Old man and the state

Sir ? It was good to read about the ?Man who has seen three centuries? (June 12) ? Habib Miyan. But the story also pointed out a sad difference between us and the West. In the West, a person of Habib Miyan?s longevity would be treated as a valuable aid by researchers. They would study his eating habits, his lifestyle, his movements to provide a clue to a long life. Here, of course, nothing of the sort will happen. Instead, he has been roped in by the AIDS control organization, possibly to preach silly moralistic sermons about monogamous living. So much could have been done ? the government could have utilized the services of the gentleman to promote pulse polio vaccination, or malaria eradication, or oral diarrhoeal solution, since Habib Miyan belongs to times when polio, malaria and diarrhoea were the prime killers, while AIDS was not heard of.

Yours faithfully,
Mahesh Rathi, Calcutta

Institutional politics

Sir ? The Bharatiya Janata Party-led opposition?s criticism of the decision to reserve 50 per cent of seats for Muslim students in the Aligarh Muslim University defies all logic. The Union human resource development minister, Arjun Singh, has declared the university to be a minority institution whose primary aim is to meet the educational needs of Muslims. It is true that a large section of Muslim society is poor and illiterate. So what is the harm in reserving 50 per cent of the seats for Muslims, especially since the welfare of the nation depends on improving the literacy rates among the minorities?

Yours faithfully,
Md Mudassir Alam, Aligarh

Sir ? The move to reserve seats for Muslim students at the Aligarh Muslim University has shattered the ?secular? credentials of the United Progressive Alliance government. The Muslim community needs to be careful about politicians like Arjun Singh who use the minorities for their own political interests.

One other thing. Today Singh has endorsed the AMU administration?s decision of reserving 50 per cent of the seats for Muslim students. But would Singh support a similar reservation for Hindus in the Banaras Hindu University? Unlikely. And we all know why.

Yours faithfully,
Anurag Gupta, Calcutta

Sir ? Left parties and Islamic intellectuals have rightly criticized the Union government?s pseudo-secular decision of reserving 50 per cent seats for Muslims in all the 36 post-graduate courses in Aligarh Muslim University. The decision will in effect be anti-Muslim, since the reservation will create antagonisms and lower the value of the degrees awarded by the AMU. Driving wedges between communities on religious grounds can never work as a policy. However, the Bharatiya Janata Party is in no position to criticize the step because the National Democratic Alliance government had allowed similar reservation for Muslims in Hamdard University.

What the Union government should have done, instead, is take out the words ?Hindu? and ?Muslim? from Banaras Hindu University and Aligarh Muslim University respectively, to remove the religious associations of these institutions. Clearly, governments take these steps with an eye on minority vote-banks. Only recently, the Andhra Pradesh high court struck down a five-per cent reservation for Muslims in jobs and educational institutions announced by the state government. If the government is really sincere about eliminating backwardness among Muslims and other minorities, it should motivate them towards family-planning by having only one reserved category ? for families with two or less children.

Yours faithfully,
Subhash Chandra Agrawal, Dariba, Delhi

Sir ? The Aligarh Muslim University was set up for the benefit of Muslim students. But that was long ago. Times have changed now. Universities cannot be treated as madrassahs where only Muslims will get admission. Therefore, the government?s move to reserve 50 per cent seats for Muslim students at AMU seems to go against the secular principles of the country.

The reservation is somewhat meaningless too. Aligarh is a Muslim-dominated town, surrounded by other Muslim-dominated areas. Therefore, Muslims automatically make up half or more of the student strength. And if there are a considerable number of non-Muslims studying here, then it should be a feather in the cap of secular India that so many non-Muslim students are studying in a university that has ?Muslim? in its name.

Yours faithfully,
Govind Das Dujari, Calcutta

Parting shot

Sir ? The report, ?Indian who could have prevented Vietnam War? (June 7), dug up a lot of memories. My father worked in the International Control Commission during 1962-1964. Its headquarters were at the then Saigon and its work stretched upto Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The memories of seeing Angkor Vat, US warships on the Mekong, the statue of two sisters holding hands or the midday streetfiring and armoured vehicles on the streets of Saigon during the coup d?etat that ousted Dien Bien Fu are still in my memory. As an Indian, I feel proud that an Indian bureaucrat was nominated to get across a peace plan that could have averted the bitterest war in the post-World War II world. That it could not be averted is unfortunate.

But the way the Vietnamese rebuilt the war-ravaged country, and now has full economic ties with the US, their tormentor, is an example worth emulating.

Yours faithfully,
Tapan Pal, Batanagar