In
India, The Wages Of Distrust
By Sudha Ramachandran
15 November, 2006
Asia
Times Online
BANGALORE -
A recent media report has pointed out that Muslims have been kept out
of some wings of India's intelligence apparatus. While the thin presence
of Muslims in jobs and education is well known, their exclusion from
government agencies by design is cause for concern. Not only is it a
blot on the country's secular and pluralistic credentials but it has
implications for India's security. It could be detracting from the quality
of intelligence the agencies are gathering.
According to a report in
leading newsmagazine Outlook, India's external intelligence agency,
the Research and Analysis Wing,adheres to an "unwritten code"
not to recruit Muslims. Right from its inception in the late 1960s,
RAW, which has a 10,000-strong staff, "has avoided recruiting any
Muslim officer". This is the case, too, with the National Technical
Research Organization, the recently established technical-intelligence
wing of RAW.
The report points out that
Muslims and Sikhs are not deployed to protect India's VIPs, either.
The Special Protection Group (SPG) that is in charge of protecting the
prime minister avoids posting Muslims and Sikhs as bodyguards. The few
Muslims and Sikhs who are in the SPG are deployed on administrative
duties. There are no Muslims or Sikhs in the National Security Guard
(or Black Cats), an elite counter-terrorism force that is also responsible
for VIP protection.
While distrust of Muslims
is long-standing, suspicion of Sikhs, who constitute less than 2% of
India's population, can be traced back to the eruption of the Sikh militancy
that raged through the 1980s and was aided by sections of the Sikh diaspora
and Pakistan. In October 1984, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was
assassinated by two of her Sikh guards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh.
The Sikh community came under a cloud and Sikhs were thereafter pulled
off the personal security of prime ministers.
Sikh militancy has subsided,
but Sikhs continue to be excluded from the personal security of the
prime minister. Incidentally, India's current prime minister, Manmohan
Singh, is himself a Sikh, as is Chief of Army Staff Joginder Jaswant
Singh. Yet people from the Sikh community are not trusted to look after
the prime minister's security.
It was Sikh officers in the
police, the intelligence and the armed forces who ultimately defeated
the Sikh militancy. There are lessons in that for India as it shrinks
from recruiting Muslims.
Distrust of Muslims is far
deeper and more widespread. They are kept out not just from bodyguard
duties of India's top leaders but much more.
Muslims constitute 13.4%
of India's 1.1-billion-strong population, but their presence in education
and employment - both private sector and government - is nowhere near
their population share. "From the administration and the police
to the judiciary and the private sector, the invisible hands of prejudice,
economic and educational inequality seem to have frozen the 'quota'
for Muslims at 3-5%," observes Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu.
"For virtually every
socio-economic marker of well-being, the Muslim is well below the national
norm - not to speak of the level commensurate with her or his share
of the national population - and the evidence suggests these inequalities
are not decreasing over time."
The thin presence of Muslims
in jobs and employment and their abysmal socio-economic status have
often been blamed on their community's reluctance to become a part of
the Indian mainstream. Muslims don't get jobs because they don't want
to get educated, they don't want to work in government, is an argument
often heard in India. Muslim clerics and politicians are often accused
of keeping the community backward. And there is some truth in this argument.
But there is serious prejudice
too against Muslims. And this prejudice is responsible for the reluctance
of Hindus to rent houses to Muslims, to hire them or to trust them in
"sensitive" positions.
In the eyes of many Hindus,
no Muslim can ever truly belong to India. Muslims are seen as "outsiders",
descendents of those who invaded India centuries ago. The partition
of the subcontinent in 1947 and the creation of Pakistan out of Muslim-majority
areas has added to hostility against Muslims. Muslims in India are often
regarded as pro-Pakistan and in recent years have been looked upon with
suspicion as possible terrorists.
It is this perception that
lies behind the reluctance to recruit Muslims into the security forces
and the intelligence agencies.
It is estimated that the
number of Muslims in India's 1.1-million-strong army is only about 29,000.
Since 1947, there have been only three Muslim lieutenant-generals and
only eight major-generals, out of several hundred, points out Omar Khalidi,
author of Khaki and the Ethnic Violence in India. This is the same number
as that among Parsis and Jews, who are far smaller minorities in India.
"The reported exclusion
of Muslims from RAW isn't a surprise," said a retired bureaucrat.
"It is an extension of the systematic discrimination that Muslims
in India encounter whether it is in education, jobs or accessing bank
credit."
It appears that like RAW,
the Intelligence Bureau (IB) - the agency responsible for domestic intelligence
- was once reluctant to recruit Muslims. A change in its outlook came
in the early 1990s when it decided to recruit Muslim officers. Today,
the 12,000-strong IB has what has been termed "a handful"
of Muslim officers.
Will RAW go the IB's way
and open its doors to Muslims? Some RAW officials remain skeptical about
the loyalty of Muslims. "How can they be trusted to represent and
protect India's national interests when they are pro-Pakistan or when
their loyalty to the community of Muslims the world over is greater
than that to the country?" one RAW official asked this correspondent.
Other RAW operatives admit
that questioning the willingness of Muslims to represent India's interests
is unfair. They recognize that Muslims in the diplomatic corps have
done a great job in representing the country's interests. They admit
too that there are no doubts over the integrity and loyalty of Muslims
in the Indian security forces. And they are willing to admit that Muslims
in the IB played a big role in fighting the militancy in Kashmir.
There is growing awareness
within RAW too that it needs Muslim officers not just because that is
politically correct but because Muslims will be able to fill important
gaps in India's world view.
"They might be in a
better position to understand the Muslim mind and in gathering and interpreting
intelligence from Muslim countries," said an RAW officer. With
a major part of India's concerns today focused on the Muslim world,
"Muslim officers in RAW would be an asset", he added.
The two obstacles in the
way of RAW opening its doors to Muslims are the absence of clear direction
on the matter from the country's political leadership and the inertia
that has gripped the organization, preventing it from changing its old
ways.
It appears that in 2000,
when the government was revamping the security setup after the Kargil
conflict, the need for recruiting Muslims came up. According to Outlook,
a senior bureaucrat approached the then national security adviser, Brajesh
Mishra, with the idea of recruiting Muslims into the organizations that
were being set up. Mishra promised to look into it but nothing was done
to take the suggestion forward.
Officials say a policy rethink
on the issue of recruiting Muslims into RAW and deploying them as bodyguards
to VIPs is "an enterprise fraught with risk". It requires
someone to stick his neck out and make a bold decision.
"Since there is a possibility
that such a decision could go horribly wrong, nobody wants to take the
risk," said a Home Ministry official.
Sudha Ramachandran is an
independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
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