Forgotten faithful

The forgotten people of Mewat are idolising global terrorists- thats bad news for the government
Sanjay Kapoor

In Delhi's backyard, not too far away from where land has been allotted by the Haryana administration to Reliance industries to build their little kingdom autonomous of greasy inspectors or politicians seeking favours, live the community of Meos, sunk in misery, illiteracy and rampant unemployment. This is the ideal locale for setting up a venture that will be far removed from the world of the greedy political and administrative classes. The India that is here is far from shining. The Meos are low in the human development index.

This disturbing truth has found corroboration in a survey conducted by a NGO called SMART, which is an arm of Hardnews magazine, which seeks to use innovation to bring about transformation in such impoverished and deprived areas. The survey involved 80,000 households (approximately 6 lakh people) and was conducted for the Haryana government. The data is still being analysed, but an impressionistic analysis of the survey reveals that there is a problem staring at the government and the development paradigms that it has followed in the last many years.

Most of the people surveyed were either unemployed, daily wagers or agriculturalists. On an average every illiterate Muslim family had six to eight children. The illiterate Hindu families are no different. The numbers of children in a family only fell when the head of the family was either in a government job or educated. Majority of the school-going children from Muslim families went to madrassas as they believe that the study of Quran is more important than secular education. Due to this reason, children routinely drop out from government aided schools as they are not able to understand the use of modern education.

Girls are routinely married off before they attain puberty. It is impossible to see any young girl walking on village roads who is young and not married. The survey showed that in many cases the mother and the married daughter would be pregnant at the same time. Some surveyors encountered women who had lost count of the children they had given birth to. “We do not know how many children I have. We do not count them”.

The villages are teeming with people. Here unemployment is rampant and men are either found hanging out at village corners either smoking communal hookahs or staring at strangers. They are deeply suspicious of any new ideas or initiatives. The net result of this closed environment that no government programmes really succeed. But some interesting things are happening in the community that should worry the government and even United States of America. They are idolising all those who have been declared by Indian government and the international community as “criminals”, “militants” and “terrorists”. Evidence: there are thousands of children who have been named after Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Dawood Ibrahim, and Anis Ibrahim. The interesting thing is that many of them have picked up these names without watching television or reading a newspaper. Television and movies are banned in most of the homes that practise an orthodox, almost Talibani, version of Islam. Quite evidently, some one is stirring the anti-US pot in areas where global Islam is still an alien concept.