Globalisation and Muslim Youth

SADAT HUSAINI presents an analytical study of globalisation and Muslim youth and suggests to the Muslim leadership to take up the gauntlet so as to save the ‘liberalisation children’ from moral and cultural degeneration.

Arguably, the so-called economic liberalisation of 1990s is the most defining government policy of post-independent India. It has entirely transformed the look of India. Although it was mainly an economic decision, but like other ‘liberalised’ societies in the world, no section of the Indian national life remained unmoved by it. So now, the liberalisation or globalisation has not remained just an economic phenomenon. We can summarise the major attributes of globalisation into the following:

(1) Capitalist ways of production and distribution of goods and services, fuelled by growing levels of international trade, foreign direct investment, and capital flows.

(2) Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that help exchanges and instantly bond people across vast geographies and place a premium on knowledge-intensive work.

(3) Rising worldwide migration.

(4) Cultural transformations and exchanges that challenge traditional values and norms in both sending and receiving countries.

Once the liberalisation of economy was triggered in 1990s, MNCs started operations in India. India offered them a huge market. It had a large pool of skilled manpower for the IT and service industries, huge consumer base for the manufacturing companies, and the cheap labour for outsourcing companies. With this started a new revolution in India. Money started flooding in the cities. Shopping malls and entertainment hubs started mushrooming like never before. Information and communication technologies connected the affluent class to the people across the continents. Governments and policy-makers were awestruck by the unprecedented inflow of foreign capital without giving any thought to its impact on the social fabric of society.

They remained ‘feeling good’ with their eyes focused on the tiny minority of urban affluent populace that was the sole beneficiary of liberalisation. This resulted in the emergence of a new culture and lifestyle. Youth being the present and the future citizens of the country, globalisation has its maximum impact on them.Globalisation has definitely its positive sides also. Foreign direct investment (FDI) has helped to reduce abject poverty in a number of countries. In India also by creating huge jobs in IT, outsourcing and many other sectors, it has, in a way, played some role in providing a segment of society with hope and a sense of well being. But throughout the world it has been widely criticised for its much more significant and vital negative impacts. Everywhere it has increased economic inequality within and across nations and has been instrumental in the increasingly desperate fate of growing numbers of poor and disenfranchised people throughout the world: by 2002, 1.2 billion people around the world lived on less than $1 a day and 2.8 billion people lived on less than $2 a day.

DisparitiesIn the last one decade there had been unique amplification of economic and social disparities among the different classes in India. The flow of capital has been mainly in a few major cities covering only a small fraction of the total national population, that too in a few major sectors whose beneficiary is mainly elite urban class. For the vast majority in the country-side life is as before and in some respects, more horrible than that.

Globalisation has forced the successive governments to relegate to a lower league the most fundamental needs of people. The equitable distribution of food; piped water and electricity for the rural poor; proper sanitation for the urban poor; low cost housing; adequate health care facilities for the majority of the populace; and quality education for all are no longer priority concerns. The aim of our economic policies is just to facilitate foreign investments in those sectors, which are most lucrative to the investors. The result is that on the one hand there are tremendous opportunities for the business, IT and engineering graduates, and English speaking youth; with 20-year olds earning 20 to 30 thousands a month, while on the other hand even educated people without required technical and linguistic background are not in a position to make their ends meet in the rural and semi-urban areas.Economic disparity is not a new phenomenon in India.

One can argue that the situation was much more terrible in the older farming society. True, but the new thing with the new-age disparity is the total absence of interface between the haves and have-nots that is the basic prerequisite for an inter-class humanitarian interaction. Today a young business executive has no opportunity to interact with the deprived people of his own society. He spares full 12-hour day in the air-conditioned premises of his office, takes the lunch in McDonalds or Dominos, shops in the high-class shopping malls and there are many sophisticated companies to look after his day-to-day chores like laundry, hair dressing, etc.

In the modern companies the old-time ‘class 4’ is almost absent, with even the activities like daily cleaning given on contract to other companies. A modern elite youth, therefore, neither meets with dhobi and Hajjam nor does he know that there is a small Kirana shop next door where a poor shop owner is struggling to earn a few rupees after a full day’s labour. Being the ‘liberalisation-age boy’, he is entitled to see only the glamour and grandeur of his own airtight glasshouse, remaining totally ignorant of the worries and plight of the outside world. That is why he is always in the state of ‘feel good’ and thinks that ‘India is shining’.

In fact the situations around him are strategically designed to make him think and feel in that way. Without this the globalisation project can never succeed. It implies that the disparities of our globalisation era is much more comprehensive and serious. It is not just that few people are earning and spending more and others less. It has in fact created two totally different worlds. Each wholly alienated from the other.So when we move from the glitter and splendour of our thriving hi-tech localities towards the real India we hit upon poor, humble country-youth, many of whom educated also, who have been deprived of the opportunities and avenues their earlier generation was having. With no small-scale industry, no agriculture, minimum intra-country trading and no policies for rural areas they have minimum livelihood options. And with no free-schools, no free-hospitals, costly transport, and ever-increasing living costs there problems are gigantic. Thereby come the resultant frustration, the suicides, and mad rush towards the metropolitan cities.

