his understanding of appeasement – any affirmative action, policy action in favour of India’s Muslims is something that they are opposed to. Now, I want to step back and I just want to listen to you. What has happened to India's Muslims in these 75 years? Why have they reached the bottom of India’s development trajectory?
AK
So, let me start off by quoting an economist that the prime minister admires. Surjit Bhalla did a fabulous analysis on the socio-religious groupings. And Surjit points out that the average Muslim – the median Muslim – post-independence was where the Hindu OBC is today.
HM
Okay.
AK
So, there was the Hindu upper caste, there is the Christian, the Jain and there was the OBC…
HM
And then you have the Dalits and the Adivasi
AK
And then the Dalits and….
HM
But the OBCs today are pretty strong.
AK
So, we are talking of 1951.
Surjit points out that if you look at monthly per capita consumption which is the indicator we all use because that is the data we have. will find that the Muslim occupies that middle ground..
HM
Occupied?
AK
Yeah, in the 1950s. Then Surjit shows that post the 1990s, the trend starts going southwards and first…
HM
Was it really in the 1990s? Wasn’t it much earlier?
AK
So, what happens is that it is the ‘81 census and the ‘81 figures and the ‘81 NSS rounds that show a decline, a relative decline in the Muslim per capita incomes in expenditures. And therefore, you find that the Muslim goes below OBC, goes below BCs, goes below SCs and today is poised at that level where the Muslim is marginally above the ST.
HM
Yeah, okay, which is really, mean, below the Dalit and marginal.
AK
And trending downwards.
HM
But I mean, before you continue, I still want to interrogate. Didn’t this decline begin right after Nehru passed away?
AK
I am just hazarding a hypothesis that may be this decline, if we go back in time and nobody has done this work and look at the data from 1870 onwards, which is when we have the census data. I think the decline began there.
HM
Hmm. Yeah my guess I mean intuitively I guess that that is what [it is].
AK
But we have not done any work. Surjit and a few others have done this work post independence and it is clear that after about 30 or 40 years, the Muslim decline.
HM
It became very precipitous.
AK
Now, how does one explain this? The sociologists who study migration – their argument is that the elite Muslim and the middle class Muslims migrated in 1947. And so did the Muslim industry. The Muslim industry that moved from Calcutta to Dhaka, that moved from Amritsar to Lahore, which were the industrial hubs, that went away from Calcutta. So, these…
HM
But is that true? I mean just for East Pakistan, what I hear is that it was the Hindu who was the big landlord in East Pakistan and Bangladesh and it was largely Dalit OBC Muslims who were the working class.
AK
But the big industry, the big elite that moved away...
HM
Muslim…
AK
The Muslim elite! So, there was not …that anchor completely was missing in that, that is one explanation that is given, this is the historical sociological explanation – there is very little in the economics textbooks on this issue. But certainly what happened was that the Muslim population migrated in large numbers, the elite Muslim population migrated, and the poor stayed back in most areas except in South India where the migration was very little. So, also what happened was the nature of industrialisation and the nature of employment. So, increasingly, employment and this trend gets exaggerated faster after the 1990 reforms when jobs became available to those who were skilled and who had a university degree. You will find that the Muslim dropout rates even today after higher secondary are far more precipitous than the non-Muslim.
HM
Yeah, we’ll talk about that.
AK
We will get to education, but the one…
HM
But skills? I mean in my understanding Muslims have concentrated a lot on skill-building.
AK
The traditional skills…
HM
Artisans…
AK
And the artisan cluster, the artisan economy of India started suffering 50 years ago. So, that was the other…
HM
I think the decline of the artisan sector must be seen as an important contributory factor.
AK
That is where, in most of the artisan sectors, you have more Muslim domination. And that sector not only collapsed in terms of domestic consumption with the cheaper imports coming in from China and whatever, but it also suffered, and that is the serious issue: that it was a major export earner for India. And exports came down significantly. Now, the exports are close to zero.
HM
And I would say that globalisation must have precipitated the death knell in a sense of the artisan.
AK
Also, our trade policy which encouraged imports at the expense of exports.
