AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

        In these columns yesterday I had  referred to the Historic Memoran dum highlighting the wretched Social, Economic and Educational status of the Hindus in majority in India presented by R K Ohri IPS (Retd), Secretary General, PATRIOTS' FORUM, New Delhi on 19 May 2006 to the Office of the Justice Sachar Committee in New Delhi which was put deliberately into the waste paper basket by Justice Sachar with the full cooperation of his ever servile Islam-embracing and Hindu-hating Office. R K Ohri and all the Office Bearers and Members of the Patriots' Forum have to be congratulated by more than 800 millions of Hindus in India for having displayed such a tremendous public spirit and unsullied patriotism in these decadent days when high treason, ever vigilant national sabotage and national subversion have become the whole time official occupation of men at the highest levels of authority in the UPA Government in New Delhi. Subsequently the Patriots' Forum sent a more detailed Memorandum to Justice Sri Rajindar Sachar, Chairperson, Prime Minister's High Level Committee on 226 October, 2006 about the socio-economic and educational status of Hindus vis-à-vis Indian Muslims and followed by several subsequent reminders which were all treated by Justice Sachar and his Committee with Islamic Anti-Kafir fervour in the same manner as they had done in regard to the earlier Memorandum sent by Patriots' Forum on 19 May, 2006.

        The great public spirit shown by R K Ohri and his other patriotic colleagues in the Patriots' Forum reminds me of the work done by The Servants of India Society established by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, political mentor of Mahatma Gandhi, in 1905. Gokhale defined its objectives in the following burning words: 'The claims of public life are everyday receiving wider recognition and attachment to the land of our birth is growing into a strong and deeply cherished passion of the heart'. The great work of rearing and raising the national superstructure as yet to be taken in hand and the situation demands on the part of patriotic workers devotion and sacrifices proportionate to the magnitude of this task. The Servants of India Society has been established to meet in some measure these requirements of the situation. One essential condition of success in this work is that sufficient number of our country men must now come forward to devote themselves to the cause in the spirit in which religious work is undertaken. Public life must be spiritualized. Love of country must so fill the heart that all else shall appear as of little moment by its side. A fervent patriotism which rejoices at every opportunity of sacrifice for the motherland, a dauntless heart which refuses to be turned back from its object by difficulty or danger, a deep faith in the purpose of Providence which nothing can shake 'equipped with these, every patriotic worker must start on his sacred mission and reverently seek the joy which comes of spending oneself in the service of one's country'.

        I have no doubt whatsoever that great public spirited men like R K Ohri and others in the Patriots' Forum, New Delhi, are today endeavouring under very difficult and treacherous conditions to translate the grand vision of Servants of India Society into a reality.

        In his detailed Memorandum to Justice Sachar Committee on 26 October, 2006, R K Ohri, Secretary General, Patriots' Forum wrote as follows: 'For decades a myth, or an unsubstantiated belief, has been propagated across by partisan politicians that as a community the Muslims in India are more backward than the Hindus. In recent years this impression has gained considerable credence thanks to the sustained efforts of vote-bank besotted politicians and not-so-informed opinion-makers, including in some the mainstream English media. No one seems to have ever cared to scientifically analyze and compare the standard human development indices of the two communities'.

        'On 25 August, 2005, a delegation of 26 Muslim MPs and 3 Muslim Ministers of the UPA government had met the Prime Minister in an inelegant bid to mount pressure for getting a quota of communal reservations sanctioned for their community. Responding to the growing demands of the fundamentalist lobby, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, constituted a High Level Committee, under your chairmanship. The sudden appointment of the Committee by the Prime Minister, apparently succumbing to the political pressure, stirred some of us to undertake an in-depth study for assessing the comparative socio-economic status of the two communities in a scientific manner. The result of the research, which was entrusted to me by our study group, startled even us. It revealed that in respect of several major globally accepted determinants of socio-economic status, the Hindus are more backward than the Muslims. These determinants are:

        I. Incidence of Infant & Child Mortality

        II. Degree of Urbanization

        III. Average Life Expectancy at Birth

        I. Incidence of Infant & Child Mortality

        The Patriots' Forum submitted the following data compiled by S.Irudaya Rajan which gives an overall picture of Infant and Child mortality for Hindus and Muslims of India:

        Estimates of Infant and Child Mortality for Hindus and Muslims of India.

