The Great Ganesha

Today’s WSJ has a front-page write-up about Azim Premji and his “muslim-ness” (or lack of it, thereof). His secular stance is pissing off a lot of imams, but the article also highlights how imbalanced the Hindu-Muslim equation is, in terms of employment and opportunities for education. Here are some excerpts:

Mr. Premji’s rise is already inspiring some Indian Muslims to embrace the modern, globalized world…[But t]hough the country’s economy is growing at 9% a year, the vast majority of India’s estimated 150 million Muslims — the largest Islamic population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan — remain socially marginalized, badly educated and mired in deep poverty.

How badly are the Muslims faring? The answer is minutes away from Premji’s home in Bangalore.

A Muslim school a half-hour’s drive from Mr. Premji’s Bangalore home reveals the chasm between this globalist success story and the country’s Muslim masses. Students sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Masjid e Takwa madrassa spend their days memorizing the Quran in Arabic — a language that neither they nor their teacher understand.

But Premji is not affected by these things.

Mr. Premji bristles impatiently when the plight of the broader Muslim populace is cited. “This whole issue of Hindu-Muslim in India is completely overhyped,” the 62-year-old executive says.

He is, in fact, quite removed from religion entirely.

Mr. Premji has mentioned his Muslim background so rarely in public that many Indian Muslims don’t even know he shares their heritage.

…Mr. Premji scoffed at the idea he should display his Muslim identity or champion the cause of Muslim advancement in India. “We’ve always seen ourselves as Indian. We’ve never seen ourselves as Hindus, or Muslims, or Christians or Buddhists,” he said.

How does that show up in his company?

None of Wipro?s senior managers aside from Mr. Premji himself are Muslims. The company maintains normal working hours on Islamic high holidays. Among its 70,000 employees, there?s only a ?sprinkling? of Muslims, according to Sudip Banerjee, president of a division that accounts for a third of revenue.

Yet, the company balks when discrimination is mentioned.

…company officials say they seek to hire the best regardless of creed. They say that among the reasons few Indian Muslims meet Wipro’s stringent standards is that they often study in Urdu rather than English, and rarely pursue engineering degrees. Urdu, which is also the official language of Pakistan, is intertwined with Islamic identity on the subcontinent. In southern India, where most of the country’s technology industry is based, Hindus speak a number of regional languages and are more likely to study English.

“All our hiring staff are trained to interview in English,” Mr. Premji says. “They’re trained to look for Westernized segments because we deal with global customers.” Out of every 100 r?sum?s received, only one or two usually come from Muslim applicants, according to a former manager in Wipro’s human-resources department. [link]

I don’t think Wipro is discriminating against Muslims, but I do think that there are fewer opportunities available to them, which prevents them from obtaining a job in one of India’s top companies.

Besides, I think two inequities are highlighted here. First off, is the obvious Hindu-Muslim imbalance. But then, there’s also the rich-poor divide. Obviously, Premji’s family wealth gave him his education (St. Mary’s school + Electrical Engineering at Stanford) which, in turn, gave him him access to a plethora of opportunities to which other poorer Indians, and Muslim Indians in particular, have no access. And that has also led to his secular outlook on life in India, and his belief that the “whole issue of Hindu-Muslim in India is completely overhyped”. I disagree with that particular statement – the Hindu-Muslim issue needs to be brought up to the surface, and not pushed further down. But I applaud his secular view and his position as India’s richest Muslim is a great place from which to perpetuate it.

Yet, it seems more and more to me that just as literacy was a huge issue for India in the twentieth century, income inequality (between, as well as amongst, Hindus and Muslims) will be the next big problem to resolve for the twenty-first century. Here’s the last paragraph of the article:

Many [Al-Ameen college, a progressive Islamic school] graduates have already gotten jobs at companies like Wipro and Infosys, says the college’s principal, Mr. Javeed, and have started to earn salaries well above those offered outside the booming technology industry. “This has brought awareness to the Muslim community about the need to pursue higher education,” he says. “People are beginning to realize that education is power, that education is money, that education is an opportunity.”

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