vidurascounsel

The Inward Turn: Muslim Politics in the Indian Subcontinent from the Fall of the Mughals to the Present

vidurascounsel

Apr 13, 2026

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Preface: A Necessary Discomfort

Muslim political movements in the Indian subcontinent – from the first reformist stirrings after the Mughal collapse to the institutional politics of today – have been overwhelmingly characterized by an inward orientation. Whether the mode was militant restorationism, separatist nationalism, or the quieter but equally consequential demand for communal legal autonomy, the dominant tendency has been to organize as Muslims first, often in opposition to the larger society, rather than as citizens of a shared polity.

This is not to say that individual Muslims have not been patriots, secularists, and integrationists – many have, heroically. Nor is it to pretend that the subcontinent’s communal history has been one-sided. Hindu-Muslim violence has always run in both directions, and any honest account must hold that truth. But intellectual honesty also requires acknowledging that the structural failures of mainstream Muslim political organizations to embrace genuine secular citizenship are real, longstanding, and consequential – independent of whatever provocations have existed.

What follows is an attempt to trace the full arc of that inward turn – its origins in the trauma of civilizational decline, its crystallization in the demand for Pakistan, its post-partition continuation in the form of protected communal autonomy in India, and its mirror image in the steady Islamization of Pakistan and Bangladesh, with catastrophic consequences for their Hindu minorities. It ends with a pointed question: why, even today, do mainstream Muslim political organizations in India react with reflexive hostility to perfectly normal expressions of Hindu cultural and national pride – expressions that should threaten no one who is genuinely committed to shared citizenship?

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Part I: Decline and the Politics of Loss (1707–1857)

 

To understand Muslim political psychology in the subcontinent, you must begin with a fact that has no real parallel in modern Indian Hindu experience: Muslims experienced political catastrophe from a position of power. The Mughal Empire, at its height under Aurangzeb in the late seventeenth century, was the world’s largest economy and one of history’s most impressive administrative achievements. Within fifty years of Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, it had begun an irreversible collapse.

This was not a gradual economic slide. It was a civilizational fall experienced in real time – military defeats to the Marathas, Sikh expansion into Punjab, Afghan invasions, and finally the decisive encroachment of the British East India Company. By 1757, when Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey, the writing was legible to any honest observer. By 1803, Delhi itself had passed under effective British control. The last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was a pensioner of the British Crown, permitted to occupy the Red Fort as a courtesy.

The political and psychological consequences of this collapse for Muslim elites were immense. They had been the ruling class. They had administered justice through Islamic jurisprudence, conducted courtly life in Persian, and understood themselves as the heirs of a civilization that spanned from Samarkand to Delhi to Dhaka. Now they were subjects – and worse, subjects increasingly displaced by Hindu commercial castes who had no aristocratic inhibitions about collaborating with the new British order.

The first major intellectual response to this crisis came from Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762), whose long shadow falls over virtually every subsequent Muslim political movement in the subcontinent. Waliullah’s diagnosis was theological: Muslim decline was punishment for religious corruption. Indian Muslims had absorbed too much of the syncretic Hindu environment around them – Sufi saint-worship, shrine festivals, elaborate practices not rooted in the Quran and Hadith. The prescription was purification: a return to textual Islam, the purging of innovation, the reassertion of sharia.

This diagnostic framework – Muslim decline as consequence of internal religious failure, remedy as religious purification – is perhaps the single most consequential intellectual legacy in subcontinent Muslim politics. Notice what it does not contain: any serious engagement with the political, economic, or technological reasons for Muslim decline; any recognition that Hindu or Sikh or British neighbors might have legitimate claims; any framework for shared citizenship with non-Muslims. The problem was framed as internal to the Muslim community, and the solution was therefore entirely internal.

Waliullah’s successors translated this intellectual framework into political action. His student’s student, Syed Ahmad Barelvi, turned it into armed jihad. Declaring India a Dar-ul-Harb (land of war against Islam), Barelvi organized what was, in modern terms, the first subcontinent jihad movement – a disciplined, pan-regional fundraising network, mass recruitment, and ultimately armed struggle first against the Sikhs, then implicitly against the British, from a base in the northwest frontier. He died in battle at Balakot in 1831, but the movement he founded – its Patna network, its ideological framework, its glorification of martyrdom in jihad – persisted for decades and inspired generations of militants from Taliban commanders to al-Qaeda ideologues who explicitly cite him.

The Deobandi movement, founded in 1866 in the aftermath of the failed 1857 uprising, chose education over armed jihad as its method, but retained much of Waliullah’s theological framework. Deoband’s founders saw the British defeat of the 1857 uprising as confirming the futility of direct confrontation. Instead, they would preserve Islamic civilization through a vast network of seminaries, training a generation of scholars to sustain Muslim religious identity through whatever political storms might come. This was a defensive, preservationist project – brilliant on its own terms, but again inward: focused entirely on maintaining the integrity of Muslim religious identity, not on building bridges to the Hindu majority or engaging with the possibilities of a shared Indian political life.

The exception to this inward turn in the nineteenth century was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Aligarh movement, which at least engaged with modernity – Western science, English education, rational engagement with colonial power. Sir Syed genuinely believed that Muslims could survive and flourish by embracing education and strategic cooperation with the British. But even here, notice the structure: Sir Syed was explicitly building Muslim modernism, for Muslim advancement, in explicit contrast to and competition with the Hindu majority. His famous 1888 speech asked whether Hindus and Muslims could share power after British withdrawal, and answered: no. This was not yet the two-nation theory, but it was the seed of it.

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Part II: The Politics of Separatism (1857–1947)

 

The ninety years between the 1857 uprising and partition of 1947 represent the most consequential period of Muslim political development in Indian history. It is the period in which the inward orientation hardened from a cultural and religious tendency into an explicit political ideology – culminating in the demand for a separate nation.

Three competing frameworks emerged within Muslim politics in this period, and all three deserve careful examination.

The Separatist Strand: The Muslim League

 

The All India Muslim League, founded in 1906 by the Muslim elite of Bengal and UP, began as an organization to protect Muslim interests within the British constitutional framework – separate electorates, reserved seats, protection from Hindu majority rule. This was not yet separatism; it was communal interest-group politics dressed in the language of minority protection.

