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This past March, a group of community activists in Aurangabad, an industrial city in central India, convened a morcha — a demonstration — to protest a series of blatantly anti-Muslim measures taken by the state government in Mumbai, which is controlled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The morcha operated according to a well-worn protocol: A colorful tent was erected in a vacant lot across the street from the office of the district commissioner, and 250 or so Muslim men sat in the shade while a succession of speakers — a very long succession of speakers — denounced the state government and called for civil disobedience, in the spirit of Gandhi’s famed Salt March against the British, should their demands not be met.
The leaders of the demonstration then walked up a long driveway to formally present their demands to the district commissioner, who promised to relay them to the Maharashtra state authorities. The humble folk stayed back in the tent so as not to block traffic. Quite a few of them were qureish — cattle butchers — who had lost their jobs when the government had banned the consumption of beef the week before. They were trying to figure out how they were going to feed their families or send their kids to school. And they were wondering who, if anyone, would protect their interests amid India’s new politics of Hindu chauvinism.
Over the last year, since Modi became prime minister, the news out of India has focused almost entirely on his struggle to open up India’s economy and attract foreign investment. That has been reassuring both for many Indians and for economic partners abroad. But Modi is himself a product of the militant, trident-shaking ideological parent of the BJP known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He was chief minister of Gujarat state in 2002 when Hindu mobs killed more than 1,000 Muslims, and he was blamed for failing to stem the violence. The RSS chauvinists, who dream of a Hindu-dominant India, adore him as their champion. That is precisely what India’s Muslims fear.
India’s Muslims have noted every apparent straw in the wind. And there have been many of late. In March alone: Subramanian Swamy, a senior BJP leader from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, declared in a speech that mosques, unlike temples, are not holy places and thus can be demolished. Two days later, the BJP chief minister of the northern state of Haryana announced that the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu holy text, would become mandatory throughout the state. A number of churches were vandalized. A 71-year-old nun in the eastern state of West Bengal was gang-raped. And the beef-ban movement was spreading to new states.
India, of course, contains multitudes, and these incidents could be dismissed as the usual turbulence. Modi has conducted himself with remarkable circumspection, reassuring Muslims and other minorities about their place in Indian society, avoiding loaded or ambivalent language, and building bridges with Pakistan. He has not, however, tried to stop BJP state governments from pursuing a more nationalist agenda or has done much to curb inflammatory rhetoric. India has survived, and thrived, as a multiconfessional, multicultural nation because of a shared faith in secular principles enshrined in the country’s constitution. But India’s Muslims, who have worn that secular identity as a suit of armor in Hindu India, now feel more vulnerable than they have in many years.
An evening view in Aurangabad, known as the city of gates. (Photo by Sami Siva for FP)
A HOMECOMING
I lived and taught at the Maulana Azad College in Aurangabad almost 40 years ago. Aurangabad then was a dusty backwater with a majestic history. The city owes its name to Aurangzeb, the last of the Muslim rulers known as the Great Mughals, who moved his court there from Delhi in 1680 in the vain hope of crushing once and for all the rebellion of the Maratha hill tribes, which were Hindu. Aurangzeb has the worst reputation among the Mughals; he is often described, by both Hindus and Muslims, as an intolerant ascetic who banned music and dance and who destroyed tens of thousands of Hindu temples. The truth is more complicated and sheds light on the practical problem of governing the vast and diverse subcontinent. (Aurangzeb’s empire included virtually all of present-day Pakistan and most of India, save the south and northeast.) Rafat Qureshi, a retired historian in Aurangabad, told me that Aurangzeb had been “defamed.” The notorious icon-smasher destroyed only a handful of temples, and those usually for plausible military reasons. (Non-Aurangabad historians generally agree.) He only banned music and dance in the court. He gave land for Hindu temples. Most of his generals and governors were Hindu; to this day the names of Aurangabad's neighborhoods, like Jaisinghpura, reflect the gifts of land the emperor had given to his trusted Hindu lieutenants.
Aurangzeb might have wished to rule as a Muslim chauvinist; but he couldn’t. Muslim conquerors had ruled over Hindu India for most of the previous seven centuries, and almost all had seen the wisdom of adaptation. They forged alliances with Hindu princes and at times took Hindu wives. Over time, Islamic and Hindu religious practice, art, and daily custom blended into one another. Britain’s colonial masters did little to meddle with this syncretic culture, permitting both Hindu and Muslim princes to rule over their subjects as they wished. The independence movement was largely led by men committed to a secular India. In a 1940 speech before the Indian National Congress, Maulana Azad, the Muslim political leader after whom the college I taught at is named, said, "I am part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice, and without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete."
