- Syeda Mazhar
Muslims in India form the largest religious minority in the country. According to the 2011 Census, they comprise 14.4 per cent of India’s total population roughly 174 million people. To use the word ‘minority’ for them, therefore, is misleading: they are the third-largest Muslim population anywhere in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan. The Muslim heritage has been under threat because of the hostility Muslims face in India by the hands of Hindu leadership. The resentment against the Mughal Empire is still very much alive.
The Hindu right is especially bitter toward Islam, particularly in the context of Muslim rule over the Indian subcontinent for much of the past millennium. While this overlooks the contributions–food, art, architecture, to name a few–of Indian Islam, as well as the religion’s more mystical nature relative to Middle Eastern Islam, the bitterness is rooted in a real history of dominance by a minority that sometimes engaged in the destruction of important Hindu temples.
The Mughal Empire consolidated Islam in South Asia and spread Muslim arts and culture as well as the faith. The heritage that has remained from the era is rich in terms of architecture, literature and cuisine. However, the Hindus blame the Mughals to have captured their homeland. However, throughout our history is that Hindus and Muslims lived here together. When the Mughals came they became Indians. They accepted many things from the culture here. The Mughals had ministers who were Hindu. Hindu kings had Muslim gurus.
Furthermore, throughout time, religion has been used to create the divide between the people. The indigenous Hindu and Muslim elites who used religious identity as a means of shoring up their own power (a practice that continues even today on both sides of the religious divide and, indeed, on both sides of the India-Pakistan border). On the whole, this approach hindered the fluidity of beliefs and religious practices across communal boundaries which have always existed in the subcontinent, and which persists despite hindrances even today. Though many Muslims in India occupy various important positions in the state and the society – which mostly depends on where they come from and what are their class, caste, and gender – a growing sense of marginalization among Muslims across India is hard to deny. This sense of marginalization has been steadily increasing since the rise to prominence of Hindu right-wing ideologies and organizations during the 1980s, when the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi issue was used to sharpen religious divides across India. While the occurrence of communal violence has declined since the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the alienation felt by religious minorities – including Muslims and Christians – has continued to increase, particularly after the victory of Narendra Modi as prime minister in the 2014 election.
Hindu nationalist groups are waging a concerted campaign against all religious minorities in their efforts to Hindu-ise India. Recently in August 2018, India’s Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party government renamed the historic Mughalsarai Junction Railway Station in the state of Uttar Pradesh after the right-wing Hindu ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, most likely because the existing name referred to the Indian Muslim Mughal dynasty. Before that, many street signs in New Delhi carrying Urdu/Muslim names including Aurangzeb Road, named after the sixth Mughal emperor, were painted black by Shiv Sena Hindustan. Many other instances such as – the ruling BJP officially changed the name of the Aurangzeb Road to A P J Abdul Kalam, a pro-BJP ex-president of India, the BJP government in Haryana renamed the city of Gurgaon as Gurugram, after Guru Dronacharya, an upper caste Hindu figure from the epic Mahabharata, the BJP government’s proposal to rename airports in the towns of Bareilly, Kanpur, and Agra with most apparent Hindu undertones.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP, also demands many other places with Muslim names, including the cities of Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, and Aurangabad, to be renamed. Narendra Modi also vehemently opposes the “slavery” mentality which he claims India is suffering from for the past 1200 years and advocates the eradication of Muslim heritage and symbols that may be indicative of the presence of Muslims in India at any given time.
Islamophobia is apparent in other actions by the government as well. RSS ideologue Dina Nath Batra sent a document to the National Council for Educational Research and Training demanding that some Urdu words and a couplet by the 19th century Urdu poet Ghalib be removed from India’s school textbooks. In a similar attack on Muslim symbols, in 2016, some right-wing activists prevented artists from writing a couplet in Urdu on the walls of the GT Road in Delhi as part of a non-governmental “Delhi I Love You” campaign Renaming of a place appears a lot more acceptable to the local population when it is done to erase remaining symbols of colonialism. However, when it is done solely to privilege one of the many available readings of a place’s history and identity, it becomes a divisive force, helping to accentuate political, social and historic divisions within a community.