The critical transformation came over the 1930s and reached its culmination under Jinnah in 1940. The Lahore Resolution demanded separate states for Muslims in the northwest and east of the subcontinent – what became Pakistan. Jinnah’s argument, eventually crystallized as the Two-Nation Theory, was that Hindus and Muslims were not merely different religious communities but different nations – with different histories, epics, heroes, gods, social customs, and moral frameworks – and that therefore coexistence in a single democratic state was impossible without Muslims being permanently subordinated to the Hindu majority.

There is genuine complexity in evaluating this claim. It was not pure invention. There were real reasons for Muslims to fear Hindu majoritarian democracy – the Congress Party’s organizational culture was distinctly Hindu in flavor despite its formal secularism, the Hindi-Urdu controversy showed real cultural incompatibility in some regions, and the experience of Congress provincial governments in 1937–39 had generated real Muslim grievances. Jinnah was a sophisticated lawyer, not a fanatic, and his arguments were not crazy.

But the Two-Nation Theory required something intellectually troubling: it required that the identities of 400+ million people be reduced to two monolithic blocs. It erased the enormous internal diversity within both “Hindu” and “Muslim” India. It made religious identity the primary and sufficient category of political life. And it created a logical problem that was never resolved: what about the 30–40% of Indian Muslims who would remain in India even after partition? If the Two-Nation Theory was correct, they were members of a separate nation marooned in the wrong country.

The Composite Nationalist Strand – and Its Uncomfortable Ambiguities

 

Not all Muslim political thinkers accepted the separatist framework. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the political organization of major Deobandi scholars, opposed partition explicitly and consistently. Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, the principal of Darul Uloom Deoband and perhaps the most important Deobandi scholar of his generation, developed the concept of muttahida qaumiyat (composite nationalism) – the idea that Muslims and Hindus were part of one Indian nation united by territory, history, and shared culture, and that Islam not merely permitted but required loyalty to this shared homeland. His 1938 book Composite Nationalism and Islam argued from Quranic evidence and the example of the Prophet’s Treaty of Hudaybiyyah that Muslims could and must live in political alliance with non-Muslims who share their homeland. He was physically attacked by Muslim League activists for this position – men threw filth on him at railway stations – and he persisted anyway until his death in 1957.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was the other great symbol of this tradition. Born in Mecca into a family of Islamic scholars, the young Azad was in fact a pan-Islamist and a theorist of trans-national jihad during the First World War period – historian Ayesha Jalal’s scholarship establishes him as perhaps the most celebrated theorist of that tradition during that decade. His journal Al-Hilal preached both Islamic revivalism and anti-British resistance. He joined the Muslim League in 1913. The evolution from this phase to his later Congress nationalism was real and documented – the Khilafat movement’s failure, his encounter with Gandhi, and his eventual theological conclusion that Islam was compatible with plural Indian nationhood shaped a genuine intellectual transformation. By 1940, he was delivering his famous Ramgarh address: “I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice and without me this splendid structure is incomplete.”

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier Gandhi,” took a third path – not through theological argument but through a practical commitment to non-violent resistance against British rule that he saw as inseparable from his Muslim faith. He built the Khudai Khidmatgar movement among Pashtuns entirely on the principle of composite Indian nationhood, and he spent years in Pakistani prisons for his refusal to accept the two-nation logic – a suffering that gives his nationalism a credibility untainted by strategic calculation.

This tradition deserves genuine honor – it was courageously defended against real physical intimidation, and it represented the closest Indian Muslim politics came to a path of genuine shared citizenship. But an honest accounting requires confronting an ambiguity its admirers rarely address directly. Were these figures genuinely committed to equal secular citizenship as an intrinsic value, or did their opposition to partition reflect other motivations?

Madani’s own text, as scholarly editions note, advocated composite nationalism within a united India “which he thought would be more conducive to the spread and prosperity of his community over the entire subcontinent than any religious partition.” The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah – the model he invoked for Hindu-Muslim political alliance – was the Prophet’s tactical alliance with non-Muslims in Mecca, which Deobandi scholars noted “promoted mutual interaction between the two communities thus allowing more opportunities for Muslims to preach their religion through peaceful tabligh.” The calculus was transparent: a united India provided more fertile ground for Islamic proselytization and community growth than a divided subcontinent in which Muslims would be confined to Pakistan’s western wing. As one formulation puts it directly, “the Ulama’s priority was an independent India where they could practice Islam without fear or hindrance.” The emphasis was on unrestricted Islamic practice and outreach across the vast subcontinent – not on secular equal citizenship as a value in itself.

The great Iqbal-Madani debate crystallizes this precisely. Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher whose vision eventually inspired Pakistan, and Madani disagreed not about whether Islam should be the governing framework of political life, but only about what the first step should be. For Iqbal, it was creating a Muslim-majority territory where Islamic civilization could consolidate itself. For Madani, it was first gaining freedom from Britain, after which Muslims would be far better positioned demographically, organizationally, and religiously across the entire subcontinent. Both were thinking in terms of Muslim civilizational strategy. Neither was reasoning from secular equal citizenship as an intrinsic value.

Azad’s case is more genuinely complex. His theological work, the Tarjuman al-Quran, attempted to construct an Islam hospitable to other forms of monotheism, including Hinduism, placing emphasis on commonly held rules of righteous conduct – a genuinely liberal theological project that went further than Madani’s tactical calculations. His post-independence career as India’s first Education Minister, focused on building institutions accessible to all Indians regardless of religion, showed a real commitment to the secular project in practice. Yet even his composite nationalism, as the historian S. Irfan Habib observes, was “never simply secular nationalism” – it was always grounded in the theological claim that Islam permitted composite nationhood, not that religion was irrelevant to political identity. Azad always needed an Islamic justification for living alongside Hindus as equals; the equality itself was not his starting point.

This distinction matters when we ask why the composite nationalist tradition failed to generate a durable political culture of Muslim secular integrationism after independence. If coexistence was valued as a condition for Muslim flourishing rather than as an end in itself, then once independence was achieved and the immediate threat of Pakistani separatism receded, the incentive to maintain the composite nationalist commitment naturally weakened. The tradition had no deep secular roots to sustain it – and this internal ambiguity may partly explain why it produced no lasting institutional legacy after Azad’s death.

The Congress Muslim Strand – Named Figures and Their Limits

 

Beyond the composite nationalist ulema, there was a distinct cohort of genuinely secularist Muslim politicians who operated within the Congress and treated religion as a private matter separable from political life. These figures deserve to be named concretely.

