By TwoCircles.net News Desk,
New Delhi: The Jamia Millia Islamia is organizing a two-day National Seminar on 17-18 November, 2009, on Muslim Alienation: Manifestation and Challenges. The seminar will be inaugurated by Abusaleh Shariff, Member Secretary of PM’s High Level Committee to prepare a report on “Social, Economic and Educational Status of Muslim Community in India.”
Sponsored by the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the seminar will have keynote address from Prof. T.K Oommen, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, JNU, and Member, Sachar Committee. The other speakers include: Prof. Imtiaz Ahmad, Asghar Ali Engineer, Zakia Soman, Prashant Bhushan, Dr. Manzoor Alam, Prof. Anand Kumar, Prof. Zoya Hasan, Prof. Anwar Alam, Ram Puniyani, Prof. Javeed Alam, Tanveer Fazal, and Adnan Farooqui.
Muslims constitute the second largest religious group in India and thus the largest religious minority. The 2001 census enumerated India’s Muslim population at over 138 million. After the partition of the country in 1947, most of the Muslims decided to stay in the country despite large-scale killing and violence. Those who remained in India boldly faced the onslaught of communal violence which still looms large in some parts of the country. Periodic anti-Muslim riots and pogroms have generated the process of ghettoisation — shifting of communities from areas inhabited by the dominant community — among the Muslims in search of their life and property. Although ghettoisation of communities is not a new phenomenon, after the 2002 Gujarat carnage the polarization of communities along religious lines has become more manifest.