Students at Maulana Azad College in Aurangabad. (Photo by Sami Siva for FP)
Nevertheless, as independence loomed, some Muslim leaders embraced the idea that they were a separate "people" threatened by the Hindu majority and requiring a nation of their own in order to survive. The British, eager to let go of India and unwilling to adjudicate an increasingly bitter debate among Indians, agreed to divide the subcontinent into two countries, India and Pakistan. By the time of Partition, in 1947, sectarian fear and hatred on all sides had been stoked to such a level that millions of Muslims fled north to Pakistan, while Hindus escaped in the opposite direction. Both sides carried out terrible massacres. But while virtually all Hindus left Pakistan, the overwhelming majority of Muslims stayed in India. With 170 million members of the faith, India has the world’s second-largest Muslim population — larger than Pakistan’s, smaller only than Indonesia’s.
India's founding fathers reassured the nation's minorities of their place in that "indivisible unity" by exalting the principle of secularism. India's government would not have a national religion and would not legally differentiate among faiths. The country’s first cabinet included not just Hindus — of various castes — but Muslims, Christians, a Parsi, and a Sikh. Soon after Partition, Gandhi embarked on a fast to call attention to the plight of Muslims. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru single-handedly ended a religious riot by protecting a Muslim from a Hindu mob. Muslims saw in Nehru's Congress party the proof of the national commitment to secularism. Congress has dominated the Muslim vote from that time to today.
But the binding force of secularism began to slip after Nehru’s death in 1964. In the late 1970s, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, began to cultivate the Hindu nationalist vote. Her son Rajiv played both sides of the communal spectrum, endorsing the language both of Hindu chauvinism and of the conservative Muslims who demanded a separate "family law" to govern their faith. Extremists from both religions staged an epic confrontation over a 16th-century mosque allegedly built on the site of a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the ancient city of Ayodhya. Destroying the Babri mosque and rebuilding the Ram temple became a great rallying cry for the RSS, which secular Indians generally regard as a quasi-fascist body prepared to use violence to achieve its goal of "purifying" India of non-Hindu elements.
In 1992, mobs coordinated by RSS leaders dismantled the mosque brick by brick, leading to riots across India, including in Mumbai and Aurangabad. In Nehru's time, Hindu nationalist parties had barely registered in national politics. But the BJP was on the rise: It governed India from 1998 to 2004, though the prime minister at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was a polished member of the Indian elite.
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An Indian policeman looks on as a row of shops burns in Ahmedabad on March 1, 2002. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
Narendra Modi, by contrast, appeared to represent a decisive break with the sacrosanct value of secularism. His role in the 2002 riots remained highly controversial, and he was an ascetic, pious son of the soil rather than the kind of Westernized, Anglophone figure who had long ruled India. Modi's victory looked like the nightmare India’s Muslims had long dreaded. Yet virtually every Muslim I spoke to in Aurangabad viewed his first year in office as a pleasant surprise. Maqdoom Farooqui, the principal of Azad College, said, “Modi is trying very hard to balance against the RSS forces. We can see from his body language that he wants to do something good for the country.” The college was founded by Rafiq Zakaria, the father of foreign-policy pundit Fareed Zakaria, and several people cited to me, with great satisfaction, the words Modi had spoken in a CNN interview with Fareed: “Indian Muslims will live for India; they will die for India. They will not want anything bad for India.” While many people I spoke to viewed Modi as a puppet of the RSS, none could cite anything he had said or done to advance the organization’s cause, known as Hindutva, of forging a specifically Hindu identity for India.
Modi appears to find himself in the same situation as Aurangzeb: He may understand India in sectarian terms, but he cannot rule it that way. Modi is an extraordinarily gifted politician, far better than his nearest rivals. Good politicians do not try to do that which cannot be done. And Modi plainly understands that if, say, he had abolished India’s Ministry of Minority Affairs, as some had hoped and others had feared he would do, he would have aroused such fierce opposition that his supreme goal of making India a high-growth, modern nation would have been dead on arrival. Even as it is, the Congress party makes hay from every communal incident in the country. Defending secularism is still good politics in India; it is, in fact, just about the only thing the embattled Congress has left.
