Is It Muslim Appeasement Or Not?

Sane people think what Manmohan and his cohorts are doing - when they say Muslims should have first dibs on national resources and identify hundreds of, apparently pure, Muslim villages to target sops - is justified. They usually tend to be blind to or give benefit of doubt to the vote bank politics that our politicians play.

Apparently, actual data - that our economist pradana mantri (and I am sure our education mantri) doesn’t want to read - says something else:

As much as 84 per cent Hindus in the below poverty line (BPL) category in the rural areas live in a condition dubbed as the ‘below double’ poverty line. The percentage of Muslims in this category stands at 86, that is only two per cent higher than their Hindu counterparts.

The plight of the people belonging to the ‘double below the poverty line’ category could be gauged from the fact that they are found to be much below the ceiling of the poverty line. “They are extremely poor people and their percentage among both Hindus and Muslims is quite high,” an official in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation said.

Among the Christian poor in the rural areas, around 70 per cent belong to the extremely poor category. The data, furnished by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), a body under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, belie any move to initiate ‘affirmative action’ for a particular group of people on the basis of their religion. [Pioneer]

There are few more details in this news report.