With Assembly elections round the corner, political parties are vying with one another to boost their “Muslim friendly” image. An important part of this exercise has been one-upmanship between the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secualar) on who can take credit for providing reservation in education and employment to the community.
In the process, two factors are getting obfuscated. Firstly, Muslim reservation dates back to pre-Independence days though it has seen many ups and downs since then. Secondly, reservation has always been accorded for educational and social backwardness and not on religious lines, contrary to what the tenor of political rhetoric will lead one to believe.
Before Independence
The Muslim community was given reservation as a backward class way back in 1921, following the recommendations of the Justice Miller Committee, appointed by the then Maharaja of Mysore in 1918. As writer and journalist and former MLC Quazi Arshed Ali points out in his book Karnataka Muslims and Electoral Politics , this continued till Independence.
What we see in post-Independence period is a series of efforts to include Muslims under sections of the backward classes quota, punctuated by court cases.
The first in the series was the R. Nagana Gowda Commission, which submitted its report in 1961 and brought Muslims under the backward classes list. It identified more than 10 castes within Muslims as most backward. A Government Order, issued based on the recommendations in 1962, was challenged in the court.
This resulted in the issue being kept under suspension between 1962 and 1973. It came back to life in 1975 when D. Devaraj Urs, the then Chief Minister and the first from a non-Lingayat and non-Vokkaliga community, set up the Havanur Commission.
The Devaraj Urs government passed an order in 1977 providing reservation to Muslims under other backward classes (OBCs). This was challenged in the High Court, which upheld the order, but it was subsequently questioned in the Supreme Court. The apex court in 1983 directed the government to set up another commission to review the backward classes list.
Interestingly, the Venkataswamy Commission, set up in 1984, recommended exclusion of Vokkaligas and some Lingayats sects from backward classes list, but suggested continuation of reservation for Muslims. This resulted in protests by Vokkaligas, and the commission report was not accepted.
Yet another commission, headed by O. Chinnappa Reddy, was constituted in 1990, which again said Muslims were a backward community. Based on this, the government issued an order in 1994 to include Muslims under Category II. Another order was issued fixing Muslim quota at 6 per cent under Category II (B), along with Buddhists and Christians.
Mandal case
However, the same year the Mandal case resulted in fixing the maximum ceiling for all reservations at 50 per cent, which meant capping backward classes reservation at 27 per cent. In the process of trimming down all quotas, the Muslim quota too was fixed at 4 per cent in Category II (B) and a Government Order passed in 1995. The same norm prevails to this day.
It may be recalled here that attempts by Andhra Pradesh to provide reservation to Muslims as a religious category fell through because religion-based reservation is not provided in the Constitution. But a series of commissions at the Central and State levels have unequivocally acknowledged that a majority of Muslim community should be given reservation on grounds of educational, social and economic backwardness.