Zakir Husain (1897–1969) co-founded Jamia Millia Islamia as a nationalist, non-communal educational institution and became India’s third President. He represented perhaps the most genuine synthesis of deep personal Islamic culture and fully secular political orientation of anyone in independent India’s public life.

Rafi Ahmed Kidwai (1894–1954), a Congress politician from UP and close ally of Nehru who served as Minister of Communications and then Food, built his career on working class politics and secular nationalism with no concession to Muslim communal interests.

Hafiz Mohammed Ibrahim (1897–1981), Congress veteran and Minister for Water and Power, kept the Congress Muslim wing oriented toward national rather than communal concerns through the formative decades of the 1950s and 1960s.

Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (1905–1977) served as India’s fifth President, representing the strand of Muslim politicians who treated their Muslim identity as entirely personal and their political identity as fully national – though his willingness to sign the Emergency proclamation of 1975 under pressure from Indira Gandhi remains a permanent stain on his record.

Arif Mohammad Khan (born 1951) represents perhaps the most striking instance of genuine Muslim secular political courage in modern Indian history. As a Congress minister under Rajiv Gandhi, he publicly and passionately defended the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgment on the floor of Parliament – arguing that Muslim women deserved equal constitutional rights regardless of personal law. When Gandhi reversed course and pushed the 1986 Act to nullify the judgment, Khan resigned from the Cabinet and quit the Congress entirely rather than participate in what he described as a capitulation to orthodoxy. Few acts of political principle in post-independence India can match this one. He subsequently served as Governor of Kerala from 2019 to 2024, continuing to publicly challenge AIMPLB positions and advocate for Muslim reform from within the constitutional establishment.

Hamid Ansari (born 1937), Vice President from 2007 to 2017 and a career diplomat of distinction, represents the tradition of Muslim public service defined by professional excellence and constitutional commitment rather than communal identity politics. As India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in the 1990s, he vigorously defended India’s secular credentials against Pakistani attempts to internationalize Kashmir.

All these figures treated their Muslim identity as personal and their obligations as Indian citizens as primary. None organized around Muslim communal interests in the way the AIMPLB did. Several publicly opposed Muslim clerical conservatism at real personal and professional cost.

But the Congress never invested in building this secular Muslim political culture as a genuine political base. It was always easier and electorally more efficient to manage the clerical establishment and deliver personal law protection than to build a secular Muslim constituency from the ground up. The result was that figures like Arif Mohammad Khan remained isolated exceptions – celebrated by secularists, ignored by Muslim political organizations, and ultimately unable to shift the institutional direction of Muslim politics. The Congress treated secular Muslims as symbols of its secularism rather than as the foundation of a genuinely reformed Muslim politics, and in doing so ensured that the secular strand remained decorative rather than transformative.

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Part III: The Partition and Its Psychic Legacy

 

Partition was the single most catastrophic event in South Asian history since the Mughal collapse. Between one and two million people died in the accompanying communal violence. Fourteen to fifteen million were displaced. The Punjab and Bengal were vivisected along religious lines. Entire cities that had been home to mixed populations for centuries became mono-religious almost overnight.

For understanding post-partition Muslim politics in India, the psychic legacy of partition matters as much as its demographic consequences. Several things became simultaneously true.

The Muslims who stayed in India – roughly one-third of the pre-partition Muslim population – faced an immediate legitimacy crisis. Their co-religionists had just created a new country on the grounds that Muslims and Hindus could not live together as equal citizens. The Indian state, under Nehru and the Congress, insisted on secular citizenship and treated India’s Muslims as full citizens. But the suspicion was always there, among Hindus, that Muslim loyalty to India was provisional.

This suspicion created a defensive psychology within Muslim politics. The question “whose side are you on?” was implicitly present in every political interaction. Muslim leaders responded by insisting loudly on their patriotism while simultaneously protecting every possible mark of Muslim distinctiveness – partly as genuine cultural-religious commitment, partly as political identity assertion, and partly because the clerisy found community distinctiveness essential to its own authority.

Pakistan’s creation had a paradoxical effect on Indian Muslim religious politics. The most separatist, most Islamist elements had largely migrated to Pakistan. The Indian Muslims who remained were, on average, more committed to India than those who left. But the political vacuum this created was filled by the clerical establishment – the AIMPLB, the Jamiat – not by genuinely secular voices. The moderate secular-nationalist Muslims like Azad had no organizational base comparable to the clerical networks.

The result was a political economy of identity: Muslim political influence in India depended on maintaining Muslim distinctiveness, which meant resisting any reforms – especially personal law reforms – that would blur the boundary between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. The clerical establishment had a structural interest in this arrangement, and Congress, needing Muslim votes to counter Hindu nationalist challenges, was a willing partner.

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Part IV: The Protected Enclave – Post-Partition Indian Muslim Politics

 

The forty years from 1947 to 1986 established the basic architecture of Muslim politics in independent India: electoral participation in the Congress system; protection of Muslim Personal Law as non-negotiable; resistance to the Uniform Civil Code; and the gradual transformation of “secularism” from a constitutional principle into a label for non-interference with Muslim communal autonomy.

The clearest window into this architecture is the Shah Bano case of 1985–86.

A 62-year-old woman in Indore, divorced after forty years of marriage by triple talaq, asked the courts for maintenance. The Supreme Court – in a unanimous, five-judge decision – ruled in her favor, applying the secular Criminal Procedure Code. The court noted explicitly that Muslim personal law’s denial of maintenance to divorced women was incompatible with the Constitution’s guarantee of gender equality.

What happened next revealed everything about the political economy of Indian Muslim communal politics. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind mounted a massive campaign against the judgment. Street protests. Mosque sermons. Political pressure. The AIMPLB argued that the Supreme Court had no authority to interpret Islamic law.

And the Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi – with a massive parliamentary majority and no electoral need to capitulate – capitulated anyway. In 1986, Parliament passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, which effectively nullified the Supreme Court’s ruling and restricted maintenance to the 90-day iddat period.

Arif Mohammad Khan resigned from the Cabinet in protest. The Hindu right, the secular left, and women’s organizations across the country opposed the bill. And yet it passed, because Congress calculated – correctly – that the clerical establishment commanded enough Muslim votes to punish any government that defied it.

The dishonesty was multilayered. The AIMPLB was not defending Islamic law – Pakistan had already banned instant triple talaq in 1961, a quarter-century earlier. They were defending clerical authority over Muslim family life, which is quite different. And Congress was not defending Muslim rights – it was purchasing Muslim votes at the cost of Muslim women’s constitutional equality.