The situation in cities is also not much different. Though Indian cities, as claimed by the votaries of liberalisation, are flooded with foreign capital; its bounties are confined to a handful of professionals possessing a predefined set of technical and linguistic skills. Many traditional small-scale and cottage industries are shutting their shutters down unable to compete with the aggressive marketing strategies of the multinationals. Small vendors and roadside hawkers are losing their opportunities to the much more organised stores and supermarkets. Even the vegetables and meat are not left for poor traders. The rising automation has horribly downsized the labour needs. With all the major economic activities; namely manufacturing, trading and labour handed over to big corporations, the resultant outcome is the massive urban unemployment that combined with terrible pressure of life-standard needs of ‘liberalised’ Indian metros, is giving birth to an unparalleled nuisance and alarmingly increasing youth crime rate.

MediocrityAn interesting trait of ‘liberalisation children’ is their characteristic mediocrity or more explicitly love for mediocrity. The bright urban middle class is fully satisfied with their teenager employed to carry out insignificant back office operations in a posh ‘call centre’ or a ‘BPO company’ that too after leaving his education. The same job, which was earlier, considered ‘undignified’ or a mismatch to the level and prestige of our urban elite, is now a status symbol thanks to the lucrative salaries. The outcome is that urge for higher education is getting down. An MCA or even a simple graduate with some software skill or even a 10th pass with English communication is starting in his teens with a 15000+ salary while many Ph.Ds are forced to work at a meagre 2000 a month! Result? Pure Sciences departments in every Indian city are complaining the scarcity of students. Nobody wants to go for Arts and Humanities. Research programmes have no takers. So here we have a society that only wants engineers, MCAs and MBAs. A schoolboy doesn’t want to become a scientist or a writer. The height of his imagination is the call centre where his elder brother serves his masters in US and they enable him to go to all ‘kool’ places from shopping plazas to discotheques.

As Chandra Muzaffar writes:‘This culture has redefined perceptions of the human being to such an extent that in most societies today the worth of a person is measured in terms of his/her material possessions. It is not what a person is but what a person has which counts.’ Almost all the lucrative jobs are nothing but the back office chores of the designers of the ‘project globalisation’. Even in many software companies the high earning ‘software engineer’ has to report every hour to someone sitting on that side of the globe. Can any nation afford its brightest children aiming at just a bookkeeping job for some offshore company?There is one more side of this story.

Globalisation is snatching the very essence of youth. Youthfulness is always considered to symbolise the change, the renewal and new hopes for the future. A young man is someone who has some wishes and some dreams about a new world. He is always considered an impending threat to the status quo. Somebody, who can never take the situations around for granted. But our liberalisation children seem to have nothing like that. They start earning while they are still in their colleges. A 12-hour work schedule, 24 x 7 bombardment of entertainment and wallets thick with plastic money; with all this, they neither have time to ponder over anything else nor the energy and motivation to stand up and revolt. Posh offices, internet cafes, pubs and discotheques, restaurants and eating joints, shopping malls and showrooms and there are so many other places to go and enjoy. Even our elite English language reading material is loaded with either technology bits or the entertainment masala. So no politics, no big ‘fundas’, no serious matters, ‘Wanna only kool things’.

Thus we have the common grumble that the era of youth movements is over and that the student activism is dying. If the youth are also satisfied with the things around, who on earth will stand up and rebel? If the activism is dying among students who else will dare to act? Here it proves the relevance of a very common accusation against globalisation that it creates a society of mindless slaves who do not even dare to think what is going wrong with them.

Alienation to Cultural ValuesGlobalisation is alienating our youth from their roots in an unrivalled way. It all starts with a unique sort of generation gap. Things being totally strange, even the educated parents are not in a position to help and lead their young tech-crazy chaps. Leave alone the guidance; they are not even in a position to conceive what their young boys and girls are doing? What is a call centre? What happens in a software industry? Why a BPO works in nights? They have been class-I and super class one officers, the positions they acquire after long careers of hard work and commitment.

What things these young guys do that they earn much more than themselves? Unable to find the answers they simply stop thinking and intervening. They only know that their kids are doing something related to computers and earning a handsome salary. A handsome salary, for them, is sufficient ground to believe that the boy is bright and successful, without wondering what exactly he is doing and what is its future. Even at work places there is no sign of gray hair. Even the senior most executive in a call centre or a software company is normally 30-35 years old. So as a senior executive puts; ‘In today’s work places a 35 years old is an ancient man and a 50 years old is a dinosaur.’ So apart from being the world of only ‘rich and elite’, it is the world of young boys and girls.

This monotony is a big barrier in any kind of cultural and generational interface.This alienation is deadly combined with a strong linkage with the West or more specifically the US. Working and living on US time, pronouncing the US names, answering day and night the calls from there, desiring US products, and aspiring for a break in that ‘dreamland’; our urban youth are becoming more American than Indian. So as Chandra Muzaffar warns:‘The jeans and T-shirts of the young, for instance, seem to suggest that certain forms of attire associated with the global - read Western - culture have caught their imagination. If indigenous food and attire, language and music, art and architecture are pushed into the background as a result of powerful homogenising trends not only will the rich cultural diversity of the region decline but the communities that are the repositories of these traditions will also eventually lose their vigour and vitality.

