This Indian memo in today's NYT takes a look at the (supposedly?) growing disparity between Muslims and the rest of the junta in India. As to be expected of such memos, it clobbers together and quotes a bunch of statistics from an yet to be released Indian Goverment report on this issue, while providing little or no background knowledge or explanation as to why these statistics are what they are.

This is fatal, IMHO, not only because statistics without such background information or knowledge can be manipulated to fit private or social engineering agendas but also because the root causes that drive such disparities are obscured. Let's consider three pieces of statistics from the article as examples to illustrate this:

"In the western state of Maharashtra, for instance, Muslims make up 10.6 percent of the population but 32.4 percent of those convicted or facing trial."

"In the famed national bureaucracy, the Indian Administrative Service, Muslims made up only 2 percent of officers in 2006."

"Less than 2 percent of the students at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology are Muslim."

A reader looking at these statistics, without any background knowledge, might reach for conclusions along the lines of Maharashtra Police hates Muslims, and locks them up in larger number than their fellow citizens of a different faith or that IAS and IITs discriminate against Muslims in their selection procedures. But in my understanding, if only based on informal reading, the first statistical number might be attributed to the fact that organized crime in Maharashtra is divided along religious lines. As for the second and third numbers, for a fact, I know that IAS and IIT (even more than IAS, having attended one) selection procedures are religion blind; all they require of an individual is the ability to pass through some very rigrous screens.

That said, the conclusions that are drawn in (and can be drawn from) this article make for disturbing reading. These coupled with de-contextualized statistics, I am sure, will be used by sections of Indian polity to engineer some hopelessly bad social policies in the days ahead - religion based quotas at IITs anyone?