Ayesha Pervez, who works on minority issues and has authored reports on India's working Muslims, said job-seeking Muslims face the hurdle of discrimination even outside unorganized sectors. She said, "The discrimination - which is nothing but religious identity-based exclusion - exists in organized government sectors too." In West Bengal, Muslims constitute more than a quarter of the population. But "their representation in state-government jobs is as low as four percent," Pervez told Al Jazeera. 

According to social activist Prof. Ram Puniyani, soon after 2002 communal violence in western Gujarat state several Hindu organizations launched a propaganda campaign asking Hindus to boycott Muslims in all day-to-day dealings, much like what Wirathu and his 969 Fascist Movement are doing in Myanmar. 

In the state of Maharashtra, which has nearly 11% Muslim population, a seven-member committee - the Rehman committee (led by a retired IAS officer, Dr. Mahmood-ur-Rehman), which included retired bureaucrats and academicians, and was initially set up in 2008 by the then chief minister late Vilasrao Deshmukh to look into the backwardness of Muslims - found that around 60% of Muslims from the state live below the poverty line (BPL); there is not a single Muslim in elite government services such as the IAS in Maharashtra and a handful in the Indian Police Service (IPS), and that the overall representation of Muslims in government services is just around 4.5%; while Muslims have a 78 per cent literacy rate, only 2 per cent Muslims are graduates; similarly, in institutes of higher education such as IITs and IIMs, less than 2 per cent are Muslims. The Committee has recommended, among other things, 8-10% reservation for Muslims in government jobs and government-run or aided educational institutes to close the job discrimination. Expectedly, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena have opposed the reservation on religious grounds. 

Reserving jobs for Muslims, or any other religious minorities, is bound to get entangled in legal battles, a fact that the Indian government knows well. The Andhra Pradesh high court squashed a similar move by that state's government in 2010 to give reservations to Muslims, which is currently being challenged in the Supreme Court. Muslims are skeptical that leaders will muster the political will to push through a quota, even as many consider such preferences justified and long overdue. 

For decades, the issue of affirmative action for Muslims has been a politically fractious one in India. Many opponents, including right-wing Hindu groups, have long argued that affirmative action policies based on religion violate India's Constitution and run counter to the country's secular identity. Quotas, they said, should be strictly reserved for groups that have suffered centuries of caste-based discrimination. 

But these arguments have been steadily countered by an undeniable and worrisome byproduct of India's democratic development: Muslims, as a group, have fallen badly behind, in education, employment and economic status, mostly because of persistent discrimination in a Hindu-majority nation. 

Bottom line: As a minority, Muslims in India are worse off than Hindus living in Bangladesh. 

In spite of such a poor scorecard on the condition of Muslim minorities and failure to improve their lot, many Indian hegemonists try to picture a very rosy picture of the Indian democracy and its brand of secularism, which has always been less inclusive than Bangladesh where, as I have shown elsewhere, the Hindu community enjoys disproportionately higher quota of jobs in the public sector. 

The great Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote in his poem 'The ruins of Aztec', "Truth is always unnerving. It strikes like a blitzkrieg and often catches us unawares." I wish these hegemonists had heeded his advice rather than trying to distort Bangladesh's image. Bangladesh is surely no worse than India. 

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Dr Habib Siddiqui has authored 10 books. His latest book - Devotional Stories - is now available from A.S. Noordeen, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.