By Kashif-ul-Huda, TwoCircles.net
An RTI query filed by the Times of India revealed that 10.6% of Gujarat police personnel are Muslims. Thus they are slightly better represented in the police force with 9.1% share in the state population. This is good news since a representative police is one way to address the feeling of insecurity that is one of the major concerns of Gujarati Muslims. But a closer look at the data reveal that Muslims are sparsely represented at higher ranks of police hierarchy and postings at lower level is highly skewed towards a few districts and departments.
Muslims in Gujarat Police: Sparsely represented at higher ranks.
A 2007 list of Sub-Inspectors (SI) available at Gujarat Police website reveals 6.8% Muslims at the SI level. We found 7.3% Muslim names in an undated list of class 2 officers. The number of Muslim officers drops significantly as we move higher with only 4.7% in a list of about 400 class 1 officers prepared in 2012.
The 2007 list is very interesting because it has a large number of mid-level ranked officers (Sub-Inspectors) and identify each person with name, religion, caste, education-level, native place, and posting, etc. This list is used for the analysis in this article.
We find that 217 Muslims are there in the list of 3190 names of Sub-Inspectors. Out of which 198 Muslims belong to the Muslim General category, 18 are from the OBC category and only one in Scheduled Tribe category. That is 91% Muslims are from General category, 8% from OBC category and less than half percent from ST category.
Over one third of all Muslims sub-inspectors are posted in the districts of Ahmedabad, Vadodra, and Surat. This is interesting because only 18% of Muslim recruits come from these three districts. About 20% of Muslim recruits then find place in CID Crime Branch, Anti-Corruption Bureau, Railways, and Intelligence department.
| Postings | # of Muslims | % of total Muslims |
| AHMEDABAD | 30 | 13.8% |
| VADODARA | 23 | 10.6% |
| SURAT | 19 | 8.8% |
| C.I.D. CRIME | 17 | 7.8% |
| A.C.B. | 11 | 5.1% |
| W. RLY. VADODARA | 9 | 4.1% |
| INTELLIGENCE | 8 | 3.7% |
If we look at Muslim representation in individual departments we find Muslims are under-represented in all of them except in departments such as State Traffic (26% are Muslims), Western Railways Vadodra (13%), Police Training School Vadodra (20%), Anti-Corruption Bureau (11%), and most importantly CID Crime (15.5%). There is no Muslim SI in Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) and only 8 among 176 are Muslims (4.5%) in the Intelligence Department.
While Gujarat Police should be congratulated for recruiting Muslims proportional to their population, it needs to do more in making sure they are represented in higher levels of leadership and responsibility within the organization.
Link:
TCN series on Gujarat: http://twocircles.net/Special-Reports/gujarat.html
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Kamrun Nehar helped in the data analysis for this report.