This pattern has repeated itself across every major reform issue for forty years since. Polygamy remains permitted under Muslim Personal Law, despite Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and dozens of other Muslim-majority countries having already banned it, and despite actual Muslim polygamy rates being only marginally higher than Hindu ones. The AIMPLB has explicitly opposed the Child Marriage Restraint Act, arguing marriage age should be governed by puberty – effectively defending child marriage in the name of religious freedom, a position that would draw immediate condemnation if held by any Hindu organization. The AIMPLB opposed the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act as an infringement on the madrasa system, even as data consistently showed madrasa-educated children having significantly worse economic outcomes than those in mainstream schools. And when the Modi government pushed for transparency and accountability in the Waqf boards – institutions managing billions of rupees in property, characterized even by Muslim reformers as opaque and captured by Ashraf elites – every Muslim organization opposed it wholesale as an attack on Muslim identity.

The pattern is consistent: any reform that reduces clerical authority or blurs the boundary between Muslim and non-Muslim legal status is immediately reframed as an attack on Islam itself. The political interests of the clerisy are presented as the religious interests of the entire Muslim community.

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Part V: The Self-Reinforcing Circle – Communal Violence, Terrorism, and Muslim Defensiveness

 

The rise of the BJP and Hindu nationalism from the 1980s onward has created a new dynamic that significantly complicates honest analysis – but the complications run in both directions, and any serious account must resist the temptation to frame Hindu-Muslim conflict as a morality play with a single guilty party.

Communal Violence Is Bidirectional

 

The history of Hindu-Muslim communal violence in India is long, complex, and emphatically not one-sided. This is not a comfortable thing to say, but the historical record demands it.

Gandhi, who spent decades mediating communal conflicts and was by no stretch a Hindu nationalist, made the observation that Muslims had a pattern of initiating riots – a charge he made with great reluctance and sorrow, and which cost him political goodwill among Muslim leaders. The pre-partition record bears this out in significant measure. The Moplah Rebellion of 1921 in Kerala, though initially framed as an agrarian revolt by Muslim tenants against Hindu landlords, became a systematic religious pogrom in which unarmed Hindus were massacred or forced to convert. The Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946 – triggered by Jinnah’s Direct Action Day – were initiated by Muslim League activists and resulted in an estimated 4,000–5,000 deaths, the majority Hindu in the first days before Hindu and Sikh retaliatory violence began. Historian Ishtiaq Ahmed, a Pakistani scholar of partition violence, concluded from his research on Punjab that in March 1947, Muslims initiated large-scale violence against Sikhs and Hindus in the Muslim-majority districts of northern Punjab – and that the horrific retaliatory violence that followed ultimately killed more Muslims than the initial Muslim attacks had killed Hindus and Sikhs.

This is not to assign collective guilt to Muslims as a community. The leaders who incited violence – the Muslim League politicians who called for Direct Action, the landlords and local strongmen who organized pogroms – were a small fraction of the Muslim population. Ordinary Muslims suffered enormously from retaliatory Hindu and Sikh violence, especially in East Punjab after partition. The point is that the narrative of Muslims as uniquely victimized in communal conflicts, which has become standard in certain political circles, is historically false. Violence was ignited from both sides, responded to from both sides, and ordinary people on both sides paid the price.

In post-independence India, the pattern of bidirectional violence continued. Several major riots – Bhiwandi 1970, Moradabad 1980, Bhagalpur 1989 – involved significant Muslim aggression as trigger events, even when Hindu retaliation was disproportionate. The 1992 Bombay riots following the Babri demolition involved organized Muslim attacks on Hindus and Hindu property in the first phase, before the violence became generalized.

There are, however, cases of clear state-directed or state-tolerated violence against Muslims that deserve to be named without equivocation. The 1983 Nellie massacre in Assam – in which between 2,000 and 3,000 Bengali Muslim settlers were killed by Tiwa tribal communities, with state forces arriving too late – represents a genuine communal atrocity with elements of administrative failure. The 1984 Delhi anti-Sikh riots, while targeting Sikhs rather than Muslims, are the clearest example in Indian history of Congress-organized state-backed communal massacre – important precisely because it demonstrates that state complicity in communal violence is not the exclusive property of any one party.

The Gujarat 2002 Question

 

The 2002 Gujarat riots deserve specific attention because they have become politically iconic in ways that often substitute symbol for fact. The riots began with a genuine provocation: on February 27, 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya was attacked at Godhra, killing 59 people in a burning railway coach. A special court later convicted 31 Muslims of this attack as a pre-planned conspiracy. What followed was catastrophic communal violence across Gujarat in which approximately 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed according to official figures – the asymmetry reflecting the minority status of Muslims in a state where Hindu mobs had effectively free run for several days.

The question of state complicity is legally nuanced and should be stated precisely. A Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team investigated allegations of a larger conspiracy involving then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi. In 2012, the SIT issued a closure report finding no prosecutable evidence against Modi and 63 others. This was upheld through the Magistrate’s Court, the Gujarat High Court, and finally the Supreme Court in 2022, which dismissed the petition by Zakia Jafri as devoid of merit. The Supreme Court specifically held that a failure of state administration, as may be expected in riot situations, is not the same as state-sponsored violence and a conspiracy to cause riots.

What is legally established: the riots were real and devastating; many individual perpetrators were convicted; the Godhra train burning was a Muslim-initiated attack that triggered the subsequent violence; and no criminal conspiracy by the state government was proven in court. What remains a matter of legitimate debate is whether administrative failures – the delayed deployment of security forces, the presence of ministers in police control rooms during the violence – reflected deliberate inaction or chaotic mismanagement. The honest verdict is proven administrative dereliction, not proven criminal conspiracy or state-directed pogrom.

Terrorism

 

Any honest account of Hindu-Muslim conflict must also engage the terrorism dimension, which Muslim political organizations in India have been conspicuously reluctant to address with full candor.

Indian Muslims are disproportionately represented among those convicted of Islamist terrorism on Indian soil. SIMI, the Indian Mujahideen, and Pakistan-based groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba have all drawn from Indian Muslim communities for their domestic networks. The serial bombings of the 2000s – Varanasi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Pune – killed hundreds of civilians and were carried out by Indian Muslim operatives, typically in the name of avenging communal violence against Muslims. This terrorism was wrong, was condemned by most Indian Muslims, and served primarily to harm the very community it claimed to avenge – by generating anti-Muslim backlash, providing fuel for Hindutva mobilization, and confirming the worst fears of Hindu nationalists about Muslim loyalties.