        Note: NFHS stands for National Family Health Survey. Two such surveys have been held, one in 1992-93 and another in 1998-99.

        II. Degree of Urbanisation

        'Degree of urbanization, or the relative proportion of a community's population living in urban areas, is the second important global norm for assessing socio-economic status of a community, or group. According to Census 2001 (Religion Data Report), the proportion of Hindus living in urban areas is 26 percent while that of Muslims living in urban areas is 36 percent - far ahead of Hindus by almost 40 percent. Thus Muslims of India are ahead of the Hindus'

        III. The Average Life Expectancy at Birth

        'The average life expectancy at birth is another important determinant of socio-economic status. According to NFHS-1, held in 1992-93, the crude death rate per 1000 was 9.6 for the Hindus and 8.9 for the Muslims.

        The foregoing facts clearly show that there is no justification for classifying the Muslims as a socio-economically backward religious group, especially when they have better human development indices than the Hindus. This fact has been conformed in an interesting Seminar Paper presented by Shri Sanjay Kumar (Fellow, Centre for Study of Developing Societies) in a Workshop-cum-Seminar organized by the Indian Institute of Public Administration on Sept. 2, 2006, it was pointed out that according to the findings of the National Election Study (conducted by the CSDS after interviewing 27,000 respondents, post 2004 general elections), 'there is hardly any difference among the level of educational attainments among Hindus and Muslims'. Justice Sachar Committee treated these research findings with suave Soniaic contempt.

        When I spoke to R K Ohri personally he told me that the Justice Sachar Committee has only indulged in a cheap and vulgar game of Resurrection of Convoluted Muslim Grievance Politics. I have spoken to more than 30 IAS and IPS Officers who have held the highest posts in the Government of India and all of them have endorsed the view of R K Ohri.

        A detailed study of Justice Sachar Committee's Report will show that it has extensively tried to ignore facts and taken recourse to extensive misinterpretation of statistical data. A few instances are listed below:

        1. There is a lop-sided over emphasis on the so-called fear of lack of security which has been cited in more than one place as the cause of lack of education and social backwardness of Muslims. Justice Sachar and his Committee Members seem to be greater psychoanalysts than poor Sigmund Freud!

        2. In Chapter 2, it has been asserted without any data or reasoning that the 'popular perception that religious conservatism among Muslims is a major factor for not accessing education is incorrect'.

        3. One striking instance of suppressio veri suggestio falsi is the unfounded assertion made in Chapter 2 on page 3 that 'the poor rate of success of the polio vaccination drive in Muslim majority areas is one such response arising out of the fear of an alleged plot to reduce the Muslim birth rate'.

        4. There are many more instances of suppressio veri suggestio falsi in the Report all of which need not be elaborated here, e.g., the simplistic explanation given for the causes of lower infant and child mortality among the Muslims vis a vis the Hindus by calling it as an 'enigma' rather than admitting that the indices showed better nutritional intake by the children of Muslim community than the Hindu children.

        5. For sheer pro-Islamic and Pseudo- secular effort not to look at facts straight, some observations in Chapter 5 dealing with Economy and Employment will take the cake. Instead of diagnosing the prevalent gender discrimination, the custom of mandatory veil and scriptural orthodoxy as 3 basic reasons for low work participation by Muslim women (which factors also keep the household incomes substantially lower), the Sachar Committee invented an argument that cannot stand the test of any scrutiny, such as: 'One of the reasons for lower participation rates of Muslim women may be higher dependency rates due to relatively higher share of younger population in the community resulting in women staying at home'.

        6. In Chapter 4, while pleading for the cause of Urdu for being considered as an elective subject in schools , the Sachar Committee trains its guns on the teaching of Sanskrit. For reasons best known to its members. Going off at a tangent, it finds' fault with the 'importance attached to say, Sanskrit, which is offered in a majority of schools'. It pontificates on page 83 that 'the importance given to Sanskrit in the educational framework in Delhi and many north Indian States has tended to sideline minority languages'. This unwarranted diatribe against Sanskrit will be viewed as an unprovoked endeavour to outrage the cultural modesty of Bharat Mata or Mother India.

        Against this background it will be clear that gigantic fraud and Justice Sachar Committee are indeed inter-changeable and synonymous terms.

        (To be contd...)

        (The writer is a retired IAS officer)

        e-mail the writer at

        vsundaram@newstodaynet.com