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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Rajinder Sachar (1923-2018) helped puncture the myth of Muslim appeasement in India -Ajaz Ashraf

Rajinder Sachar (1923-2018) helped puncture the myth of Muslim appeasement in India -Ajaz Ashraf

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published Published on Apr 22, 2018   modified Modified on Apr 22, 2018
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The former Delhi High Court chief justice chaired the committee that wrote a landmark report on the status of Muslims in India.

There are many reasons to remember Justice Rajinder Sachar, who died in Delhi at the age of 95, on April 20. He was a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, a civil rights activist proud of his socialist credentials, and a man whose instinct it was to take on the establishment. This trait was surprising as he belonged to a prominent political family: his father, Bhim Sen Sachar, was twice the chief minister of Punjab, for eight months in 1949, and then between April 1952 and January 1956.

Rajinder Sachar’s anti-establishment streak first became visible when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was scheduled to have breakfast at the Punjab chief minister’s residence. Sachar senior, in an excited tone, broke the news to his son, presumably expecting him to be keen to share a meal with the charismatic prime minister. The son was not impressed. Let alone breakfast, Sachar said he would walk out of the house when Nehru’s entered. “Rajinder Sachar joined the Socialist Party at its inception in 1948,” recalled Prem Singh, president of the Socialist Party, which was revived in 2011, among others, by Sachar. “The Congress was consequently his ideological opponent. He would narrate this incident to us and chuckle and say, ‘It would have done me no harm to have breakfast with Nehru.’”

The importance of the Sachar report

The delectable anecdotes and inspiring stories about Sachar’s fight for justice pale in comparison to the debate that was triggered because of the report he prepared as chairperson of the Prime Minister’s High-Level Committee on the Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim community in India. Published in 2006, it became known as the Rajinder Sachar Committee report. It was a statistical and sociological marvel, praised all around for quantifying the socio-economic status of the Muslim community and its rich diversity.

In effect, the Sachar report punctured the myth of Muslim appeasement. No longer could anyone accuse the Indian state of favouring Muslims: the report showed that they lagged behind other communities, barring the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, on just about every socio-economic index. On some indices, such as education and government employment, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were actually ahead of Muslims by a margin. Muslims constituted just 3.2% of all officers in the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Police Service and the Indian Foreign Service. The findings came as a shock to the nation.

The report also busted the stereotype of the Muslim community being a monolith. In a chapter titled The Muslim OBCs and Affirmative Action, the report showed that the community was as riven by caste as any, and that there were remarkable differences between North Indian Muslims and their counterparts in the South. Muslims had progressed in those parts of South India where they had been the beneficiaries of reservations for many years.

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Scroll.in, 22 April, 2018, https://scroll.in/article/876399/rajinder-sachar-1923-2018-helped-puncture-the-myth-of-muslim-appeasement-in-india


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