The mainstream Muslim political response to this terrorism has been deeply inadequate. The dominant pattern has been initial qualified condemnation, quickly followed by deflection toward grievances, skepticism about the convictions, and resistance to any serious community-level examination of why young Indian Muslims were being recruited into jihadist networks. The AIMPLB and major Muslim political organizations have never seriously engaged with radicalization prevention – because doing so would require acknowledging that radicalization is actually happening, which disrupts the narrative of pure Muslim victimhood.

Love Jihad: Neither Conspiracy Nor Manufactured Fiction

 

Nowhere is the Muslim political establishment’s failure to engage honestly with Hindu concerns more visible than on the question of love jihad.

The national media and secular-liberal discourse have treated this as a clean binary: either it is a purely Hindutva conspiracy theory with zero basis in fact, or it is proof of organized Muslim demographic warfare. Both positions are wrong, and the refusal to navigate the middle has left a real grievance unaddressed and a real conversation unmade.

Multiple official investigations – by state CIDs in Karnataka and Kerala, by the National Investigation Agency’s 2018 examination of 11 interfaith marriages in Kerala – concluded that there was no evidence of an organized conspiracy by Muslim organizations to systematically convert Hindu women through deceptive marriages. The Supreme Court upheld an adult Muslim woman’s right to marry a Muslim man of her own free will. The central government stated before Parliament that no central agency had found evidence of organized love jihad as such. These findings matter and should not be dismissed.

However, dismissing the issue entirely as a debunked conspiracy is itself intellectually dishonest. Across local Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and Gujarati media – the kind that does not reach Western journalists or urban English-speaking commentators – there has been consistent, FIR-backed reporting of a specific pattern: Muslim men using Hindu names, performing Hindu rituals including temple weddings, concealing their identity and marital status, engaging in sexual relationships on the promise of marriage, and in documented cases either demanding conversion after marriage or abandoning the woman. The pattern of identity concealment appears with enough frequency across enough geographies – UP, MP, Haryana, Karnataka, Gujarat, Uttarakhand – to suggest it is not merely a random collection of individual bad actors. Whether it constitutes an organized conspiracy in the sense of institutional direction is a different and unproven question. The individual acts of deception are, however, real in numerous documented cases, each backed by FIRs, police station records, and verified victim testimony.

There is also a structural dimension that Muslim organizations have never acknowledged publicly. Under traditional Sunni fiqh, a Muslim man may marry a Jewish or Christian woman without her converting, since they are People of the Book. He may not validly marry a Hindu woman without her conversion to Islam, since Hinduism falls outside that category. This means that for a Muslim man who wishes to marry a Hindu woman in an Islamic-recognized marriage, her conversion is not merely socially preferred – it is theologically required. This creates a structural dynamic entirely independent of any conspiracy: Muslim men who genuinely fall in love with Hindu women face religious pressure to secure their partner’s conversion, and extended Muslim families have communal incentives to encourage it. The honest response to Hindu concerns would be to acknowledge this asymmetry and address it – either by urging use of the Special Marriage Act, which requires no conversion at all, or by encouraging progressive scholarship that permits Muslim men to marry Hindus without conversion. Instead, the AIMPLB has responded with reflexive denial and no acknowledgment of the theological problem.

The distinctions that need to be drawn are between three genuinely different phenomena. The first is consensual interfaith love marriages – fully mutual, full-information, fully adult – which are constitutionally protected and which anti-conversion laws unjustly criminalize. The second is individual deceptive relationships involving concealment of identity, false Hindu names, and false promises of marriage – real, documented, criminally prosecutable under existing fraud statutes, and emphatically not Hindutva inventions. The third is the claim of an institutional Muslim plan to demographically conquer India through systematically arranged seductions – which has no evidentiary support in any court, investigation, or credible scholarly source. Muslim organizations condemn none of the second and dismiss all of it as the third. The silence where honest condemnation of individual deception ought to be is itself telling.

The Halal Economy

 

The halal controversy is another arena where genuine Hindu and Sikh economic concerns have been reflexively dismissed as bigotry rather than engaged with honestly.

Halal is not merely a dietary preference – it is a certification system with structural economic consequences. Under halal meat certification requirements, only Muslims may slaughter the animals, since the theological basis of the certification requires the slaughterer to invoke the name of Allah at the moment of killing. The practical consequence is that Hindu butchers – many belonging to the Khatik community, a historically marginalized Dalit and backward-caste group whose traditional occupation has been meat-processing – are structurally excluded from certified halal slaughter facilities regardless of the quality of their work. A Khatik butcher’s craft and expertise are simply irrelevant; the certification requires Muslim identity of the slaughterer.

Halal certification in India, introduced in 1974 initially for meat exports, has expanded dramatically to cover processed foods, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, hospital services, and more. India’s meat export requirements initially drove the institutionalization of halal in supply chains, creating path dependencies: large abattoirs built for export normalized halal as the default, and the entire supply chain followed. The result is that halal meat is now served in most five-star hotels, railway pantries, military canteens, and roadside restaurants – not because Muslim preference dominates those settings, but because suppliers preemptively halal-certify to avoid commercial friction.

Sikhism explicitly prohibits halal meat, which Sikhs call kuttha, and its consumption is forbidden by the Sikh Rehat Maryada. In most of India outside Punjab and Chandigarh, the de facto dominance of halal in the meat supply chain means Sikhs seeking Jhatka meat must actively search for it. This is a genuine infringement on Sikh religious practice, not a manufactured grievance. The absence of any equivalent regulatory recognition or institutional support for Jhatka or Satvik standards represents a real asymmetry – halal has been embedded in government export bodies and institutional supply chains while Hindu and Jain dietary standards have no comparable official footing. The government’s 2020 removal of mandatory halal from APEDA’s meat export manual was a correction of this imbalance, not an act of anti-Muslim discrimination.

The “economic jihad” framing – the claim that halal certification is a deliberate strategy to fund terrorism or systematically destroy Hindu businesses – significantly overstates the case. Most Muslim consumers simply want religiously compliant food, which is a legitimate religious right. The certifying bodies collecting fees are doing so lawfully. The problem is not intentional economic warfare; it is the absence of a pluralistic regulatory framework that gives equal institutional space to different communities’ dietary requirements. But the real structural displacement of Khatik butchers and the genuine Sikh religious infringement deserve honest engagement. Muslim political organizations have offered none – treating any question about halal expansion as Islamophobia rather than as the legitimate concern about institutional pluralism that it is.

