JEDDAH, 11 November 2003 — A leading Urdu journalist has urged Muslims to enter into strategic pre-election alliances with regional parties. “Coalition politics offers Muslims the best chance ever to increase their political leverage,” said Zahid Ali Khan, editor in chief of Hyderabad’s oldest Urdu daily Siyasat.
He said regional parties were more receptive to the needs of Muslims and singled out Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party, Laloo Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal and Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party as examples. “These parties have done more for Muslims in recent times than the Congress party has done during its four decades in power... We have had Congress rule — both at the center and in the states — but Muslims did not get anything substantial from that association,” he told Arab News during a recent visit to the Kingdom.
Khan, who took a leading part in providing relief and rehabilitation to those traumatized by the riots in Gujarat, said Muslims needed to concentrate on education to avoid “future Gujarats.” “Merely constructing houses for the riot-affected is not enough. We need to have a cohesive and a long-term plan to promote education in the community. That unfortunately is not happening.”
He blasted the rush among educated Muslims to force their children into studying only medicine or engineering. “I fail to understand the craze for the two professions. The community needs IAS and IPS officers, scientists, journalists and biotechnologists.” He advised non-resident Indians (NRIs) not to “buy” seats for their children in medical and engineering colleges back home in India. “They should let their children compete in the general category and get those seats for free. That way their children will learn to work hard to earn and then respect their degrees.”
Khan said NRIs were pushing their children into those professions even when these youngsters had no aptitude to compete. “I know of many cases where these students have taken more than eight years to complete a professional degree course of four years... This is a criminal waste of precious resources and it has got to be stopped.”
He also confessed he was frustrated over the lack of financial planning among Muslims in general and NRIs in particular. “They earn two lakh rupees here in the Kingdom and then blow four lakh rupees during their annual vacations. Things are not the same in India. If they are not going to save today, tomorrow will be too late,” he warned.
Khan asserted that Muslims must find ways to better integrate into Indian society so that with time they can increase their influence at all levels. One method to achieve this goal would be to embrace regional languages.
“Because they don’t speak regional languages Muslims have lost many opportunities to take up government jobs where knowledge of the state language is mandatory. Muslims have the wrong notion that learning the state language comes at the cost of their beloved Urdu. That is not the case. It is the requirement of the job market to learn the state language, and that should be embraced.” While some might worry that learning regional languages would diminish the strength of Urdu in India, Khan said Urdu was already so popular and well established that there is no cause for concern. “How else can we explain the rise in the readership of Urdu newspapers? Our circulation has increased ten-fold in the last decade. We have had a tremendous response to our Internet edition. We receive almost 50,000 hits everyday from the Kingdom alone,” he added.