HM
Only post-1990.
AK
Yeah. So, therefore, the export sector, especially the small and medium export sector, continues to decline even today and that is why the rupee stands at 98 rupees to a dollar. So, that was one aspect of it. So, the second aspect is the mobility aspect and that is something that some demographers have started pointing out.
HM
Social mobility?
AK
No, I am talking about physical migration and this is the strange thing that one sees that's happening.
HM
I think Muslims’ working class is very mobile.
AK
And the data says exactly the opposite, that if you divide the socio-religious communities by way of their numbers that migrate, then you will find that the rate of migration from rural to urban and from Tier 3 to 2 and 2 to 1 is increasingly becoming the slowest as far as Muslims are concerned. The Muslim migration!
HM
But how recent is that?
AK
This is till 2011 – till which we have data.
HM
Between the 1990s and 2011.
AK
Between 1971 and 2011, you find that the rate of migration – firstly the rate of my urban migration itself comes down, and within that, the rate of urban migration among Muslims is the slowest and there is enough indication to show that 2011 onwards it is even more.
HM
But isn't that – I would hazard a guess – that that indicates a sense of fear.
AK
Now, firstly, why do Indians not migrate? When we look at, and try and get that data out from the census and whatever, then we find that very few Indians migrate, and within that the number of Muslims migrating is even slower.
HM
So, internal migration.
AK
We are talking only about internal migration.
HM
The other migration is, of course, another story.
AK
That is another story. So, firstly is the mobility, the Muslim population prior to 1947 was a very vibrant urban population. Even now the Muslim is…
HM
I was really startled to learn that Muslims were 33 percent of Delhi's population.
AK
That is right.
HM
And in two or three years they came down to five percent.
AK
Yeah, and even otherwise, while 30 percent of India is urban, 40 percent of India’s Muslim [community] is urban. So, Muslims are urban for historical factors, but that rate of urbanisation has been coming down, which means that a group of people who are living in villages [are] without any assets. The villager in India does well only when he has some land.
HM
Yeah, yeah.
AK
But the Muslim in India does not have – and here is this Muslim now…
HM
In rural India, I mean – am I overgeneralising – is where there are largely either artisans or farm labour, is that correct?
AK
Absolutely, right, and that is the most marginalised.
HM
That, almost by definition, means poverty.
AK
So, that is the other thing that happened, post the 1990s – because of that huge differential in educational levels and the jobs only coming into the service sector, into a financial sector that required higher education, the Muslims just dropped out of employment. And therefore, you will find that if you look at the Muslim workforce, two thirds of that is self-employed. In India, the self-employed are poor.
HM
This, I think, goes beyond a hypothesis that this very high level of self-employment among India's Muslims is also a result of the expectation of discrimination when they seek jobs. And let me say it, and then you tell me whether your data is that – it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘There is no point going into higher education because I am not going to get a job. I will face discrimination. So, let me get out and employ myself’. Is that an overgeneralisation? Does your data support this?
AK
So, there are two questions: one is, is there discrimination, is there expectation of being discriminated? Or is it purely deprivation? So, therefore, we did this one study looking at the periodic labour force data which gives you wages at every three-month frequency for all the workers, and we just focused on pre- and post- Covid. And the data is so outstanding, so stark, so articulate, that if you see urban India, then it is so obvious that the maximum decline in wages between 2019 and ‘22 pre-Covid and post-Covid is purely in the Muslim workforce. There are wages – which is out there – just the numbers. So, if people have found their wages slashed, it has been Muslims. In rural areas, it has been women who suffered the most; their wages declined very much.
HM
Generally, across the community.
AK
Across the community. So, and it is very fascinating – what this suggests is that the Indian Muslim does not face as much discrimination in rural India as much as she faces in urban India.
HM
So, I mean, I’m persuaded but only partially by your explanation. Somebody who has a wonderful mind and who I respect a lot is Dr Upendra Bakshi.
AK
Of course.