Population, Land, and the Broader Ecosystem of Hindu Concerns

 

The “population jihad” claim – that Muslims are deliberately having more children to eventually outnumber Hindus – is the clearest example of a real underlying phenomenon being inflated into a conspiracy theory, with that inflation then used to discredit the underlying phenomenon entirely.

The demographic differential is real. Muslim TFR in 2019–21 was 2.36 versus Hindu TFR of 1.94, and the Muslim share of India’s population rose from approximately 9.9% in 1951 to 14.2% by 2011. But the fertility gap has narrowed dramatically and continuously – from 1.1 children per woman in 1992 to 0.42 in 2019–21, a 62% reduction. Muslim fertility has been declining faster than Hindu fertility in percentage terms. Demographic projections place Muslim population share stabilizing at approximately 18–19% by mid-century, well short of a majority. The primary drivers are not religious ideology but socioeconomic factors – female literacy, income, and urbanization – as evidenced by the fact that Muslim women in Kerala have fewer children than Hindu women in Bihar. The claim that Muslim men are consciously framing childbearing as a demographic conquest strategy has no serious evidentiary support. The appropriate response would be to engage these facts honestly, acknowledge the differential while explaining its socioeconomic roots, and actively support female education and family planning within Muslim communities. Instead, any mention of differential fertility is treated as Islamophobia.

The land jihad narrative – focused primarily on Waqf board governance and demographic concentration in certain districts – similarly mixes real problems with conspiratorial overstatement. Waqf boards managing billions of rupees in property have been characterized even by Muslim reformers as opaque, mismanaged, and captured by Ashraf elites. The Waqf Act’s historical self-declaration provisions created genuine legal ambiguities that resulted in documented disputes with non-Muslim landowners. The 2025 Waqf Amendment’s push for transparency, women’s inclusion on boards, and external audit mechanisms addressed real governance failures that Muslim organizations should have sought to remedy themselves. The broader claim of a systematic Muslim strategy to seize Hindu land through Waqf declarations is not established. Similarly, Hindu concerns about Bangladeshi Muslim migration to Assam have a legitimate basis in real documented migration patterns – a genuine administrative challenge – while the “land jihad” framing that treats all Muslim demographic presence as deliberate threat conflates illegal immigration with the constitutionally protected internal movement of Indian Muslim citizens.

Looking across the full ecosystem of Hindu concerns – love jihad, economic jihad, land jihad, population jihad – a consistent pattern emerges. Some concerns rest on solid factual ground and deserve serious engagement: the identity deception pattern in certain interfaith relationships; the structural exclusion of Khatik butchers from halal certification; the Sikh religious infringement; the Muslim fertility differential; Waqf governance failures. Others have partial factual grounding that has been inflated into conspiratorial frameworks: demographic concentration in certain districts; halal scope expansion into non-food products. Others function primarily as political mobilization tools with little factual basis: organized institutional love jihad; deliberate population conquest planning; systematic Muslim land seizure. The appropriate response to this spectrum is differentiated – taking seriously what has factual grounding, debunking what does not, and refusing the conflation that treats all such concerns as equivalent Islamophobia. Muslim political organizations have done none of this. The blanket dismissal of every Hindu concern has left legitimate grievances festering and handed the entire discourse to Hindutva political entrepreneurs, foreclosing the honest community self-examination that might actually address the underlying real problems.

The Spectrum of Hindutva – A Distinction That Must Be Made

 

With this fuller picture of bidirectional violence, terrorism, love jihad, and the broader ecosystem of Hindu concerns in view, the critical question that Muslim political organizations consistently refuse to engage is: is all Hindutva equivalent?

The honest answer is no, and the refusal to make this distinction is itself a serious political failure.

The spectrum runs from syncretic cultural nationalism – Vivekananda’s vision of a Hinduism that encompasses all of India’s religious traditions, Mohan Bhagwat’s repeated assertion that Hindus and Muslims share common ancestors and common civilizational roots – through constitutional Hindu assertiveness and majoritarian political assertion to communal aggression and hard supremacism. These are genuinely different things. The Bajrang Dal activist who attacks a Muslim boy for talking to a Hindu girl is not the same as the RSS chief visiting a mosque and a madrasa, as Bhagwat did in 2022. The love jihad law that criminalizes interfaith marriage between consenting adults is not the same as teaching Hindu history and culture in schools. The politician who describes Muslims as infiltrators is not the same as one who says India is a civilization rooted in Hindu thought in which Muslims have been a formative presence for a thousand years.

Muslim organizations in India treat all of these as equivalent. The standard response to any Hindu cultural assertion – including perfectly reasonable ones like teaching Sanskrit in schools, naming roads after Hindu historical figures, or celebrating Indian civilizational continuity – is to invoke Islamophobia, to deploy the vocabulary of minority persecution, to warn of communal conflict.

Some of this sensitivity is understandable. The post-2014 spike in vigilante attacks on Muslims, the inflammatory rhetoric from certain BJP politicians, and years of genuine discrimination in employment and housing have created a legitimate hair-trigger. When co-religionists are being lynched for carrying beef, it is psychologically difficult to maintain fine distinctions between the Hindu cultural pride that produced Vivekananda and the Hindu communalism that produces lynch mobs.

Some of it is cynical: the clerical establishment and Muslim politicians have strong incentives to maintain a siege mentality within the community. Fear of the Hindu other has been the most reliable mechanism for maintaining Muslim political cohesion – and for ensuring that ordinary Muslims do not question the clerical establishment’s authority or the political leadership’s record.

And some of it is a failure of political imagination – the inability to conceive of a framework in which India can be acknowledged as a civilization rooted in Hindu thought and culture, and fully equal in its secular citizenship for all religious communities including Muslims. These two things are not incompatible, but the dominant framework in Muslim political thought treats them as mutually exclusive.

The intellectually honest position would be: India is a civilization in which Hindu traditions constitute the deep cultural substrate, and in which Muslims have been a formative presence for a thousand years, and in which the Constitution guarantees equal citizenship regardless of religion. A celebration of Hindu culture is not a threat to Muslim citizenship. The demand for a Uniform Civil Code is not an attack on Muslim identity but an extension of the equal dignity the Constitution already guarantees to every other Indian citizen. The RSS saying that Hindus and Muslims share ancestors is an invitation – even if it comes with political baggage – to shared belonging rather than a denial of Muslim religious identity.

