A Statistician's Childhood in Two Schools
Abusaleh Shariff, the economist and demographer who served as the principal data expert on the Sachar Committee, traces his interest in Hindu-Muslim comparison to a village childhood in Karnataka. Born in 1952, he was the only Muslim child in his settlement sent by his father, an Urdu schoolteacher, to attend a Kannada-language government school in the mornings before walking to the Urdu school that began at 11. He ate breakfast most days at the home of a Hindu farming family nearby, since his own school day began before his household woke. "That environment brought the communities together in my mind, whether Hindu or Muslim, as a child," he says — an early, lived comparison that he says predates by decades the more formal one the Sachar Committee would later produce for the nation.
The Data Nobody Wanted Collected
After his master's degree in economics, Shariff spent years as a field investigator, walking door to door in Karnataka villages collecting household survey data — a job, he notes, few other Muslims of his background could do, since it required literacy in Kannada. That fieldwork led him, almost by accident, into a lifelong specialisation: comparing Hindu and Muslim households on the same government datasets. His first published paper on the subject, on widow remarriage patterns, found that Muslim widows in India remarried far more often, and far faster, than Hindu widows — a finding he presented, as one of the only Muslims in the room, at a seminar hosted by a prominent Hindu temple in Karnataka, for which he was awarded a silver medal. He extended the same method to household decision-making, finding that Muslim women, despite living under purdah, exercised more independent authority within nuclear Muslim households — measured in things as concrete as how quickly a mother could get an injured child to a doctor — than Hindu women typically could within larger joint-family structures. "The status of women among Muslims in India, including in UP and Bihar, is better than how Hindu women are treated among Hindus in India," he says, a claim he has published and defended since the 1970s.
Layered onto this was a structural discovery about the government's own statistical categories. India's official surveys maintained separate columns for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, because the constitution grants them explicit protections, but had no equivalent category for Muslims, who were folded into an undifferentiated "Hindu and all others" bucket. Working through decades of household data, Shariff found a persistent 20 to 25 percent gap between Hindus, once Dalits were excluded from the comparison, and Muslims, on measures from education to income — a gap he calls a "systemic bias" that predates and outlasts any single government. Openly comparing "Hindu" and "Muslim" data was, for most of his career, treated as close to taboo: raising the comparison in a seminar at Jamia Millia Islamia or Jawaharlal Nehru University, he says, could draw accusations of communalism or anti-national sentiment, even though it happens informally in every Indian village and mohalla every day.
That early comfort with the comparison carried Shariff into national visibility well before Sachar. In 1999, he contributed the Muslim chapters to an India Human Development Report, funded by the United Nations, that then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee personally released at Vigyan Bhavan — data Vajpayee, whom Shariff came to consider something close to a friend, later cited and discussed with him at length, including asking directly about madrasa enrolment. Shariff told him then, using data he had generated years earlier, that only three to four percent of eligible Muslim children attended madrasas at all, with the remaining 96 percent in the general school system — a figure, he notes, that had already circulated well before it later became closely associated with the Sachar Committee itself. He recalls telling Vajpayee separately that an Indian Muslim "will steal, will cheat, will break the law — but he will not go anti-national," because his whole family and future are rooted in the country; he says he has repeated the same argument, including to Manmohan Singh, as the one conviction that keeps him personally invested in the community's cause despite describing himself as an Indian first and a Muslim by birth second. It is also, in his account, why Manmohan Singh ultimately framed the Sachar Committee not as a minority-appeasement exercise but as what Shariff calls "a report of nation-building" — comparable, he says, to no other government report before or since in the sheer volume of public debate it generated.
A Phone Call from the Prime Minister's House
In 1996, Shariff published what he describes as independent India's first systematic academic comparison of Hindu-Muslim socio-economic and demographic indicators, in the Economic and Political Weekly. The paper was read widely enough in policy circles that it earned him an invitation to lecture at Harvard's Kennedy School. Years later, when a related op-ed of his ran in the Times of India — around 2005 — arguing that the government should commission a white paper on the true state of India's Muslim population, he received a call at ten that same morning from the Prime Minister's Office. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whom Shariff had not previously known well, invited him for coffee, said he had been thinking along similar lines, and asked him to help build an expert team. That conversation became the Sachar Committee, chaired by Justice Rajinder Sachar and built around a small group Shariff assembled for their technical rigour: the sociologist T.K. Oommen, the IIM Ahmedabad economist Rakesh Basant, the statistician Abdul Basit, and Jamia Hamdard's Syed Hamid, with contributions including a chapter on internal Muslim social stratification — OBC and non-OBC divisions within the community — from the Jamia Millia scholar Azra Razzack.
