There are questions asked in confidence, and there are questions asked in fear. The former are born of curiosity; the latter of survival. In recent years, one question has echoed in drawing rooms, university corridors, television studios, and the weary silence of Muslim homes across India: What do Indian Muslims need to do in a Hindu-majority land? The question is not philosophical. It is existential.
One rarely hears an Indian Hindu asking what he must do to survive in India. Nor does one hear such anxiety from Christians, Sikhs, or Jains. Why then is the Muslim, more than seventy-five years after Partition, still compelled to ask how he should conduct himself? When does a citizen begin to ask permission to belong?
To understand the wound, one must examine the history.
The roots of contemporary anxiety are not merely political; they are civilizational. The Hindu social order historically rested on a hierarchical caste system, sanctified by scriptures and normalized over centuries of practice. The Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, and the Shudra—an arrangement not merely occupational but existential. Beneath this structure lay those outside its moral perimeter: the so-called “untouchables,” later called Dalits.
This hierarchy did not merely marginalize Muslims and Christians; it institutionalized inequality among Hindus themselves. The caste system created a moral vocabulary in which stratification was natural, and purity was sacred. When hierarchy becomes theology, exclusion ceases to be cruelty—it becomes duty.
Muslims entered this subcontinent as rulers, traders, mystics, and migrants. Over centuries, they became woven into India’s cultural fabric. Urdu poetry, Mughal architecture, Sufi shrines, music traditions—none of these are alien implants. They are part of the soil. Yet, politically, Muslims were often perceived as the “other,” especially during the late colonial period when identity hardened under electoral arithmetic.
The British policy of separate electorates intensified communal consciousness. Politics became arithmetic; arithmetic became destiny. By the 1930s and 1940s, distrust was no longer abstract—it was organized. The failure of the Congress leadership to reassure Muslim political aspirations, coupled with the fear of permanent majority rule, laid the psychological groundwork for the demand for Pakistan.
The creation of Pakistan was not born in a vacuum. It emerged from apprehension—the fear that a Hindu-majority democracy might morph into majoritarian dominance. That fear was dismissed by many as paranoia. History, however, has a cruel habit of revisiting unfinished debates.
Post-independence India adopted a secular constitution—an extraordinary document promising equality before law. Yet constitutions, as the philosopher Edmund Burke warned, are only as strong as the moral habits of the society that sustains them.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) factor, founded in 1925, envisioned India as a Hindu Rashtra—a cultural nation defined not by citizenship but by civilizational identity. Its intellectual fountainheads argued that minorities could live in India but must accept the primacy of Hindu culture. The distinction between cultural pride and political supremacy, however, is subtle. When crossed, it radicalizes.
Over decades, the RSS built an extensive network—schools, social organizations, shakhas, cultural fronts. Its narrative was simple: Hindu civilization had been humiliated by centuries of Muslim and colonial rule; it must now reclaim its pride. Pride, when anchored in dignity, is healthy. When anchored in grievance, it is combustible.
Based in Lahore, the writer is a historian and a critical analyst. He can be reached at arslan9h@gmail.com
Leave a Reply