HM
Now, Upendra Bakshi, one of the things he says is that we shouldn’t describe people as poor. We should always call them impoverished because poverty is not how you happen to be. Impoverished underlines [that] this is something that is done to you. Don’t you see a central role of the state in impoverishing India’s Muslims? And let me give you just one illustration, is Mewat. Mewat is such a – I mean, the Nuh district – it’s such a dramatic example because it is just next to Gurugram, which has all the Fortune 500 [companies]; every single one of them is there. This glittering, ‘we could be like Amartya Sen’ – it’s an island of California. So, there it is.
And just next to it, he said, in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa, you just have to go 30 kilometres and there you are. Nuh was identified as the most economically backward district in the country. 80 percent Muslim population, one of the highest outside Kashmir. I got engaged with them because the high levels of lynching that have happened over the last years. But I have got more and more fascinated by the degree of deprivation that I see there from the state. I will give you one more example – again, coming from the work that I do – is Northeast Delhi. Northeast Delhi, the district where the violence happened, is the largest district in Delhi with the largest working class population, and we found it amazingly deprived of public services. So, what I found missing in your entire explanation of this backwardness is conscious wanton state deprivation of public services in Muslim dominated areas. Is that a story that your data upholds?
AK
That is the headline. When you look at the Planning Commission’s backward districts or the Niti Aayog’s aspirational districts, they are all Muslim districts.
HM
It’s not how they happen to be.
AK
The Sachar committee pointed out that if you see the bottom 70 districts, they are usually except for the tribal ones, they are usually districts where Muslims abound and in bureaucracy, we have seen how the choice the location of schools, the location of hospitals, the location of wells even in that “million wells” scheme, the wells were dug where they were non-Muslim populations.
HM
Non-Muslim and non-Dalit.
AK
Hundred percent non-Dalit, and you see then that everywhere, take a state like Telangana, you see that the most deprived districts would be the districts where there is a there is some Muslim population. UP, Bihar…
HM
Absolutely.
AK
So, in terms of the state, almost everything – and in fact, if you even see the delimitation exercises, they have also led to a disempowerment of the Muslim population. Assam is a classic case, where there is some 35-37 percent Muslim population and cannot get elected. So, the state attempt – and the state is a very successful way in which it has been able to marginalise geographical areas that are Muslim-dominated and Adivasi-dominated – is so very clear.
HM
Across political parties, and it is not something just that the BJP has done.
AK
The data that also one has to look at is in public employment. 93 percent of India’s works in the informal sector, it’s only seven percent who have contracts of which roughly half, slightly more than half, are in public employment…
HM
State employment.
AK
State. So, about 40 million.
HM
I’m sure that’s declining, that proportion.
AK
It is static right now, but it is going to get worse. So, about 40 million people, 19 million in the private sector, 21 in the government sector. In that, look at Muslim representation. Even in the states which are secular, in states which have non-BJP parties, even where the states have been pretty progressive, you will not find a single occupation where you will have more than 2 or 3 percent. My standard example is the Osmania University in Hyderabad. Osmania University was set up as an Urdu medium university exactly 100 years ago. [In] 1946, it had about 50 percent faculty and students from Muslim and non-Muslim. Today it is one and a half percent.
HM
My god!
AK
In a city where you have 30 percent of Muslims better off, reasonably well educated – this is Osmania. Now you can take Patna University, you can go to Bombay University and imagine what the situation is. So, that is a big indicator of this feeling of being discriminated [against], whether one is being discriminated [against] or not is still not sure.
HM
I just feel that when we look at the data that the Sachar Committee showed us, put a mirror before us, we need to recognise that this has been done to the Muslim people of our country consistently by government after government. And I think that needs to be central to our understanding of what has gone wrong. Would you agree?
AK
Sir, that is where we get out of the pure economics and look at the political economy.
HM
It is the political economy that we should be speaking about.
AK
And you know it’s a tragedy that the Muslim – what has been the Muslim demand from the state? The Muslim demand from the state has ironically, and very sadly, been issues that are not really Muslim. For example, the single biggest issue post-independence was Urdu. Now, Urdu is not a Muslim language. How has Urdu got anything to do with Muslims? Fifty percent of Muslims in India do not speak Urdu. Fifty percent of Urdu speakers are Harsh Manders and so on.