The Fight for the Numbers
Assembling the data was not straightforward. Every state government and central ministry was formally instructed by the Prime Minister's Office to cooperate, and Shariff says only two points of real friction arose. Gujarat, then under Chief Minister Narendra Modi, was, he notes pointedly, the first state to supply its data; West Bengal's government was the last, doing so only after Shariff says he threatened publicly, on television, to name the state for withholding it. The sharpest fight was with the defence establishment, when Shariff sought data on Muslim enrolment across the armed forces. The request became a public controversy, reaching all the way to the President's office, with newspapers accusing him of trying to "communalise" the army; Justice Sachar himself asked Shariff to explain his letters before ultimately backing him. Formal data was refused — then-Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee told him directly it would not be provided officially — but Shariff says the same figures reached him informally a few months later, before the report was completed.
What a Government Would Rather Not Count
Shariff is reluctant to relitigate the report's specific numbers, which are publicly available, but he is emphatic about their overall shape: across competitive government recruitment — the IAS, IIT admissions, similar entry points — Muslims made up roughly 4 percent of successful candidates against a population share of around 15 percent, even after accounting for the fact that Muslim applicants also applied in visibly lower numbers relative to their population. He argues the underrepresentation numbers put Muslim deprivation on the same empirical footing as Dalit deprivation, which is part of why, he recalls, Dalit political leaders such as the Republican Party's Ramdas Athawale greeted the report's release enthusiastically — garlanding Shariff personally — because it gave their own community's data comparative visibility as well, even though the Sachar Committee's mandate covered only Muslims.
"The Answer Is Not a Quota"
Despite the report's fame for documenting deprivation, Shariff insists it never recommended caste-style reservation for Muslims — a fact he says is widely misunderstood even by Muslims themselves. He recalls, not long after the report's submission to Parliament, watching a crowd of thousands march through Delhi's Connaught Place chanting for the government to "give Sachar Committee quota," despite the word never appearing in its 100-plus recommendations. As an economist, he argues reservation would have created only a "private good" — benefiting the small number of applicants who obtain the handful of available government jobs, which represent a shrinking share of India's overall employment — rather than a "public good" that improves conditions broadly across the community. Instead, the committee's central recommendations were a Diversity Index, developed with the demographer Amitabh Kundu, that would measure and then incentivise — through tax breaks or special funding, rather than mandates — greater inclusion of Muslims, Christians and Dalits across universities, districts, states and even private companies; and a permanent Equal Opportunity Commission, later elaborated in a separate committee chaired by N.R. Madhava Menon, meant to function as an ongoing, evidence-based platform for monitoring and debating exclusion, rather than leaving the issue to resurface only once a decade.
Shariff pairs this argument for state incentives with a pointed critique of the Muslim community's own institutions, particularly the mosque. He argues Indian mosques, unlike gurdwaras, function as spaces people enter and leave for prayer without any embedded structure for community organising, and that they have compounded the problem by effectively excluding women — half of the community — from a shared communal institution, and by failing to update their public messaging (delivered through Friday sermons) to address present-day concerns such as health, education access or skill development. He argues this runs contrary to the Prophet's own practice of using communal gathering spaces for what he calls community development, and proposes concrete fixes: attaching an anganwadi-style childcare centre to every mosque, steering Muslim families toward government rather than costly private schools, and publicising government skill-development programmes that go largely unused in Muslim neighbourhoods simply because no one has told residents the funding and training exist.
Answering the "Appeasement" Charge
Shariff pushes back forcefully on the political framing of the Sachar report as an "appeasement" document, noting that even when the BJP government came to power in 2014, no official body formally repudiated it: the report remains, in his words, "a valid policy document," submitted to and accepted by Parliament, still downloadable from an Indian government website, never withdrawn. He points out that Narendra Modi, as prime minister, referenced a subsequent, related report by Amitabh Kundu three times in public remarks, and argues that anyone who wishes to dispute the Sachar findings has one honest option: commission a rival study with rival data, rather than simply declaring the numbers void. "How will you reject it?" he asks. "You'll have to write another book, and in it you'll have to disprove the figures."
Numbers as a Kind of Faith
Shariff closes by drawing a line between political anger and loyalty to the state itself, arguing Indian Muslims should acknowledge real victimisation without adopting what he calls a victimhood psychology, and insisting — as he says he once told Manmohan Singh directly — that an Indian Muslim, whatever his other faults, will not turn anti-national, because his entire life, his family and his future are rooted in India. For him, the deeper legacy of the Sachar Committee is less any specific recommendation than a discipline: that once a government's own numbers are gathered, verified and published, they become close to impossible to wish away. "That is something essential," he says of the underlying data — a fact, once measured honestly, that no political movement can simply talk its way out of.
Discussion
0Readers only · Comments are reviewed by the desk before they appear
The journalism is free for everyone — create a free account to join the discussion.