Watching and checking on progress – collecting and publishing essential information by Sameena Choudry.

Article published in Race Equality Teaching vol 23 no 2

This couplet was written by the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar.  It is from a widely acclaimed ghazal[i] when he was exiled in Burma by the British after the 1857 Indian Rebellion (or Mutiny, depending on your perspective).  His death in 1862 brought to an end the hugely successful Mughal dynasty established by his ancestor Babar in 1526.  This article suggests that the government’s failure to collect, analyse and publish relevant information, as required by the specific duties of the 2010 Equality Act  in modern Britain, implies that it sees the Equality Act as, in the words of Bahadur Shah Zafar, no more than ‘a speck of dust that can do no good to anyone’. In particular the article considers the lack of information about intersectionality and the lack of information about differences between regions and local authorities. The article refers mainly to race equality, but touches also on issues of gender and special educational needs.


[i] A ghazal is a short love poem in which the two halves of the first couplet and the second line of the remaining couplets rhyme.

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