Nominations at NCM flawed

The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) was established amidst a growing perception that despite safeguards provided in the Indian Constitution, there was a feeling of inequality and discrimination within the minorities.

While the present NCM was established and given statutory powers in 1993, its existence dates back to 1978 with the setting up of a Minorities Commission by the then Janata Party government. The Commission conducts surveys and research on the issue of development of minorities, monitors the constitutional mandate of protection and non-discrimination towards minorities and makes recommendations to the state and central governments for social and economic development of minority communities.

Initially related to the concerns of five religious minorities (Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Parsis), its mandate was later expanded to look into issues concerning linguistic minorities also.

The recognition that a democratic polity should be extra cautious in treating its minorities was a welcome step. However, almost two decades since becoming a statutory body, the NCM has not been able to carve out a distinct identity for itself. It has not been able to project itself as a serious and effective body fighting for the rights of minorities in India.

The reasons for this non-visibility are many but most importantly have to do with the very organizational setup of the Commission itself. The NCM Act envisages that the Chairperson and members of the Commission shall be nominated by the government. Nominated members are hardly expected to speak their mind or to take up issues which might hurt the interest of the powers that be. As a result, critical voices from within different minorities have been kept at bay when it comes to nominating members of the Commission. It will be much better that the members are chosen by a collegiate of civil rights activists rather than be nominated by the government. Only then perhaps can the Commission call  itself an autonomous body and function independently.
One only has to look at the silence of NCM during the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom to understand what is being argued here. The present demand of the NCM that it be granted constitutional status will not make the commission effective till its members are chosen without any government interference.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the NCM currently is a toothless body. While it does have the powers of a civil court, its demands for penal powers have fallen on deaf years. It is only commonsense to understand that in the absence of powers to inquire and investigate, the Commission will not be taken seriously by those who have played with the lives of Muslims and Christians in this country.

The NCM should have been the vanguard of pushing new ideas towards integrating minority communities. Instead, most of the big ticket ideas on the question of minority inclusion have come from elsewhere. The Sachar Committee Report came from the Prime Minister’s Office while the impetus of creating an Equal Opportunity Commission came from the Ministry of Minority Affairs.

To be fair, the NCM raises the pitch when it comes to violence against minorities such as witnessed recently in Assam. But that clearly is not enough. As a nodal agency looking into the affairs of minorities, it needs to come with out-of-the-box ideas about their inclusion and set the agenda for other allied ministries to follow.

The NCM actually ends up doing the opposite. Shorn of ideas, it is forced to adopt others’ reports as its own. Thus the Commission has almost adopted the Sachar Committee as its own and one of its very important works is to remind various government bodies of implementing the Sachar Committee Report!

However, even here seriousness is lacking as some of important recommendations of the Sachar Committee are not even talked about by the NCM. To give one example, the Sachar Committee found out that an inordinately large number of seats that were reserved for SCs were constituencies with a substantial Muslim presence. In the wake of declining Muslim political representation, this was a serious issue which should have been looked into by the NCM. Yet, there is hardly anything on paper to suggest that it has taken up the issue with the seriousness that it deserves.

Similarly, the recommendation of the Sachar Committee to create a central Wakf administration has been languishing. The total Wakf property in India is estimated to the tune of Rs 120 billion. If managed properly, this will go a long way in ameliorating the pitiable economic condition of Muslims. A bill to overhaul the Wakf system is languishing in Parliament since 2010. One would like to ask the NCM as to what it has done in this regard? If nothing else, the least it could have done was to hold consultations with various stakeholders and helped in creating an atmosphere for a consensus to emerge on the bill.

Nothing like this has happened at all. Similarly the fate of Equal Opportunity Commission, which would deepen Indian democracy by re-defining the scope and ambit of affirmative action for weaker sections and minorities, hangs in abeyance and all the NCM is telling us that things will become effective only when it gets a constitutional status! The fate of the communal violence bill is also doomed as there has been no action on it after the parliamentary debate.

One would like to know what the NCM is doing about these important issues. It appears that the NCM is hamstrung on the one hand by government’s silent opposition to this important institution getting any effective power, and on the other hand by its inability to do something concrete. It must realise that the best option is to work within the system rather than hope for the system to change and then start working.

It is not that the NCM has not made any contribution. Its report on the inclusion of Dalit Muslims and Christians within the ambit of Scheduled Castes was praised for its meticulous research and it became any eye opener for the outside world to realise the existence of Dalits within the so called ‘egalitarian religions’. It is only through such patient work that they can document and position the issue of minorities on the national agenda. And there is a possibility, that through such exemplary works, the establishment would start taking them seriously and then the question of whether the NCM has penal powers or not would simply become irrelevant.

(Arshad Alam is Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU)