Muslims are being appeased’ appears in every manifesto of India's ruling party; BJP.

 In 2019, after five years in power, the party spoke of ‘what is happening today; appeasement of one, at the cost of the other’.

Let's examine the appeasement of Indian Muslims in this article.

Starting of with politics, the 200 million Muslims of India have been kept marginalised. PM Modi's party BJP won a huge majority with 303 Lok Sabha seats in 2019. But there are no Muslim MPs. In 2014, BJP had 282 seats in Lok Sabha; without a single seat for any Muslim.

In Gujarat, where BJP has run the govt since 1998, there has been no Muslim BJP MLA for 22 years. There has been no Muslim representative of any party from Gujarat in the Lok Sabha since 1985. In the entire Hindi belt, there is no Muslim MLA in 2020 belonging to the BJP. The state of Uttar Pradesh has over 40 million Muslims. BJP has 307 MLAs after the state elections of 2017 but there's not a single Muslim. The 40 million Muslims in Uttar Pradesh remain the largest unrepresented group in the democratic world. There's not a single Muslim chief minister of a state, outside Kashmir, who has completed his full term since independence. As of now, there's no Muslim minister in 15 out of 28 Indian states. In the cabinets of ten of remaining 13 states, there's only one Muslim minister.

India’s Scheduled Castes are 16% of population but they are given 84 reserved seats in Lok Sabha. The Scheduled Tribes, which are 8% of the population, get 47 reserved seats. India has acknowledged it's discrimination against Dalits and and Adivasis but Muslims remain the most under-represented community in Parliament. There were 27 Muslims elected in 2019. By their share of population Muslims should have 74 seats. But they've never got more than 49 (in 1980). Their average is 28 seats, about one third of representation they should have.

The Sachal Commission Report revealed astonishing details of the discrimination against Indian Muslims at institutional level in 2006 by scrutinizing the data on employment of Muslims in govt. Muslims were only 4.9% of total 88 lakh state and central govt employees.

1. The Railways had 4.5% Muslims but 98.7% of the Muslims employed were at lower levels, with only 1.3% as Group A or Group B officers. 

2. In the Indian Police Service and the Indian Foreign Service, Muslim representation was 3.2%. 

3. In the judiciary, Muslims were 7.8% compared to 23% OBCs, and 20% SC/STs. 

4. Among the faculty members of universities, Muslims were 3.7% 

5. The share of Muslim employment in state banks and the Reserve Bank of India was 2.2% 

6. In the central public sector units, Muslims were 3.3%

7. In 1999, the former defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav said that of the over 1 million people in the Indian military, Muslims were only 1%. The roots of discrimination were laid by the first Army Chief Gen K.M. Cariappa. In an offensive titled diatribe published the Organiser which was the mouthpiece of RSS, Cariappa bluntly declared: "Muslim loyalty seems to be primarily to Pakistan. This is a crime unpardonable.." 

8. In the security agencies, India’s Muslims face open discrimination. They are assumed to be treasonous by birth.

The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) does not recruit Muslims by way of unwritten policy. Outlook magazine reported on this in its 13 November 2006 issue. From 1969 till today—RAW’s current staff strength is about 10,000— it has avoided recruiting any Muslim officer. 

As of 2020, in the entire intelligence community of RAW, IB, National Technical Research Organisation and Military Intelligence, India has just one Muslim officer out of 200 million Muslims. The India Justice Report 2019 released by the Tata Trusts said that from 1999–2013, Muslim representation in the Indian police has remained between 3% and 4% outside Kashmir. The postal department had 2.7 lakh employees of whom 5% were Muslim, mostly in Group D. Muslims also face discrimination when to comes to benefiting from government schemes. In Kerala, Muslims were over 30% of those identified as below the poverty line, but only between 5% and 18% of BPL scheme beneficiaries, except for three programmes on tuberculosis. Muslims have the poorest access to healthcare according to the National Sample Survey data. They had the lowest access to urban public access to hospital deliveries and the second lowest in private hospitals after Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. In rural India, Muslims have highest number of births delivered by a non-trained assistant. Sachar report says, ‘Muslims, especially women, have virtually no access to govt development schemes. They experience discrimination in getting loans from Jawahar Rozgar Yojana for below poverty line beneficiaries, in getting loans for housing, in procuring widow pensions’. Integrated Child Development Schemes touched only 7.6% Muslim children from the ages of 0-6 compared to 10.2% among SC/STs and 12.5% among OBCs.

The number of Muslim children who are covered by mid-day meal programme nationally are 22.8% compared to 28.1% for all Hindus and 34.7% for SC/STs. Only the general category is lower at 19.1% because the children are educated in schools where these meals are not served. Indian bureaucrats and politicians attribute the educational backwardness of Indian Muslims to the madrasas but Sachar Report concluded, on basis of data collected by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), that only 4% of Muslim students go to madrasas. And I've yet not covered the Ghettoisation among urban Indian Muslims. Sachar Committee Report claimed that ‘Fearing for their security, Muslims are increasingly resorting to living in ghettos across the country’. 

Before 2014 elections, Narendra Modi said in an interview that when Sachar Committee came to Gujarat to take inputs for the report, it asked him: ‘What did you do for the Muslims?’ To this, Modi replied that he did nothing for Muslims. He will do nothing for Muslims of Gujarat.

Reference: 

1. Our Hindu Rashtra by Aakar Patel 

2. Khaki and the ethnic violence by Omar Khalidi 

3. The Sachar Committee Report