Urdu is an Indian language far more than it is Bangladeshi or Pakistani. Nobody in Pakistan speaks Urdu, and nobody in Bangladesh does. But Urdu became central to Muslim aspirations, Aligarh University became central to Muslim aspirations, and Kashmir became. None of these three are Muslim issues. One is a purely education issue, one is a purely geographical territorial issue, and one is a language issue. The Muslim aspiration did not go to a fourth. And therefore, the demand, and this has been the secular parties justification saying that look we got a vote when we said ‘here is 30 crore rupees for a Urdu festival’. But we did not get voted because there was a hospital that we set up in a Muslim area.
HM
That comes to the issue of Muslim leadership actually.
AK
So that comes to the issue of Muslim leadership, and one constant question that this professor of mine used to ask was: name a Muslim leader in India, who is not Maulana Azad, post-independence. And we would all be scratching our heads. Can you talk of one person who has been a Muslim leader?
HM
Zakir Hussain, I suppose.
AK
Zakir Hussain was so… you know firstly, we are talking of post ‘47. Zakir Hussain was primarily pre-’47 and he lived a few years, but otherwise you will have to think that hard and get that there is no other name that you can think of.
HM
Again, have they not emerged or have they not been allowed to emerge by the political system. Why are you not a leader of the…
AK
So two issues are there, and that’s the core question. The question is ‘who did the Muslims want as her leader?’ and survey upon survey has shown that for the Muslim – the Indian Muslim – it was never important to have a Muslim leader. The Indian Muslim had far greater conviction and belief in a Nehru than it could ever have on a Jinnah or anybody else. Mulayam Singh was a leader. Lalu Prasad was a Muslim leader. These are the people who were called Maulana and whatever. But these were people – the Muslim voter really voted for a leader who would protect the idea of India, not a Muslim vote bank or a Hindu vote bank. And it continues. You see the Indian Muslim league. Except for the two constituencies in Kerala where it wins, it has no constituency anywhere in the country. And that I can say for any Muslim party, that is localised in one constituency or two, Hyderabad is a great example.
HM
Yeah. Owaisi here again, yes.
AK
So, where is the Muslim leadership? It did not emerge. So, therefore, maybe an unkind thing, that maybe it was this leadership that the Muslim trusted which did not reciprocate that. The Muslims voted Left everywhere. Hyderabad, the MLA used to be a CPM, Warangal, you know. But did the left abandon the Muslim? [I] don’t know, but West Bengal’s indicators are horrible.
AK
And that is why you find that the Muslim voter today is a very confused voter. Who does she vote for? This is the only thing that a Muslim voter is sure of is that ‘I will not vote for the BJP’. But otherwise, should we vote for the Samajwadi or is the Congress better? Should it be the CPI more, is the Trinamool better? So, that is the…
HM
Delhi was the most…
AK
Delhi – AAP or Congress?
HM
AAP has let them down so badly and yet they have voted en masse for…
AK
There are still six of those Muslim constituencies who voted for AAP. But I would just like to add that, as Indians, we do not care for equity. You know the inequality is so stark, nobody even mentions it.
HM
I think the political economy of Muslim economic deprivation, I think we sort of unpacked it pretty strongly.
AK
Except for one thing that I did not mention, and that is, again, Surjit’s argument where he says that [the] post-Mandal era was certainly an era where the backward caste got empowered. But that is where the Muslim loses out even more because the SC Muslim has no reservation. There are no STs among Muslims. Those two or three tribes that are there, they do get reservations, and therefore you find a couple of officers from Kashmir coming in. Otherwise, you don’t find them, but that’s too small – 37,000 people or so. So, SCs by law for some strange reason: if you are Muslim you cannot get SC.
HM
It’s not a strange reason. I think this was the one most significant betrayal that our constitution writers did. I mean, it was quite clear that they did not want Dalit Hindus to move into legality.
