[Reader-list] mini pakistan

Sat Jul 31 17:18:44 IST 2010

Dear all,

I would like the group to reflect upon the concept of 'mini Pakistan' ( in
India). this phrase is used sometimes to define Muslim ghettos so that
neutral people take side  about a communal issue.

precisely i want to know about your feelings when you hear it.

thanks,

Yunus

On 7/30/10, Javed <javedmasoo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Some people didn't believe in such a news when I posted earlier:
> -----------------
>
> The banking woes of an “excluded” community
> Vidya Subrahmaniam
>
> Banks have designated red zones where the vast majority of Muslim
> clusters fall. This fact is confirmed by the rash of banking-related
> complaints received by the National Commission for Minorities.
>
> A little over a year ago, Ali Arshad, a resident of Okhla in Delhi,
> went to a well-known private sector bank to open a bank account. He
> thought his case would be fast-tracked because he had a banking
> background, he worked with a well-known investment and brokerage
> company and he had the necessary documents: A passport, a pan card and
> a house rent agreement notorised on stamp paper.
>
> He still has not heard from the bank. The manager of the branch
> informally told him that his passport showed a Patna address and the
> bank did not accept rent agreement as proof of residence. The Hindu
> checked the website of the bank and found that the bank did accept
> house rent agreement as proof of residence. A call placed to the bank
> confirmed that a passport (proof of identity) and a rent agreement
> (proof of residence) were enough to start a bank account.
>
> Mr. Arshad finally opened a salary account with a bank that had his
> company's corporate account. “The bank could not refuse me because I
> came as a package,” Mr. Arshad says. He attributes his banking
> difficulties to the fact that he stays in Muslim-concentrated Okhla,
> an unofficial red zone for banks. Indeed, in the Muslim belt of Okhla,
> Zakir Nagar and Batla House stories abound of residents not being able
> to open bank accounts and of banks turning down their loan
> applications. The situation, residents say, has got worse after the
> September 2008 killing of two alleged terrorists in Batla House.
> “Landlords here refuse to give residence proof documentation for fear
> of being tracked down,” says Hasan Shuja, editor of Urdu daily
> Sahafat. Mr. Shuja, who has gone from bank to bank looking for a loan
> to expand his business, says, “I gave them all possible documentation
> but to no avail. But not just Delhi, you will hear the same thing
> wherever Muslims are in large numbers.”
>
> The sense of “exclusion” among Mr. Shuja and others has only
> heightened with recent reports that in Andhra Pradesh alone as many as
> 90,000 Muslims students were unable to open bank accounts to deposit
> their scholarship cheques. The complaints were received by the State
> Minorities Commission which, in turn, referred them to the National
> Commission for Minorities in Delhi. The Ministry of Minorities has
> since taken up the matter with the State's Chief Secretary. The
> puzzling thing here is that banks have shown the audacity to turn away
> students despite a standing RBI circular instructing them to open
> basic, no-frills accounts for people from deprived categories.
>
> At the NCM, officials cannot cope with Muslim complaints relating to
> banking. The Commission receives an average of five banking complaints
> a day from across the country, with most complainants recording
> specific details of discrimination. The NCM recently intervened to
> have a dismissed Muslim official of a leading private sector bank
> reinstated. The official was found to have been falsely accused of
> fraud.
>
> Up until the Sachar Committee report, which conclusively established
> unacceptable levels of Muslim deprivation, there were not many takers
> for Muslim-specific banking complaints which were typically dismissed
> as an exaggeration. The other commonly held perception was that
> Muslims were averse to banking because of religious injunctions
> against receiving interest.
>
> Several significant findings emerged in the investigations of the
> Sachar Committee which analysed access to Priority Sector Advances
> (farm sector, small-scale industries and small advances to weaker
> sections) across Socio Religious Communities. To start with, banks
> confirmed the existence of “red zones” where they offered minimal
> services. Says Abusaleh Shariff, who was member-secretary with the
> committee: “We did not use the term discrimination in the report but
> we did find banks to be unacceptably insensitive. They accepted that
> they don't like to provide services in the red zones. Unfortunately,
> most of the areas where Muslims live fall in the red zones.”
>
> The committee was also able to bust the myth that Muslims were against
> banking. Muslims held a 12 per cent share in PSA bank accounts which
> was rather low considering the high concentration of Muslims in
> socially and economically deprived sections. Nonetheless, as Mr.
> Shariff points out, the figure established that given a chance Muslims
> opened bank accounts.
>
> The committee's third major finding was that Muslims did not easily
> get loans. The community's share of outstanding PSAs was pathetic —
> only 4.6 per cent as against a population share of 13.4 per cent. The
> ratio of loans to population was even worse in the Minority
> Concentration Districts. In 44 such districts, where the Muslim share
> of the population was 33 per cent, their share of PSAs was an abysmal
> 7.9 per cent. The share of other minorities, who together constituted
> two per cent of the population, was 3.7 per cent. In 11 of these
> districts, where the Muslim share of the population was 51.4 per cent,
> their share of PSAs was 12.9 per cent. With a 1.2 per cent share of
> the population in the same districts, other minorities received 3. 4
> per cent of PSAs while Hindus, who formed 47.4 per cent of the
> population, got a PSA share of 63.1 per cent. Over all, other
> minorities fared twice as well as Muslims in the priority sector.
>
> When the UPA government came to power in 2004, one of its early
> priorities was to address the “development deficit” among Muslims. It
> recast the old 15-point Minority Welfare Programme and established a
> time-frame for programme-specific interventions. It set up a Ministry
> of Minority Affairs (MMA), following it up with the first-ever
> exhaustive study of the community's social, economic and educational
> status. Simultaneously, it started a programme of financial inclusion
> through the Reserve Bank. The RBI's charter, reiterated through
> repeated circulars, included expanding access to banking through “nil
> balance, no frills” accounts as well as smoothening credit flow to
> Muslims.
>
> Six years later, the government, and the MMA in particular, are still
> battling systemic resistance to minority welfare. This situation is
> despite the ministry's exemplary commitment and overall vision.
> Ministry sources say that with each year, they are getting closer to
> reaching the target, exceeding it in some programmes such as the award
> of scholarship. And yet it has been literally a case of inching
> forward. Take the National Minorities Development And Finance
> Corporation established 17 years ago. In all this time, it has
> disbursed loans only to 5.39 lakh minority beneficiaries. A drop in
> the ocean for a Muslim population of over 130 million.
>
> The MMA points out that as against this dismal figure, the corporation
> achieved a target of 1.46 beneficiaries in 2009-2010. However, the
> ministry had to move mountains for this, as the States, with some
> exceptions, simply would not cough up their share of 26 per cent to
> the scheme. For instance, Uttar Pradesh has so far contributed only 7
> per cent (Rs. 7 crore) of its share of 26 per cent (Rs. 44 crore). The
> Ministry offered to set up a separate fund for strengthening the state
> channels for disbursal. “Not one State has responded to our offer,”
> said a top ministry source. In the 90 Minority Concentration
> Districts, too, progress has been uneven, with development plans going
> back and forth and the States not being quick with their feedback.
> Need to black list errant banks
>
> The MMA was patting itself on the back for its success in the
> scholarship scheme when reports came in of banks refusing to open
> scholarship accounts for Muslim students. The ministry has swiftly
> moved to address the problem but the news has understandably upset the
> community. As politician Abdul Khaliq remarked: “This situation will
> not change unless Muslim representation in banking staff goes up. And
> government must black list errant banks and punish the guilty
> officers.”
>
> http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article540507.ece
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
> subscribe in the subject header.
> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>

-- 

Change is the only constant in life !