Segregation in India: Plight of Muslims

After winning the American Civil War for Northern States, Abraham Lincoln went about abolishing slavery in United States of America.  The Congress and Senate passed three landmark amendments attempting to change the fate of African Americans in that country.  The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, the 14th Amendment made blacks equal citizens, and 15th Amendment gave them right to vote.  In the next ten years of Reconstruction, many black leaders emerged to occupy positions in Senate and Congress.  It almost looked, for a while, that this new nation would correct the mistakes of its past and reverse the effects of slavery it imposed on black people.  However, the whites of America were not ready to give blacks an equal status in their country.  They started to dilute these amendments by creating a notion called ‘separate but equal’.  They imposed segregation in the country through a series of measures called Jim Crow laws. 

It started with disenfranchising many blacks, then creating separate schools, separate seating in travel and restaurants, thereby institutionalizing discrimination.  They created two Americas, one for the privileged which was mostly white, and the other was for the underprivileged which was mostly black.  The Jim Crow laws completely negated the three amendments passed during Lincoln’s times.

Segregation in India

India has many laws to oppose discrimination.  But like the Americans of those times, Indians too have come up with their own segregation strategies. 

When I went to an engineering school, there were only about 5 Muslims in a batch of nearly 350 students.  That made their representation around 1.5% while Muslims constituted nearly 14% of the Indian population.  This scenario bothered me for a long time. How did we come to this?  The usual and convenient explanation by most Hindu Indians was that Muslims don’t study, that they are not interested in education, that their religion has something to do with it.  Is that really true? 

White Americans gave similar excuses while trying to justify their discriminatory laws.  They said that blacks were not keen on the same kind of education that whites were interested, that there is something about their African roots which explains their lack of interest, and so on. 

Are the Muslims so different from Hindus when it comes to their expectations for mainstream education?  When I examine and observe many middle class Muslim families, they are not very different from middle class Hindu families in their aspirations.  They want to send their kids to good school, want their kids to get good higher education, and they want their kids to become engineers or doctors.  They want to lead a good and decent life just like middle class Hindu families. 

However, Indian Muslim is not give the same opportunity in India. From all the available statistics it is clear that the tools of prosperity have bypassed Muslims in India.  There are not many Muslims in private schools, not many Muslims in engineering colleges, not many Muslims in the IT industry.  There are two things happening here – one, while the Hindu middle class as a group is growing in size through time bringing more and more people into its fold, the same is not true for Muslims.   They are somehow left out of the rise of prosperity that India has witnessed in the last sixty years.  Two, there is an active campaign though not through explicit laws, but through many direct and indirect actions of many Hindus, to discriminate against Muslims thereby reducing their participation from the areas of opportunity.

Both these phenomenon are rooted in discrimination.  After Partition, Indian Hindus grudgingly 'allowed' Muslims to remain in India, but they are not ready to give them their due share in the rewards. 

There is a news item in THE HINDU which says that ‘In Delhi’s nursery classes, Muslim children are a rarity’:  [Emphasis mine]

 Of 92 (private) schools, as many as 20 admitted NO muslim child while 17 admitted only one Muslim child each.

…information from individual schools suggests Muslims applied in fairly significant numbers this year and were… less likely to be selected…

Social activist Abdul Khalid wrote: “…less than 0.5 percent of Muslim children have been admitted…”

Now, how does this actually happen in India?  I will relate a personal experience.

Recently when I had to admit my kid to nursery class we were filling application forms to different schools.  The application form from National Public School, a prestigious private school, asked us to mention the ‘religion’.  I deliberately did not.  When my wife went to submit the form, the school asked her to fill the religion otherwise it would rejected.   The form also had other items like salary of the parents and their job qualifications.

I talked to someone who had recently attended National Public School.  In his graduating batch of four sections of one class comprising 120 kids, there were only 5 Muslim kids.  That makes their representation less than 5%. 

I do not know the profile of all the kids at National Public School, but I am quite confident they would comprise mostly upper caste Hindus and other privileged sections.  The selection must be done on the basis of religion, surname, and the salary criteria followed by a personal interview with the parents.  The admission criterion is designed in such a way that it somehow excludes Muslims (and quite possibly lower caste Hindus). That means that upper caste Hindu children in urban areas get to attend schools where there are mostly upper caste Hindus.  This is segregation in action.  

Such segregation is not confined to only primary schools.  A rough estimate of the profile of people in most IT companies would reflect the same.  The number of Muslims would be very low.  In one of the companies that I am familiar with, there were not more than 1% Muslims in an organization which had nearly 2,500 engineers.  In a study conducted on IT industry in Bangalore in 2006, 88% were Hindus, while 5% were Christians and only 2% Muslims.  71% belong to upper castes (half were Brahmins).

The above news from New Delhi nursery schools is hardly surprising then.  If the statistics are revealed by private schools in metros and towns of while of India, you will see a stark segregation where Muslims are being pushed out of these mainstream schools.   

Segregation is already in action and taking place for many decades now.  Indian Muslim does not live in your apartment complex, he does not show up at your workplace.  He does not sit next to you in your school.  India has institutionalized its own segregation methods against Muslims.   

Way forward

Though the Lincoln Government imposed three amendments onto Americans to free the black man to make him an equal citizen, the whites came up with their own ‘separate but equal’ strategies to institutionalize discrimination against black population.   In the same way, though India has created laws to prevent discrimination based on religion, Indian Hindus have come up with their sly methods to prevent Muslims from access to the tools of opportunity.  

Muslim is the new Dalit in India.  Their participation in the mainstream is not reflective of their representation in population and the worrying trend is they are being marginalized and segregated more with time.  We have to realize and reckon this before it is too late.  


The struggle by the black population to overthrow segregation in United States of America culminated in a new Civil Rights Movement under various leaders including Martin Luther King Jr.  With the two new bills passed by Congress and Senate, Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Jim Crow laws were reversed and the rights of blacks were restored to make him an equal citizen without discrimination.  One of the key items introduced by Lyndon Johnson’s government was the affirmative action- to proactively increase the participation of blacks in all mainstream positions so that their numbers reflect their proportion in the population. 

Similarly, something sinister was happening in India for more than two thousand years in India where lower castes were systematically discriminated, ostracized and marginalized.  However, India has found an antidote to that poison – through the tool of reservations.  Though highly discredited as a tool for politics, the bitter pill of reservations alone has brought socioeconomic change to the plight of millions of lower castes in India. 

And now, we need to set in motion another transformation.  Of imposing reservations to bring Muslims into the mainstream, to break the walls that Indian Hindus have carefully built to keep Muslims away.  To do that, we have to introduce reservations for Muslims in private schools and government schools, in engineering and medical colleges, in IT industry and government jobs.  There is no other way out.