AK
And the rest of the reservation, it just does not come the Muslim way, and while it is the most impoverished community and if there is a reservation in Andhra, 4 percent in Karnataka, then that is the appeasement that Mr. Modi talks about and gets a lot of votes because of that.
So, this appeasement thing is a very strange thing that everybody is aware today that the Muslim is the most impoverished, is the poorest, but there is this appeasement. And I think that appeasement is what ironically is the success of a secular India that allowed Muslim places of worship to exist, that allowed people to dress the way they did, that allowed minority institutions to come up, that allowed churches to give education and that is now being seen as… that is the appeasement that people are worried about. There is no other appeasement.
HM
I want to talk a little bit about sectors.
AK
Yes.
HM
Let us start with education, both school education and higher education. Recent data, Christophe Jaffrelot pointed [out], which you would be familiar with, that the only community which has ever shown since independence – a decade-to-decade decline in higher education enrollment – is Muslims. But also school education, once again, the stereotype is that Muslims just want to go into madrasas, but the data does not support that at all. But when I go to a place like Mustaphaabad or Mewat, I find there are hardly any public schools and government schools and they are so poorly resourced. So just putting on your economist, development economist hat, can you run us through what is the status of public education among Muslims and why has it declined so badly?
AK
So, first the secular issue – the return on higher education in India is fast declining. We have the world’s largest standing educated unemployed army that we have ever seen in the world or certainly in India: 24 percent.
HM
I interrupt you there. Satish Deshpande, our friend, has pointed out quite powerfully that actually in very unequal India, the only real pathway to social mobility is through higher education.
AK
So ironic and such a contradiction that firstly, we have the world’s largest unemployed, educated workforce, touching nearly 40 percent in Haryana and 24 percent in the country. It is the highest ever since we started doing a PLFS in 1972.
HM
Educated unemployed, would you say high school?
AK
So, this is higher secondary and university education, with an undergrad degree. So, the return on English education is high, the condition being that there should be a job. If there is no job then equally you suffer. So, the return on higher education is poor and is declining, especially in the last 10 years.
HM
But that would apply also to a Dalit.
AK
So it’s a secular thing, it applies to an upper caste Hindu.
HM
But why is the decline only with this?
AK
So, the second, that is the secular problem – that higher education, that is the reason why gross enrollment ratios in India are the worst in the world. And in Punjab, in Haryana, in Assam and Gujarat, Assam and Bihar, they will be the lowest, even amongst sub-Saharan African countries – because there is no return on higher education, there is no job to get. Now, look at the Muslim issues: that within the higher education system, the fastest increase in numbers is among the Scheduled Tribes. But why? The base is low.
HM
The base was very, very low.
AK
And there is a reservation. One, there is an expectation of a seat. You know that even if you get a 0 percent in the FIITJEE exam, the IIT entrance exam, you will get a seat. Whereas, for a similar Muslim fellow in the next house, you need 93 percent to get in, which is impossible. So there is a reservation angle there that has helped the most marginalised reach in higher education and stay there – also, education is free. So, the third thing is that, and here is a very serious issue which we have been ignoring for some time: that especially over the last 10 years, the rate of inflation has been pretty steep, and if you see within that, the costs of education and healthcare have grown the most. Now, contrast this to stagnant wage rates. Real wage rates in India have remained either the same or declined. Real wages have actually declined.
HM
So economic growth is like this, and wages are like this.
AK
So, here is this gentleman, whose median income in India is a 25000 rupee income for a family of five or six, with rising costs of education and healthcare with rising food cost. Now it is an open-and-shut case. What are you going to spend your money on? You will withdraw your child from school and spend that money buying rice and wheat. So, that is the thing that we have not taken care of. Now, most of the universities…
HM
If the public school was good enough then we would not have that crisis.
AK
And if the public school was available, Sachar committee showed that Muslim locations do not have… take Adilabad district, you will have some fabulous residential schools set up by the government – none of them in a Muslim neighborhood. None of them. So the Muslim girl has to travel seven kilometres.