Indian Muslim women clad in hijabs hold up sweets and a portrait of victorious Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi in Varanasi on May 16, 2014. (Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images)
The leaders of the demonstration then walked up a long driveway to formally present their demands to the district commissioner, who promised to relay them to the Maharashtra state authorities. The humble folk stayed back in the tent so as not to block traffic. Quite a few of them were qureish — cattle butchers — who had lost their jobs when the government had banned the consumption of beef the week before. They were trying to figure out how they were going to feed their families or send their kids to school. And they were wondering who, if anyone, would protect their interests amid India’s new politics of Hindu chauvinism.
Over the last year, since Modi became prime minister, the news out of India has focused almost entirely on his struggle to open up India’s economy and attract foreign investment. That has been reassuring both for many Indians and for economic partners abroad. But Modi is himself a product of the militant, trident-shaking ideological parent of the BJP known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He was chief minister of Gujarat state in 2002 when Hindu mobs killed more than 1,000 Muslims, and he was blamed for failing to stem the violence. The RSS chauvinists, who dream of a Hindu-dominant India, adore him as their champion. That is precisely what India’s Muslims fear.
India’s Muslims have noted every apparent straw in the wind. And there have been many of late. In March alone: Subramanian Swamy, a senior BJP leader from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, declared in a speech that mosques, unlike temples, are not holy places and thus can be demolished. Two days later, the BJP chief minister of the northern state of Haryana announced that the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu holy text, would become mandatory throughout the state. A number of churches were vandalized. A 71-year-old nun in the eastern state of West Bengal was gang-raped. And the beef-ban movement was spreading to new states.
India, of course, contains multitudes, and these incidents could be dismissed as the usual turbulence. Modi has conducted himself with remarkable circumspection, reassuring Muslims and other minorities about their place in Indian society, avoiding loaded or ambivalent language, and building bridges with Pakistan. He has not, however, tried to stop BJP state governments from pursuing a more nationalist agenda or has done much to curb inflammatory rhetoric. India has survived, and thrived, as a multiconfessional, multicultural nation because of a shared faith in secular principles enshrined in the country’s constitution. But India’s Muslims, who have worn that secular identity as a suit of armor in Hindu India, now feel more vulnerable than they have in many years.
An evening view in Aurangabad, known as the city of gates. (Photo by Sami Siva for FP)
A HOMECOMING
I lived and taught at the Maulana Azad College in Aurangabad almost 40 years ago. Aurangabad then was a dusty backwater with a majestic history. The city owes its name to Aurangzeb, the last of the Muslim rulers known as the Great Mughals, who moved his court there from Delhi in 1680 in the vain hope of crushing once and for all the rebellion of the Maratha hill tribes, which were Hindu. Aurangzeb has the worst reputation among the Mughals; he is often described, by both Hindus and Muslims, as an intolerant ascetic who banned music and dance and who destroyed tens of thousands of Hindu temples. The truth is more complicated and sheds light on the practical problem of governing the vast and diverse subcontinent. (Aurangzeb’s empire included virtually all of present-day Pakistan and most of India, save the south and northeast.) Rafat Qureshi, a retired historian in Aurangabad, told me that Aurangzeb had been “defamed.” The notorious icon-smasher destroyed only a handful of temples, and those usually for plausible military reasons. (Non-Aurangabad historians generally agree.) He only banned music and dance in the court. He gave land for Hindu temples. Most of his generals and governors were Hindu; to this day the names of Aurangabad's neighborhoods, like Jaisinghpura, reflect the gifts of land the emperor had given to his trusted Hindu lieutenants.
Aurangzeb might have wished to rule as a Muslim chauvinist; but he couldn’t. Muslim conquerors had ruled over Hindu India for most of the previous seven centuries, and almost all had seen the wisdom of adaptation. They forged alliances with Hindu princes and at times took Hindu wives. Over time, Islamic and Hindu religious practice, art, and daily custom blended into one another. Britain’s colonial masters did little to meddle with this syncretic culture, permitting both Hindu and Muslim princes to rule over their subjects as they wished. The independence movement was largely led by men committed to a secular India. In a 1940 speech before the Indian National Congress, Maulana Azad, the Muslim political leader after whom the college I taught at is named, said, "I am part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice, and without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete."
