Why Muslim-dominated seats are reserved for SCs?

By Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TwoCircles.net,

It’s like killing of two birds with one stone. Constitutional requirement for one community is fulfilled at the cost of the other. Seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes in legislative bodies in the country – a constitutional obligation – but it is done in effect by diminishing the Muslims representation in the very legislatures. It’s an irony that the very constitution debars Muslims from being included in the category of Scheduled Castes.

---

Support TwoCircles

---

There are scores of assembly and parliamentary constituencies across the country which are reserved for SCs though Muslim population in those constituencies far outnumbers the SCs. The charge of some design against Muslims gets stronger when one finds a number of seats unreserved (general) though SCs are majority community in those constituencies.

Six years back, the issue was highlighted by the Sachar Committee.
“Another issue emphasized before the Committee was that a number of Parliamentary and Assembly constituencies with substantial Muslim voter population are reserved for SCs while the SC population was not high there. Contrarily, constituencies with comparatively lesser Muslim voter population remain unreserved even though they have sizeable SC population,” says the Sachar Committee Report.

Attention of the Committee was drawn to the issue of Muslim concentration assembly constituencies being declared as ‘reserved’ constituencies where only SC candidates can contest elections. By this move, it was argued that Muslims are being systematically denied political participation.

The Sachar Committee went into the issue. While the Committee could not look into the issue of voter lists, an effort was made to ascertain the facts on the issue of reserved constituencies. “Our analysis relating to the reserved constituencies for the SC candidates in three states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal suggests that there is truth in the allegation,” reads the report.

“Data relating to the reserved constituencies for the SC candidates in three states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal was analysed by the Committee. These states have a relatively large share of the Muslim population in India. The data shows that constituencies which have been declared reserved for SCs by the Delimitation Commission in these three states are by and large those constituencies where Muslims live in greater numbers often more than 50 per cent as well as their proportion in the population is higher than that of SCs. On the other hand, there are quite a large number of other constituencies within the respective states, where the share of SCs is large, often closer to or even more than one half but these are declared as ‘un-reserved’. Arguably, this can be seen as discriminatory and certainly reduces the opportunities that Muslims have to get elected to democratic institutions,” the report further says.

List of Assembly constituencies with high population of Muslims but reserved for SCs and constituencies with high population of SCs but are unreserved

The Sachar Committee table is based on data from Election Commission of India, 2004 and Census of India, 2001.

It was suggested to the Committee that it would be more equitable to reserve those constituencies where voter population of SCs is high rather than those where it is low and, instead, Muslim presence is high.
And the Sachar Committee had recommended establishing a more rational procedure for delimitation of constituencies.

“The Committee also recommends the elimination of the anomalies with respect to reserved constituencies under the delimitation schemes discussed in Chapter 2. A more rational delimitation procedure that does not reserve constituencies with high minority population shares for SCs will improve the opportunity for the minorities, especially the Muslims, to contest and get elected to the Indian Parliament and the State Assemblies. Apart from these two initiatives it is important to evolve other methods to enhance political participation of the Community,” the Sachar Committee had recommended but it seems no step has been taken in this regard so far.