HM
And sadly, you know, I did a critique of the UPA government’s performance after Sachar because what I found was that you said minority dominated districts will get special allocations, but they did not say you will spend that allocation in minority settlements. And I found that even those small allocations were not spent in minority.
AK
So, we did a little more than that. Actually, the prime minister, the same prime minister with the same wisdom who got a bunch of us together in 2013 and said that ‘please evaluate what happened after Sachar’. That was called the post-Sachar evaluation committee submitted to the parliament. I was a member of that, Professor Kundu was chairing it, it is called the Kundu committee and the result was so obvious.
So, we said one of the obvious things was that – and it is a thumb rule that do not look at outlays, look at outcomes. You just count the number. If you are saying that Muslims had to be brought, count the number of Muslims who are brought, not the amount of money you have spent in so and so district because that will go to naught. So, that was the first thing. The second is, we found that on every parameter, the decline was just as bad. The rising tide had improved incomes for everybody, but the differential had become even more. But the most heartening feature of the post Sachar evaluation – and you know, in all this, there is one very, one silver lining – and that is that when we did these tables on education or labour or wages or employment or rentals or credit, the strange table, the column that stood out was healthcare. The Muslim access to healthcare is actually better, the life expectancy is slightly better. So, well the explanation could be that it is a larger urban workforce. Therefore, it has access to healthcare. The second is that the Muslim household does spend marginally more on health care than the non-Muslim. The third is that you are more likely to find a toilet inside a Muslim household than in a similar non-Muslim household. The fourth is that the woman gets money to spend in a Muslim household. If she is earning, she has access to that money even if she is not earning, she has the agency to spend some money, and women, traditionally, have spent on healthcare more than education.
HM
Food and healthcare, I think.
AK
The food practices are such that the family eats together – the women do not eat [only] at the end of the meal. So the girl doesn’t get the crumbs, but she eats the same food. So she is marginally better off nutritionally. These advantages stay till she is about 15 to 20. Then they are even out because then there is nothing… Then she is poor. But that’s the one column that stood out.
HM
I'll come to health care presently. Staying with school education, to the class that we belong. I studied in this elite boarding school called Mayo College, and we had Muslims and it was normal and natural, you would notice. My daughter, when she studied in Delhi in an elite school, she had a reasonable number of Muslim classmates. By the time my niece went another 10 years later, there were almost none.This idea that Muslims are not going into [higher education] is also a blocking out. Do you see that?
AK
So, post-Covid, the low income schools saw the maximum dropouts because even that 50 rupees was not available... So, in education that is certainly what has happened – that the Muslim population has become – from your days in Mayo college – [in] the more prosperous neighborhoods, the Muslim populations have moved away. So, they do not have access to that neighborhood school, you see that in Delhi. And if you look at cities, I mean, the sole exception is Jaipur. We did this study on where the segregation is more than 50 percent. And with the exception of Jaipur, almost all other cities – which is so astonishing to see – it is not surprising that the most ghettoized city is Ahmedabad, but it is so astonishing to see that the most segregated city after Ahmedabad is Hyderabad.
HM
Please just unpack that a little bit.
AK
Plot the Hyderabad Muslim population. Hyderabad’s population is something like 80 lakhs and about 35 would be Muslim and they are all south of the river. North of the river, you get one dot here and another dot there.
HM
Bhopal, which I am familiar with is similar.
AK
And these are very progressive, historically evenly divided cities with traditions of cosmopolitanism, of nice neighbourhoods of universities like Osmanian University of the Hamidiyya hospitals in Bhopal.
HM
And we forget about Delhi, as I said, 33 percent Muslims who are middle class and so on.
AK
The irony is not Delhi, the irony is Dehradun. Dehradun had a 40 percent Muslim population. Today, the main plank of the government there is that no Muslim should stay, that there should not be a single Muslim establishment. That’s the Dehradun legacy.
HM
Okay, ethnic cleansing kind of project.
AK
For us from a city that was purely a Muslim city.
HM
So, you know, Amir. You feel that [healthcare is] one segment of public services where Muslims are doing better than other communities.
