#aiman haque

[indizombie]

BR Ambedkar, India's first law minister, had rightfully said, "Caste system is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers." The one space where Muslim, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Classes communities find themselves overrepresented is the informal economy which employs over eighty percent of the work force. This implies that the most socially oppressed are, as a majority, doomed to work in the most precarious jobs in the country while decision-making for their communities around resource allocation and policy happens in their absence. There is a need to critically examine how the development sector and the civil society allow systemic inequalities to persist in its design and foundation. The lack of scrutiny has led to the misconception that some uniqueness exists in the sector. Organisations are able to avoid addressing these issues by issuing tired banalities such as "we do not see caste and religion." In reality, this is a refusal to acknowledge their existence, preventing us from imagining a more equal system of relations.

Aiman Haque, ‘Charitable Charade’, Caravan

[indizombie]

"Despite such strong ideological rationale for civil society's political work, we have moved to a space where our aspirations and rhetoric are political, but praxis and practice are apolitical," Amitabh Behar, the interim executive director of Oxfam International, writes in an article from 2020 for India Development Review. Behar attributes this depoliticisation to the advent of funded organisations, particularly internationally funded, working in the framework of a heavily restrictive regulatory system coupled with a gradual shift towards a more corporate way of functioning and a lack of commitment of organisations to the "systems approach" where "change in one aspect of society cannot be achieved in isolation of the larger social, economic, and political system in which it operates." This essentially means that organisations are only providing transient response and relief rather than being conduits of transformational change that overturn entrenched systems of inequalities.

Aiman Haque, ‘Charitable Charade’, Caravan

[indizombie]

In 2022, a study by LedBy, an organisation that works on building the professional capacity of Muslim women to improve their representation in the workforce, found that the net discrimination rate for entry level jobs is as high as 47.1 percent. In a social experiment it conducted, two profiles were sent to job portals, both equally qualified. The one with a Hindu woman's name received 208 positive responses as compared to the 103 that the Muslim woman's profile received. The findings are evident across industries. Ruha Shadab, the founder of LedBy, claimed, "Around 30-40 percent women who come to LedBy are interested in joining the social-impact sector so the aspiration exists, which makes their absence from this space that much more jarring." She said that this aspiration stems from a desire of the women to work in their communities and bring about positive change.

Aiman Haque, ‘Charitable Charade’, Caravan