In this regard, isn’t it a shame that, even as it is, there is so little variety in architectural styles in the different cities of Asia?’This cultural transformation is not confined to only symbolism. Value systems are also changing. Even Muslim girls do not find anything wrong in working in the call centre night shifts. In almost all ‘IT cities’, for our boys, living together with some bright female colleague in a single one-bedroom flat is not a taboo. If the surveys and opinion polls of premier English magazines are to be believed, the cultural ethos is passing through great transformation in Urban India.

Educational sector is also divided on the sectarian basis. With rising privatisation of education, premium education being led by multinational educational empires is reserved only for those having capacity to pay heavily. Policymakers are by design creating two streams of education. One, the normal MA and M.Sc kind of education, which the government institutions will continue to impart to poor masses and two, the high quality privatised education, which will be affordable only for rich.Education is losing its independent truth-searching character. Now education is nothing but a pre-entry corporate training mechanism whereby people are being groomed right from their infanthood to take up their responsibilities as faithful servants of corporate empires.

It is now an investment to recover and earn profit from, kind of entrepreneurship wherein people are entering with the calculations as to how much they will have to invest on their degree and how much they can manage to earn after the degree is granted.So like other sectors of our national life educational sector is also becoming market driven. The only consideration before the universities to decide upon a certain area of study is as to how much market value this study area has? So it is not the multifaceted wants of the society, not even the aspirations of the nation; rather it is the needs and requirements of foreign originated multinational companies that are deciding the nature and contents of education.It implies that given the overall economic and social scenario, only hope was with the educational system that it would inculcate true humanistic values in youth. But unfortunately even education has fallen prey to this menace. It is also aiding and supporting market forces in creating in our youth the capitalistic, exploitative, and greed based mindset and behaviour pattern. That in my perception is the biggest challenge before the educationists of our country.

The disparities of our globalisation era is much more comprehensive and serious. It is not just that few people are earning and spending more and others less. It has in fact created two totally different worlds. Each wholly alienated from the other.Muslim YouthMuslim youth in India are equally disturbed by globalisation. Nonetheless, disparities are not as grave among Muslims, as in other communities, but still they deserve our attention. Since the educated and elite population is already very low among Muslims, their alienation creates much serious problem.

Globalisation has no doubt, reduced the much complained about prejudices against Muslims because a truly globalised competitive economy cannot afford to harmonise with the ethnic favouritism. This development has helped the Muslims in getting good jobs. Globalisation is also gradually reducing the caste-based exclusivism in certain trade areas whereby it was very difficult for an entrepreneur belonging to a caste other than the dominant caste to venture in that trade area. The rise of service industries has also helped them because it needs very small capital. So even middle class people can become successful entrepreneurs. All these factors have created for them new arena of avenues for economic prosperity. Because even the richest elites among Muslims can at best be categorised into middle class, a strengthened and flourishing middle class is an advantage to them.

The other side of the picture is very gloomy. Barring a small fraction of middle class, majority of Muslims, particularly in the Northern and Eastern parts of the country are poor farmers, workers and small time traders. They are the worst victims of globalisation. Cottage and small scale industry was the major source of livelihood of North Indian Muslims. Brass industry of Muradabad, Leather industry of Tamilnadu, Textiles works of Bhiwandi and Malegaon and many such small industrial bases had created affluence and prosperity in a section of Muslims and had provided employment to a large section of poor masses. After liberalisation they all are endangered. Muslims normally have neither capital nor the influence to come up with giant business empires, chain of stores and multinational tie-ups. So it can be safely concluded that the share of Muslims among the gainers from the globalisation is many times less than their share among losers.

The crucial question now is: how does one deal with this challenge? First and foremost we must recognise the fact that Indian economy has proceeded too ahead on this path to retreat at once. That is the reason, even the extreme opponents of globalisation do not find any way. So any utopian path will only worsen the condition. We should strive to bring awareness among people about its ill-effects, try to minimise its impacts and simultaneously awaken the deprived sections as to how they can prosper in the new economic scenario within the ethical limits set by Islam. We should find out the ways to minimise the ever-increasing sectarian gap between the elites and the masses. Keep on fighting against the consumerist lifestyles. There shall be specially designed training programmes for our youth working in the multinationals.

The glamour of their workplace should not detach them from their roots.Our Islamic Movements and organisations that are mainly focused either in the rural/semi-urban areas or the lower middle class of urban areas should feel the exigency of the need to focus on this new class of ‘liberalisation children’. They are the most unguided people on earth now and it demands a totally new cultural strategy to bring them or keep them in the mainstream of Islamic values and culture.Economic and cultural strategies to cope with this problem needs a full-fledged and separate discussion. Right now the moral of discussion is: it’s a grave problem and we ought to focus on it with well-defined strategies

Source : www.sio-india.org