AK
So, I have to be very careful in what I am saying. The healthcare system in India is broken. It is within that horrible healthcare system that you find that the Muslim indicators in the early years are better than the non-Muslim indicators.
HM
Is it… you’re saying it’s cultural. I like some of the explanations. Eating together is actually a very good example.
AK
Now it is eating together, drunken heads of household, agency for women to spend money…
HM
But ‘drunken heads of houses’, please explain that.
AK
So, typically, [in] the lower income household when the husband is drinking, then that is where the money is going and there is a lot of domestic abuse. You find lesser of that.
But I must tell you it is in early life. So till 18, the healthcare indicators are better. After that, because of poverty and marginalisation and pollution and whatever, the health indicators become worse off. But for example, life expectancy at birth will be higher in a Muslim community than elsewhere because you know the woman is treated slightly better during pregnancy. She gets to rest, she is taken care of.
So, the health indicators – and the biggest reason and this is a study we did across 15 states – that while the Muslim access to primary education is very poor, the Muslim access to primary health is very high from the state, that if you see the Muslim households in or the Muslim population in the queues in front of public hospitals they will be a disproportionately high number. Why? The answer that is provided is that is where you do not see much discrimination. Though, of late, the answer has been that you know you are told ‘you produce too many babies’.
HM
You know, on the side in the Delhi riots, one of the saddest stories is how they were treated in public hospitals. I mean, they were treated so shabbily and, you know, insultingly by public health officers, doctors.
AK
So, that good news is also in the past, but the simple thing is that there is a greater awareness of health, more than education, and that shows within the Muslim community that seeking education is not as important as in the other community – the seeking healthcare is a little more. How did that come out? Why did it happen? That’s some anthropological [study].
HM
Yeah, a lot of what you’re saying is anthropological and fascinating and I see that a lot of those are hypotheses which require us to understand a lot better. Can I jump to the provision of basic public services in Muslim habitations? It’s so marked when you go into Juhapara in Ahmedabad, the public service suddenly declines. Why has that happened? Is it just, you know, you don’t find drains, you don't find sewage, you don't find clean water. Firstly, Muslims are being forced to live in ghettos and in those ghettos are so conspicuously deprived of basic public services compared to something just in its neighbourhood.
AK
So, I will give you a slightly different answer to this apart from the fact that there is state discrimination. So, there is a cheaper area. If you look at Hyderabad, where I can stick my neck out and tell you that that kind of discrimination is marginal if it does, it is very very minimal.
HM
You don’t think the municipal corporation discriminates? Hyderabad is, that is why the other story you were telling about Hyderabad is as a place like Bhopal, where I used to feel examples of our pluralism but that is broken down, and [now] Lucknow.
AK
But I am pointing out Hyderabad just to make that point that, despite all of those advantages, what do you see in Hyderabad? Overarching Muslim population in the most horrible slums. And the only reason is the inability to pay. See, the urban life in India is so treacherously difficult on account of two major expenses that you would not have in rural India, one is rental, the other is transportation, both very expensive.
And what is happening is here is the Hyderabad data is so revealing, the city of Hyderabad where you have a one third population of Muslims, slightly more in some part. The housing pattern is so interesting 60 percent of Muslims in Hyderabad do not have a 60 percent do not own a house 40 percent do. Of the 40 percent who own a house 60 percent have kacha houses and 40 percent have pakka houses. The if you look at all other communities it is exactly the opposite. So 60 percent have a house, 40 percent don’t. Of the 60 percent who have [houses], 60 percent have pakka houses and 40 percent have kacha houses, which means that a large proportion of the Muslim population in Hyderabad lives in rented accommodation. These are people with informal employment. Their tomorrow’s wage is not certain, but the rent is certain. And post Covid, that what happened? They just had to live on the road because, see their landlord also is not a rich person. She also depends on that Rs 5000.
HM
In fact, you know very often when I used to see, I mean they said they used to themselves say what can my poor landlord do here.
