Aggrieved Indian Muslims

Islam is second-largest religion in India with 189 million adherents making up 14.9 per cent of the population

Islam is the second-largest religion in India with around 189 million adherents making up 14.9 per cent of the population. Muslims have held high offices of state since independence and there have been five Muslim chief ministers of Indian states. Muslims are prominent across the vast Indian bureaucracy. Undeniable as all that is Muslims are a minority and like minorities elsewhere in the world — including Pakistan — suffer at the hands of the majority. The latest area of concern is that Muslims are missing from the political narrative of the ruling BJP, that the problems of Muslims are being ignored or avoided and specifically the demand for due representation in polls. It is fair to say that since the election of the nationalist BJP reports of discrimination and marginalisation have increased, and anti-Muslim rhetoric is a feature in some but not all of the Indian media. No opportunity is missed seemingly to exacerbate old wounds and create new points of irritation.

Four Indian Muslim organisations have expressed their anger and frustration, saying that all the mainstream political parties are keen to harvest the Muslim vote and then citing a recent report to Congress that suggests Muslims should keep a low profile during the polling process. A Muslim leader was expelled from the BJP for expressing support for the appallingly-treated Rohingya in Myanmar. There have also been calls for Muslims to abandon their ‘religious attire’ — hardly a prescription for harmony.

The list of grievances and areas of discrimination are long, ranging from unfair allocation of low-cost housing, to deceptive videos in circulation designed to foster hate and mistrust to exclusion from selection for certain government posts. The volume of complaints raises the matter above the merely anecdotal and into the realm of fact. Pakistan not infrequently finds itself on the wrong end of a judgmental world in respect of its own treatment of minorities; but India seems to lead something of a privileged existence when it comes to scrutiny of its own excesses. Alienating 189 million of the population is a recipe for unrest, and we are sure that there are those in the Indian government well aware of that fact.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 1^st, 2017.

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