JEDDAH, 2 June 2006 — Senior Congress leader and a strong proponent of Aligarh Muslim University’s minority character Wasim Ahmad yesterday welcomed the decision by doctors in India to call off their strike.
Doctors all over the country were protesting the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government’s decision to reserve 49.5 percent of seats in government-funded medical, engineering and other professional colleges educational institutions for lower-caste students.
Ahmad, who is in the Kingdom with Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, told Arab News that one particular section was behind the countrywide protests “because it felt its rights were being usurped.”
“We are not talking of usurping anybody’s rights. Instead we are talking about empowering everybody, especially the country’s weaker sections,” he said.
He said the Cabinet took the decision on the quota in January and the amendment was passed with the consent and full blessings of both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
“Soniaji has always stood up for the weaker sections and minorities and the quota move was one way of empowering the neglected sections,” he said.
Ahmad said coalition politics was here to stay.
“Regional parties will and are dictating terms. The secular regional parties have played a big role in marginalizing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In Delhi, however, Congress is playing a key part. It is the nucleus of all secular parties,” Ahmad said.
He felt the government was firmly entrenched in power.
“We fought the recent state elections against our own allies. Nothing happened. Of course, in a coalition there will be problems. But the problems are manageable. They are in no way life threatening. We have our differences with the leftists. And they have their own against us. Nobody will rock this coalition. We are already two years into the government and everything is intact. We have lost none of our allies,” he said.
Hailing Arjun Singh as a courageous leader, he said it was Singh who first took on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and cleaned the textbooks of all prejudiced content that had crept in during the previous government’s tenure.
“He then fought relentlessly for the minority character of the Aligarh Muslim University. This is for the first time that the government’s stand is in conformity with that of the university’s,” he said. “He has become the favorite of Aligarians throughout the world.”
Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah’s 35-minute meeting with Arjun Singh in Riyadh, he said, will add a new impetus to the relationship between the two important countries, he said.
Ahmad said Muslims have gained confidence in Congress “but a lot still needs to be done to make them feel part of the system. They need to be politically empowered. We have three more years and the party is fully alive to the needs of the Muslim community,” he added.