AK
That poor fellow living in worse in a worse house next door. So, the other thing is transportation. These are big cities now. If you want jobs you have to go 5, 7, 10, 50 miles away. How do you travel? Our cities are not built for cycles at a time at one time when we remember in our childhood everybody would cycle to work. Today is impossible to do so. It is built for big cars and expensive metro. And therefore, one of the biggest policy decisions in Karnataka and in Telangana that actually went a lot of went a huge extent to help these people was free transport for women. Suddenly they had Rs 3000. Rs 3000 for someone who earns Rs 10,000 is a lot of money. She earlier used to walk to work because she can’t afford Rs 100. Today she travels by bus and we deny her that or we grudge that.
The other policy measure that we have in our states is housing that the government decided that we will build this small one bedroom, two bedroom houses and give them to everybody and ensure that a fair percentage in Hyderabad about 20 percent should go to Muslim houses. That is a big move.
HM
There is one question that I resolved to ask every person I speak with in this. Do you see hope and if so, will things get better?
AK
So, the reason I am, despite seeing things at their worst and it could get worse –
HM
Especially the last 10 years there’s been this – you know, we were declining then.
AK
Every day you think that it can’t get better, and then you get shocked tomorrow despite everything. For me, hope lies in 2004. That 1999 to 2003 was pretty horrible. Most of the things that we see today – NRC, language, all of that – started then.
HM
Yeah. the foundations were –
AK
Foundations were laid and things were looking pretty bleak and then one election happened. Overnight the country was booming. The 10 years of bliss was… people like me went all over the world. It was my job, but I did it with great interest and passion. I went all over the world asking people to invest in India, that India is growing, it is a democratic sector. It is where rule of law is followed. I haven’t done that after 2014.
HM
Your conscience wouldn’t allow you.
AK
And the facts don’t say it. I get similar optimism when I go to Bangalore. I used to go – I teach in a Bangalore university. I go there very often. Five years, it was hopeless. The whole conversation in Bangalore, the high tech capital of the world, was ‘hijab, did Tipu Sultan do?, whether the bus stop should be shaped like a tomb or a dome?’. That was the conversation in the newspapers, in dining halls, in academia. One election, and there is and today people are talking about ‘how do we get more investment in?’ ‘what do we do about a new metro?’, ‘how do we clean up?’ So, I think India essentially is a country of people who worry about real things. They get marginalised, they get silenced, they go quiet, they get worried, they get hurt, they go to jail and they go silent, except for a few people like you. But an election – one person at the top just changes it. That’s my hope.
HM
That’s a lovely thought, and still holding on to that optimism, and it’s a very valuable optimism. Are opposition [parties] to the BJP even ready to fight that election? With clarity on ideology, it's an ideological battle and I think at least two things: on the right of minorities to live as equal citizens with their hearts, where – what Tagore had said – “where the mind is without fear and head is held up”. And the second is going back towards the aspiration of building a welfare state. Are we even – is even anyone – fighting that battle?
AK
Sir, here again you know, while it has become quite simplistic and fashionable to say that the opposition in India is dead, and the journalism in India is evil. So, from the people I follow on various social media – people I think highly of – they have been fighting this so well in such horrible circumstances. My hats off to all the political leadership that did not succumb despite enforcement directorate, CBI, threats, money – they have no money right now, but they have held out. Similarly, with journalists, I challenge everybody that takes a good sensible Indian newspaper and even an English language newspaper and count the number of stories, even today, that are anti-establishment and you will find some. You will find a Rajdeep, Pratap, Harsh Mander still writing and you will find a million people following them. So, there is tremendous hope. We are in a bad state. We are in a situation which we never dreamt of. We are in a situation where a Tamil website can be shut down because of a cartoon – that it is unimaginable that it could have happened in our India. But it is not something that is hopeless.
HM
It is not hopeless. I love talking to you. I mean, I really wish we had more time. The last thing that you said, as I am interpreting it – however dark things are, so there is resistance by ordinary – I mean ‘ordinary’ Indians – wherever they are, in the political field, in the media, in civil society.
AK
In UP they gave 40 seats.
HM
In UP, and in fact across North India wherever Mr Modi made the hate speeches, every one of them they lost. So, the idea of India is still alive. And we will get back our country one day.