Posted on 11/28/2006 5:45:34 PM PST by samsonite
NEW DELHI, Nov. 24 — Even those who caution against “illusions of grandeur and power,” as the head of India’s governing coalition, Sonia Gandhi, did last week, cannot hide their sense of pride at the idea of India as a nation that extends the concessions of secular democracy to its many castes, creeds and faiths.
Yet that notion has come under some strain in recent days, with an official panel having concluded that Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, are “lagging behind” on most things that matter.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s office, which is reviewing the report, summarized the panel’s biting conclusion this way: “The community is relatively poor, more illiterate, has lower access to education, lower representation in public- and private-sector jobs and lower availability of bank credit for self-employment. In urban areas, the community mostly lives in slums characterized by poor municipal infrastructure.”
Muslims make up roughly 13 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion, and their numbers are nearly equal to the entire population of Pakistan, which was carved out of British India nearly 60 years ago as the homeland of the subcontinent’s Muslims. Soul-searching about Muslim rights and well-being in this country, which has witnessed periodic outbreaks of religious violence, has been a recurrent leitmotif ever since.
The latest findings have prompted fresh debate. In an editorial in The Indian Express, an English-language daily, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the president of the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, suggested that the government’s panel had revealed “the hollowness of our concept of republican citizenship.”
“What is at stake,” Mr. Mehta said, “is not just uplifting this or that group, but the very idea of India itself: whether it has the capacity for transcending the cant, indifference and identity traps that have brought us to this pass.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I always wanted to be a Brahma.
Except in the USA (where Muslim immigrants tend to be far above the Muslim norm in educational and professional aspiration and achievement), the Satanic Death Cult "lags behind" everywhere because it cultivates mindless fatalism, lethargy, backwardness, and ignorance in its devotees.
I've always considered Muslims to be at the bottom of the evolutionary, not social, ladder. All they're good for is death, disease, poverty, and misery.
Putting a religion as fanatical as extremist Islam ahead of yourself leads to destruction. Not just mentally, but economically and socially. But that is to be expected. What matters is the life after death. Who cares what happens in this world.
Islamic culture does not value work. It values fighting and pillage. Where they are prevented from pillaging, they are poor
Well if this isn't news to blow yourself up for, I don't know what is.
In their current mindset, they are cockroaches whose only goal in life appears to be wiping out those not like them.
i.e. LOSERS.
Being at the bottom in India is pretty low. Of course, it's not too surprising that they get beat out by cows, but I think in India, they may be below the hogs, as well.
Oh cry me a river. /sarc
LOL.
I disagree. I don't think Muslims get beat by cows is a bad thing in India. Cows' status is far above anybody.
Now, getting beat by hogs is pretty bad.
It's hard to want to be social with someone that wants to chop your head off and post a video of it on the internet.
From what I've heard on Christian talk radio, if there's an oppressed class
in India...it's the "untouchables" (dalits).
Some are converting to Christianity and have caught some flak for that.
But maybe things are looking up for them.
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/100000.dalit.christians.to.attend.world.religious.freedom.day.rally.in.india/7943.htm
I've said before that if the palestinians had put the effort that they have expended digging smuggling tunnels into productive work they would have struck oil by now (saudi arabia's, but oil nonetheless).
Wow.
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