Consequences Of Appeasement and Pandering :-

• The first consequence is as inevitable as it is obvious: such pandering whets the appetite. Seeing that governments and parties are competing to pander to them, Muslims see that they are doing so only because their community is acting cohesively, as a vote bank. So, they act even more as a bank of votes.
• For the same reason, a competition is ignited within the community: to prove that he is more devoted to the community than his rival, every would be leader of the community demands more and more from governments and parties. When the concession he demanded has been made, he declares. 'It is not being implemented'. And he has a ready diagnosis: because implementation, he declares, is in the hands of non-Muslims. Hence, unless Muslims officers are appointed in the financial institutions meant for Muslims. With demand following demand, with secularist upon secularist straining himself to urge the demands, the leader sets about looking for grievances that he can fan, when he can't find them, he invents them.
• Government make the fatal mistake, or – as happened in the case of the British when they announced separate electorates for Muslims – they play the master-stroke: they proffer an advantage to the community which that community, Muslims in this case, can secure only by being separate- whether this be separate electorates in the case of Lord Minto or separate financial institutions in the case of Manmohan Singh.
• The community in its turn beings to assess every proposal, every measure, howsoever secular it may be, against one touchstone alone: 'what can we extract from this measure for Muslims as Muslims? How current the description rings that Cantwell Smith gave in his book, Modern Islam in India, published in the 1940s, of the effect that the British stratagem of instituting separate electorates for Muslims had on the Muslim mind. The separate electorates led Muslims, as they had been designed to lead them, he observed, 'to vote communally, think communally, look for constitutional and other reforms only in terms of more relative communal power, and express their grievances communally.' Exactly the same consequence will follow from implementing the Sachar proposal – and the reason for that is simple: the essential point about the proposals is the same – that is, the Muslims can obtain them by being separate from the rest of the country.
• The reaction cannot but set in. 'As Muslims are being given all this because they have distanced themselves from the rest of us, why should we cling to them?' the Hindus are bound to ask. 'On the contrary we should learn from them. Governments and political parties are pandering to Muslims because the latter have become a bank of votes. We should knit ourselves into a solid bloc also.
What more is needed to stoke reaction ?
Indian Express 29/12/2007
Arun Shourie