Muslim political organizations could engage these positions critically, selectively, and honestly. They could distinguish the RSS chief visiting a mosque from the Bajrang Dal burning one. They could say: yes, India’s Hindu cultural roots are real and we are part of that civilization, and here is precisely where we draw the line between cultural celebration and majoritarian discrimination. Instead, the dominant response has been to reject all of it wholesale – and in doing so, to leave the field of legitimate Hindu expression to those who hold the most aggressive versions of it.

—–

Part VI: The Pakistan Mirror

 

To understand the full implications of the inward turn in Muslim politics, it is essential to look at what happened when that turn achieved its logical conclusion – the creation of Pakistan.

Pakistan’s founding ideology – that Muslims constitute a separate nation requiring a separate state – has produced one of the most religiously intolerant polities in the modern world. The demographic trajectory is stark, but requires precise telling.

The often-cited figure that Pakistan went from 23% non-Muslim in 1947 to about 3% today requires an important correction. The 23% figure referred to the combined population of undivided Pakistan – both West Pakistan and East Pakistan. In West Pakistan alone, Hindus and Sikhs constituted approximately 14.6–20% of the population in 1941, concentrated heavily in Punjab’s cities and Sindh. After partition’s mass migration, this dropped to just 1.6% in West Pakistan by the 1951 census – primarily because virtually the entire Hindu and Sikh population of Punjab fled to India in the catastrophic population exchange of 1947, in which Muslim violence against Hindus and Sikhs was part of the initiation of the killing cycle, as the historical record establishes.

East Pakistan (Bangladesh), by contrast, had a 22% Hindu population in 1951, which declined to under 8% today through a separate and equally grim process of persecution and flight over seven decades.

The most significant single event of anti-Hindu violence in the entire subcontinent’s post-independence history occurred in 1971, when the Pakistani army launched Operation Searchlight against the Bengali population of East Pakistan. Hindus were disproportionately targeted – identified by their sacred threads, their temples, and their perceived pro-India sympathies – and constitute an estimated 80% of the civilian deaths in a campaign that killed between 300,000 and 3 million people overall. Ten million refugees fled to India, the overwhelming majority of them Hindu. This was the subcontinent’s second genocide after partition, carried out by the Pakistani state against its own citizens.

In today’s Pakistan, the Hindu population has remained at approximately 2% – stable in percentage terms, but subject to ongoing systematic persecution: blasphemy law weaponization, forced conversions of Hindu girls estimated at 1,000 per year by NGOs, temple destruction, and legal discrimination. The trajectory is one of gradual erosion rather than catastrophic collapse.

Pakistan’s Islamization followed a predictable internal logic: once a state’s legitimacy rests on Islamic identity, the question “how Islamic are you?” becomes an instrument of political competition. Every government, from Bhutto to Zia to Musharraf to Nawaz Sharif, tried to prove its Islamic credentials by making concessions to the religious right – and each concession raised the bar for the next. Zia ul-Haq institutionalized sharia in criminal law, introduced mandatory Islamic studies that systematically promoted hatred of Hindus, and created the blasphemy law apparatus that has since killed or imprisoned hundreds of people, mostly religious minorities. Pakistani school textbooks have been found by multiple scholarly analyses to promote hatred of Hindus, glorify Islamic conquest as liberation, and frame India as an existential enemy of Islam – not as occasional unfortunate passages but as structural and pervasive content.

The treatment of Ahmadis is perhaps the most revealing case. In 1974, Bhutto’s government declared Ahmadis non-Muslims by constitutional amendment. In 1984, Zia made it a criminal offense for Ahmadis to call themselves Muslims, pray in mosques, or use any Islamic greeting. Ahmadis are today among the most severely persecuted communities in Pakistan – and they are Muslims, or consider themselves to be. The logic of building identity on religious separatism does not stop at the border between Muslims and non-Muslims. Once the principle is established that religious purity is the criterion for full citizenship, the question becomes not Muslim or non-Muslim but pure Muslim or impure Muslim. Pakistan has been consuming itself by this logic for seventy-five years.

Bangladesh’s trajectory, though less extreme, follows a similar pattern. Born out of genuinely inclusive Bengali secular nationalism that explicitly rejected Pakistani Islamic nationalism, Bangladesh has seen its Hindu population decline from 28% in 1940 to under 8% today. Every major political transition has been accompanied by anti-Hindu violence. The fall of Sheikh Hasina in 2024 triggered more than 2,000 documented attacks on Hindus and their properties. Hindu police officers, teachers, and civil servants were systematically forced to resign. Jamaat-e-Islami – whose leaders were convicted of war crimes against Hindus in 1971 – emerged from the 2024 elections as the second largest political force. The revolution that ended Hasina’s authoritarianism has been partially captured by the forces of 1971.

—–

Part VII: The Pattern, Stated Plainly

 

Across three countries, across three centuries, the pattern is consistent enough to state plainly.

Muslim political movements in the subcontinent have systematically prioritized the maintenance of a separate, protected Muslim political and legal identity over genuine integration into shared citizenship. This tendency has not been universal – there have always been genuine secular integrationists, genuine composite nationalists, genuine reformers. But they have been consistently outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and in some cases physically threatened by those who treat communal distinctiveness as the non-negotiable core of Muslim political identity.

The specific manifestations differ by context. In pre-partition India: armed jihadism seeking Islamic rule, educational separatism building Muslim institutions in competition with shared ones, and eventually political separatism demanding a Muslim homeland. In post-partition India: personal law separatism preventing reform and maintaining a parallel legal system, systematic resistance to every reform proposed by the state, reflexive rejection of Hindu cultural expression as threatening. In Pakistan: the logical extreme – a state where Islamic identity became the criterion of full citizenship, with catastrophic consequences for every non-Islamic minority and eventually for heterodox Muslims too. In Bangladesh: the erosion of secular Bengali nationalism under pressure from Islamist forces, with the Hindu minority bearing the cost in an ongoing demographic catastrophe.

The victims of this pattern are not only Hindus and other non-Muslims. Muslim women have been consistently denied the equality that secular law would provide because the clerical establishment successfully frames women’s rights as an attack on Islam. Pasmanda Muslims – 85% of India’s Muslim population – have had their interests poorly represented by an Ashraf-dominated establishment more concerned with symbolic religious autonomy than economic uplift. And ordinary Indian Muslims themselves, whose political potential has been consistently captured by a leadership more interested in communal power than community welfare.

