Summary
Some two hundred million Muslims live in India, making up the predominantly Hindu country’s largest minority group.
For decades, Muslim communities have faced discrimination in employment and education and encountered barriers to achieving wealth and political power. They are disproportionately the victims of communal violence.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling party have moved to limit Muslims’ rights, particularly through the Citizenship Amendment Act, which allows fast-tracked citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from nearby countries.
Introduction
India is home to some two hundred million Muslims, one of the world’s largest Muslim populations but a minority in the predominately Hindu country. Since India’s independence, Muslims have faced systematic discrimination, prejudice, and violence, despite constitutional protections.

Experts say anti-Muslim sentiments have heightened under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has pursued a Hindu nationalist agenda since elected to power in 2014. Since Modi’s reelection in 2019, the government has pushed controversial policies that critics say explicitly ignore Muslims’ rights and are effectively intended to disenfranchise millions of Muslims. The moves have sparked protests in India and drawn international condemnation.

How many Muslims live in India?
India is a country of religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. Its estimated two hundred million Muslims, most of whom identify as Sunni, account for about 15 percent of the population, by far the largest minority group. Hindus make up about 80 percent. The country’s Muslim communities are diverse, with differences in language, caste, ethnicity, and access to political and economic power.

How did India’s partition influence Hindu-Muslim relations?
Some of the animus between India’s Hindus and Muslims can be traced back to the cataclysmic partition of British India in 1947, scholars say. Economically devastated after World War II, the British lacked the resources to maintain their empire and moved to leave the subcontinent. In the years before partition, the Indian National Congress party, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, pushed for independence, organizing civil disobedience and mass protests against British rule. Meanwhile, the All-India Muslim League political group, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, called for a separate state for Muslims.

In 1947, a British judge hastily decided the borders for a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan (including what is today Bangladesh). The partition sparked deadly riots, gruesome communal violence, and mass migrations of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs to India. Survivors recall blood-soaked trains carrying refugees from one country to the other, towns burned to the ground, and bodies thrown in the streets. Historians estimate between two hundred thousand and two million people were killed.

Why communities that had coexisted for hundreds of years attacked each other remains unclear. Some experts fault the British and their “divide-and-rule” strategy, which provided some electoral privileges for the Muslim minority, about 25 percent of the population. Others point to tensions between Hindu and Muslim political movements, which rallied constituents along religious lines.

Around thirty-five million Muslims stayed in India after partition, choosing to remain with relatives and preserve their property and wealth, among other reasons. Many opposed the creation of a separate state for Muslims in the first place.

How did religion factor into India’s constitution?
The country’s now seventy-year-old constitution enshrines egalitarian principles, including social equality and nondiscrimination. The word “secular” was added to the preamble in 1976, but the constitution does not explicitly require the separation of religion and government as some national charters do.

Leaders of the Congress party who fought for independence advocated for an India that recognized all citizens and faiths as equal. Gandhi, who envisioned a secular state free from discrimination, was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, believed that secularism was essential to building a peaceful society and avoiding another tragedy like what followed partition; he saw those trying to divide India along religious lines, especially Hindu groups, as the nation’s greatest threat.

How did Hindu nationalists come to power?
Hindu nationalism was first articulated in the 1920s by Indian author and politician V. D. Savarkar in his book Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? Hindu nationalists believe Hindus are the “true sons of the soil” because their holy lands are in India, whereas the Christian and Muslim holy lands are outside it. They generally champion policies intended to make India a Hindu state. Many see Indian Muslims as suspect foreigners, despite the fact that most are descendants of Hindus who converted to Islam. Hindu nationalists point to partition and the creation of Pakistan as the ultimate manifestation of Muslim disloyalty.

Political tensions started to strain India’s secular model in the 1980s. After suffering an electoral defeat in 1977, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi exploited religious divisions to help return the Congress party to power. Gandhi, who was assassinated by Sikh bodyguards in 1984, was succeeded by her son, Rajiv, who further favored Hindus. “Congress’s sustained move toward Hindu majoritarianism over several decades created fertile ground for the more extreme ideology of the BJP,” Kanchan Chandra writes in Foreign Affairs.

Founded in 1980, the BJP traces its origins to the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer group. The BJP came to power in 1998 elections, though it shelved its more radical goals to hold together a coalition it led until 2004 when the Congress party regained power. These goals included ending the special status of Kashmir, a disputed Muslim-majority region; constructing a Hindu temple in the northern city of Ayodhya; and creating a uniform civil code so all citizens would have the same personal laws. (There is currently a separate Muslim personal law for issues such as marriage and inheritance.)

In 2014, the BJP won a single-party majority for the first time in the Lok Sabha—the lower house of parliament and India’s most influential political body—making party leader Narendra Modi prime minister. The party again secured a majority in 2019 after a divisive campaign filled with anti-Muslim messaging, and Modi’s government is expected to stay in power for its full five-year term ending in 2024.

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“The Modi government made it extremely clear to Muslims that they were not going to address them at all. The exclusion was quite blatant,” says Ghazala Jamil, an assistant professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “There has been a marked increase in anti-Muslim hostility in all kinds of institutions.”

What types of discrimination do India’s Muslims face?
Muslims have experienced discrimination in areas including employment, education, and housing [PDF]. Many encounter barriers to achieving political power and wealth, and lack access to health care and basic services. Moreover, they often struggle to secure justice after suffering discrimination, despite constitutional protections.

A 2019 report [PDF] by nongovernmental organization Common Cause found that half of police surveyed showed anti-Muslim bias, making them less likely to intervene to stop crimes against Muslims. Analysts have noted widespread impunity for those who attack Muslims; in recent years, courts and government bodies have sometimes overturned convictions or withdrawn cases that accused Hindus of involvement in violence against Muslims.

IMAGE COPYRIGHTWASEEM KHATAK

IMAGE COPYRIGHTWASEEM KHATAK