Access of Muslims and Other Religious Minorities to Rights and Freedoms – Bihar This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Provided they acknowledge the source, users of this content are allowed to remix, tweak, build upon and share for noncommercial purposes under the same original license terms. Some rights reserved Published by: Misaal - Centre for Equity Studies 24, Khazan Singh Building Adhchini, Aurobindo Marg New Delhi - 110 017, India Tel: +91 (0)11-26535961 / 62 Email:
[email protected] Web : www.misaal.ngo Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/misaalfellowship Credits: This report has been produced with the assistance of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. Minority Rights Group International provided technical help. The contents of this report are the sole responsibility of Misaal-CES, and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency or of Minority Rights Group International. December 2016 Access of Muslims and Other Religious Minorities to Rights and Freedoms Bihar December 2016 i Executive Summary 1. This study aims to examine the access of religious minorities in the state of Bihar to minority rights - including to freedom of religion, life and security, and social, economic and cultural rights. The focus of the study is Muslims - by far the largest religious minority in Bihar, and India as a whole. We try to measure access to rights by mapping poor Muslims’ conditions as well as by examining the quality of state provisioning for them. This examination is based on (i) primary data on micro evidence on the condition of poor Muslims, collected from 5 sample sites of Muslim habitations in UP (Patna, Vaishali, Sitamarhi, Darbhanga and Madhubani districts) using household surveys (sample of 100 poor Muslim households at each site) and interviews and focus group discussions, as methods.