Students at Maulana Azad College in Aurangabad. (Photo by Sami Siva for FP)
Nevertheless, as independence loomed, some Muslim leaders embraced the idea that they were a separate "people" threatened by the Hindu majority and requiring a nation of their own in order to survive. The British, eager to let go of India and unwilling to adjudicate an increasingly bitter debate among Indians, agreed to divide the subcontinent into two countries, India and Pakistan. By the time of Partition, in 1947, sectarian fear and hatred on all sides had been stoked to such a level that millions of Muslims fled north to Pakistan, while Hindus escaped in the opposite direction. Both sides carried out terrible massacres. But while virtually all Hindus left Pakistan, the overwhelming majority of Muslims stayed in India. With 170 million members of the faith, India has the world’s second-largest Muslim population — larger than Pakistan’s, smaller only than Indonesia’s.
India's founding fathers reassured the nation's minorities of their place in that "indivisible unity" by exalting the principle of secularism. India's government would not have a national religion and would not legally differentiate among faiths. The country’s first cabinet included not just Hindus — of various castes — but Muslims, Christians, a Parsi, and a Sikh. Soon after Partition, Gandhi embarked on a fast to call attention to the plight of Muslims. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru single-handedly ended a religious riot by protecting a Muslim from a Hindu mob. Muslims saw in Nehru's Congress party the proof of the national commitment to secularism. Congress has dominated the Muslim vote from that time to today.
But the binding force of secularism began to slip after Nehru’s death in 1964. In the late 1970s, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, began to cultivate the Hindu nationalist vote. Her son Rajiv played both sides of the communal spectrum, endorsing the language both of Hindu chauvinism and of the conservative Muslims who demanded a separate "family law" to govern their faith. Extremists from both religions staged an epic confrontation over a 16th-century mosque allegedly built on the site of a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the ancient city of Ayodhya. Destroying the Babri mosque and rebuilding the Ram temple became a great rallying cry for the RSS, which secular Indians generally regard as a quasi-fascist body prepared to use violence to achieve its goal of "purifying" India of non-Hindu elements.
In 1992, mobs coordinated by RSS leaders dismantled the mosque brick by brick, leading to riots across India, including in Mumbai and Aurangabad. In Nehru's time, Hindu nationalist parties had barely registered in national politics. But the BJP was on the rise: It governed India from 1998 to 2004, though the prime minister at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was a polished member of the Indian elite.
Next
Previous
An Indian policeman looks on as a row of shops burns in Ahmedabad on March 1, 2002. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
Narendra Modi, by contrast, appeared to represent a decisive break with the sacrosanct value of secularism. His role in the 2002 riots remained highly controversial, and he was an ascetic, pious son of the soil rather than the kind of Westernized, Anglophone figure who had long ruled India. Modi's victory looked like the nightmare India’s Muslims had long dreaded. Yet virtually every Muslim I spoke to in Aurangabad viewed his first year in office as a pleasant surprise. Maqdoom Farooqui, the principal of Azad College, said, “Modi is trying very hard to balance against the RSS forces. We can see from his body language that he wants to do something good for the country.” The college was founded by Rafiq Zakaria, the father of foreign-policy pundit Fareed Zakaria, and several people cited to me, with great satisfaction, the words Modi had spoken in a CNN interview with Fareed: “Indian Muslims will live for India; they will die for India. They will not want anything bad for India.” While many people I spoke to viewed Modi as a puppet of the RSS, none could cite anything he had said or done to advance the organization’s cause, known as Hindutva, of forging a specifically Hindu identity for India.
Modi appears to find himself in the same situation as Aurangzeb: He may understand India in sectarian terms, but he cannot rule it that way. Modi is an extraordinarily gifted politician, far better than his nearest rivals. Good politicians do not try to do that which cannot be done. And Modi plainly understands that if, say, he had abolished India’s Ministry of Minority Affairs, as some had hoped and others had feared he would do, he would have aroused such fierce opposition that his supreme goal of making India a high-growth, modern nation would have been dead on arrival. Even as it is, the Congress party makes hay from every communal incident in the country. Defending secularism is still good politics in India; it is, in fact, just about the only thing the embattled Congress has left.
Indian Muslim women clad in hijabs hold up sweets and a portrait of victorious Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi in Varanasi on May 16, 2014. (Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images)
