January 6, 1979 is no real contradiction between the poor Hindu and poor Muslim but there is between the poor and the rich irrespective of community. Neither Sharma nor Rasheeduddin Khan (in his otherwise brilliant introduction to the book) refers to the class character of the Indian State. Both tend to agree that in 'secular' democratic India the minorities are bound to suffer. Why? Not because the minorities are numerically insignificant. The reason, as described by Marx, is that the bourgeois democratic state allows "privately property, education, occupation to act in their own way, i e, as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of the special nature. Far from abolishing these distinctions, the State, only exists on the presupposition of their existence.. ,"3 Such a State, whether in the United States or in India, cannot to justice to 'the minorities. It has been pointed out by the economists and sociologists that in the United States discrimination against ethnical minorities annually brings the monopolies at least 30,000 million dollars in super profits. 4 The greatest beneficiary in the Indian system is the industrial-landlord- military-bureaucratic combine. Poverty, illiteracy, injustice and exploitation are inseparably linked with each other. Rasheeduddin Khan's reliance on the 'maximal' or 'total' Indian State or on the pluralistic and segmentary nature of Indian society is positively dangerous as it conceals the main contradictions of the system. Neither Rasheeduddin Khan nor Sharma attempts to develop a framework for the study of minorities' education in terms of availing of educational opportunities. After all, education is part of the ideological State apparatus and an important element of hegemony. None of them gives primacy to the economic system in determining the role of education and its relationship with social and class relations.
