In October 1947, a bare six weeks after India and Pakistan achieved their independence from British rule, the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote a remarkable letter to the chief ministers of the different provinces. Here Nehru pointed out that despite the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, there remained, within India, “a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want, go anywhere else. That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”

In the wake of the recent incidents in Mumbai, these words make for salutary reading. It seems quite certain that the terrorists who attacked the financial capital were trained in Pakistan. The outrages have sparked a wave of indignation among the middle class. Demonstrations have been held in the major cities, calling for revenge, in particular for strikes against training camps in Pakistan. The models held up here are Israel and the US; if they can “take out” individual terrorists and invade whole countries, ask some Indians, why can’t we?

Other commentators have called for a more measured response. They note that the civilian government in Islamabad is not in control of the army, the army is not in control of the notorious Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, the ISI is not in control of the extremists it has funded. They point out that Pakistan has itself been a victim of massive terror attacks. India, they say, should make its disapproval manifest in other ways, such as cancelling sporting tours and recalling diplomats. At the same time, the US should be asked to demand of Pakistan, its erratically reliable ally, that it act more decisively against the terrorists who operate from its soil.

One short-term consequence of the terror in Mumbai is a sharpening of hostility between India and Pakistan. And, as is always the case when relations between these two countries deteriorate, right-wing Hindus have begun to scapegoat those Muslims who live in India. They have begun to speculate as to whether the attackers were aided by their Indian co-religionists, and to demand oaths of loyalty from Muslim clerics and political leaders.

There are 150 million Muslims in India. They have gained particular prominence in one area: Bollywood. Several top directors and composers are Muslim, as well as some of India’s biggest movie stars. One, Aamir Khan, was a star and producer of Lagaan, a song-and-dance epic about a game of cricket that was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002. But Muslims are massively under-represented in the professions—few of India’s top lawyers, judges, doctors and professors are Muslim. Many Indian Muslims are poor, and a few are angry.

Pakistan was carved out of the eastern and western portions of British India. To this new nation flocked Muslims from the Indian heartland. Leading the migration were the lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs who hoped that in a state reserved for people of their faith, they would be free of competition from the more populous (and better educated) Hindus.
Pakistan was created to give a sense of security to the Muslims of the subcontinent. In fact, it only made them more insecure. Nehru’s letter of October 1947 was written in response to a surge of Hindu militancy, which called for retribution against the millions of Muslims who stayed behind in India. Three months later, Mahatma Gandhi, who was both Father of the Nation as well as Nehru’s mentor, was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic. That act shamed the religious right, which retreated into the shadows. There it stayed until the 1970s when, through a combination of factors elaborated upon below, it came to occupy centre stage in Indian politics.

If the first tragedy of the Indian Muslim was Partition, the second has been the patronage by India’s most influential political party, the Congress, of Muslims who are religious and reactionary rather than liberal and secular. Nehru himself was careful to keep his distance from sectarian leaders, whether Hindu or Muslim. However, under the leadership of his daughter Indira Gandhi, the Congress party came to favour the conservative sections of the Muslim community. Before elections, Congress bosses asked heads of mosques to issue fatwas to their flock to vote for the party; after elections, the party increased government grants to religious schools and colleges.

In a defining case in 1985, the Supreme Court called for the enactment of a common civil code, which would abolish polygamy and give all women equal rights regardless of faith—the right to their husband’s or father’s property, for example, or the right to proper alimony once divorced. The prime minister at the time was Rajiv Gandhi. Acting on the advice of the Muslim clergy, he used his party’s majority in Parliament to nullify the court’s verdict. After Rajiv’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, became Congress president in 1998, the party has continued to fund Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to engage with the modern world.

Writing in 1957, the historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out that Indian Muslims were unique in that they shared their citizenship “with an immense number of people. They constitute the only sizable body of Muslims in the world of which this is, or ever has been true.” True no longer, for in many countries of western Europe and even in the US, the Muslims are now a sizeable but not dominant component of the national population. This makes this particular case even more special.
For if, notwithstanding the poisonous residues of history and the competitive chauvinism of politicians, Indians of different faiths were to live in peace, dignity and (even a moderate) prosperity, they might set an example for the world.