The move by the Gujarat State Education Board demanding Muslim students appearing for board examinations to disclose their religious identity has added to the anxieties of an already demonised and marginalised community.
Ahmedabad Mirror last Friday reported that the Gujarat State Higher Education Board (GSHEB), which conducts the 10th and 12th standard board examination has been requiring Muslim students to declare their religious identity in the registration form. The State Board’s problematic policy is a dangerous precedent, part of an ominous design since students belonging to other religious minorities are not required to specify their religious identity.
Given the unclear intentions behind this practice, it has led to increased suspicion that it is intended to profile Muslim students for heightened surveillance of them and their families. It is particularly terrifying for the Muslims of Gujarat to participate in this exercise since the allegations regarding the circulation of voters list with home addresses to the rioting mobs during the 2002 communal violence are abundant.
A convenient argument can be that this data is being gathered to help disburse scholarships to Muslim students. At best, this claim is dubious given the controversial track record of the Gujarat government when it comes to financial assistance to close to 55,000 poor students from religious minorities, including Muslims. For example, in 2008, Gujarat became the only state to oppose the pre-matriculation scholarship scheme for students belonging to low income groups from religious minorities. The UPA government had implemented the scheme in the wake of the Sachar Committee report, which had determined that Muslims were worse off than Schedule Castes (SCs) and Schedule Tribes (STs) in urban Gujarat.
The Gujarat government refused to implement the scheme on the grounds that it discriminated between the poor on religious lines . In 2013, when a five-judge Gujarat High Court bench directed the state government to implement the scheme, the state appealed the directive in the Supreme Court. The state government did not just challenge the scholarship scheme but also claimed in its submissions that the Sachar Committee was ‘unconstitutional’ and had been formed to ‘help Muslims only.
Why is a state government headed by the same ruling party, the BJP, willing to collect data of Muslims while having previously argued that pre-matriculation scholarship scheme for religious minorities violated fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution? To end all speculations about this measure, the state government and its education board must answer the following questions:
What is the exact objective of documenting religious details of only Muslim students among religious minorities appearing for board exams?
What steps have been taken to protect the data collected until now as AJ Shah, GSHSEB Chairman, also conceded that such data has been collected the last two years as well?
Which departments and officials have been allowed to access this data? Is there a record of those who have accessed the household level data of Muslim students appearing for board examinations until now?
The state’s history of encouraging discriminatory practices against the Muslim community has worsened their socio-economic backwardness and pushed them to the fringes of urban Gujarat in ghettoised neighbourhoods. In that sense, this move will only exacerbate the insecurity of Muslims in Gujarat, crystallising their lived experience of continuous, systemic neglect. (with courtesy, Ahmedabad Mirror)
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