—–

Conclusion: The Path Not Taken

 

Three hundred years after Shah Waliullah wrote his first diagnosis of Muslim decline, the same basic intellectual framework persists in Muslim political thought: the problem is internal to the Muslim community; the solution is religious purification or protection of religious distinctiveness; engagement with the larger society is primarily defensive or adversarial.

The path of genuine secular integrationism – of accepting equal citizenship fully and reforming Muslim civil life accordingly – has existed at every turn. It was available in the 1880s, when Sir Syed could have built Muslim modernism toward integration rather than separation. It was available in the 1940s, when Azad’s composite nationalism offered a real alternative to Jinnah’s Two-Nation Theory. It was available in 1986, when Congress could have held its ground on Shah Bano and the AIMPLB could have accepted that Muslim women possess the same right to maintenance as every other Indian woman. It was available after the 2000s bombings, when Muslim political organizations could have led a serious community-level reckoning with radicalization rather than defaulting to defensive denial. It was available in 2019, when Muslim organizations could have supported the triple talaq ban while demanding it not be weaponized politically.

At each of these junctures, the path of communal separatism and clerical authority was chosen over the path of shared citizenship and internal reform.

This is not a counsel of despair. The reformist voices exist and matter – Hamid Dalwai in the 1970s, Asghar Ali Engineer for decades, the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan today, the Pasmanda movement, and individual politicians like Arif Mohammad Khan who chose principle over career. The majority of ordinary Indian Muslims, survey after survey shows, care primarily about employment, prices, and safety – not about the theological purity of their personal law.

But between these ordinary Muslims and the politics that claims to represent them stands an institutional structure – the AIMPLB, the major Muslim parties, the Deobandi and Barelvi clerical networks – that has consistently chosen the politics of identity preservation over the politics of equal citizenship.

Until that changes, Muslim politics in the Indian subcontinent will continue its long, costly, inward turn – and the possibility of genuine shared citizenship, in which being a Muslim and being an Indian citizen are fully and uncomplicatedly compatible, will remain deferred.

—–

This essay traces three centuries of political and intellectual history across the Indian subcontinent. It attempts to hold two truths simultaneously: that Hindu-Muslim communal violence has always been bidirectional and cannot be reduced to a story of Hindu aggression and Muslim victimhood; and that Muslim political institutions have consistently chosen communal separatism over genuine shared citizenship, in ways that have harmed their own communities most of all. Honest historical analysis – however uncomfortable for any community – is the only foundation on which genuine political reform can be built.

Postscript: Someone on Twitter said this is just what Orthodox Islam requires of its votaries and I replied: This is the standard explanation (and it is true that orthodox Islam has these political demands built into it) but the other side of it is that many generations lived with half baked versions that mixed other traditions into it and thought it normal.. and countless millions live normalish lives by picking out some aspects and ignoring others.. Humans are adaptable. The commonly accepted full “orthodox” versions are all unworkable fever dreamz of central Asian and Persian converts that were never actually implemented by their own societies and which fail (analogous to Marxist orthodoxy) whenever intellectuals get into power and try to make it work. So that dream will fail, people will have to adjust..

Since the world has been set alight and everyone has a theory, I will put out my pet theory and invite comments. In 1930 Allama Iqbal (supposed father of the idea of Pakistan) proposed a consolidated Muslim state in Northwest India as a solution to the problem of Muslim Nationalism in India. The part that is relevant to us today is his claim that such a state will defend India against the Barbarians to its West (his words were: “the North-West Indian Muslims will prove the best defenders of India against a foreign invasion, be that invasion one of ideas or of bayonets. “).

Iqbal, being a romantic Islamist in an age when the British Empire seemed a permanent fact of life had confused ideas about many things, and his vision of a Northwest Muslim state was as confused and romantic as any of his other dreams, but in this case he hit on something real.. Pakistan is the buffer that protects India from the Middle Eastern snakepit. Of course, it is also an example of the same snakepit extending into the Indian subcontinent, but it is worth remembering that India at one point was almost entirely colonized by Islalmicate invaders from the Northwest. Now that invasive colonial culture is concentrated in Pakistan; and with the war with Afghanistan, it is now directed against the very people it once idealized.

So my point is that Indians should thank Jinnah for his service. They now have a fighting chance of escaping the Middle eastern cannon fodder trap and becoming a successful Asian country.
Choose wisely. Let Pakistan be more in the Middle East. Be more Asian.

And for Pakistan the answer is also the same. Try to be more Indian, less Middle eastern. But our road home may be convoluted. Even Indonesia is not home free, our path is going to be rockier..

Here is the relevant quote from the Allahabad address (full text in link)

As one does, we were discussing societal rise and collapse on twitter and I said at some point:

User @whatwasthataga4 on X.com (an Indian American) asked: “I don’t understand this once in a millennium opportunity. What exactly is it and how is it supposed to work in the best case?”

I posted an off the cuff reply and wished I could sit down and do a proper post on this. But knowing that I may not get to it, I am just quickly updating my tweet and hoping that commentators will add value.. So here is my “off the top of my head” explanation of this “once in a millenium opportunity” claim.

1. Indian human resources are potentially world class; the wetware is actually OK (though disease and malnutrition do lower IQ in some significant subsets, but cultural strengths compensate as well, so even that is not a lost cause)

2. So, wetware can work. What about software? I think even the software is not entirely corrupted. The bios is still intact for most people (though under threat) and the culture has many elements that make it potentially successful. For example, there is a significant commercial class and tradition, of the South Chinese type, if not equally developed right now. There is also significant respect for teachers and learning (again, not at Confucian levels, but it is very much there) and respect for legal authority (sometimes, maybe a lot of times, too much respect for authority, but there is also a romantic anti-authoritarian assault from Wokish Leftist ideologies that now threatens to over-correct).

You may be getting a hint of why i say its a chance, not a done deal. These are also strengths that are under sustained assault from Postleftist wokish ideologies and in India there is such significant domination of western leftish narratives in the educated classes that there is the possibility they could actually destroy these cultural strengths in another generation. That would be one way to miss the bus. Another would be to start a religious civil war. The second is very high on the list of fears for leftists and liberals, but I suggest we should be equally fearful of too much leftism 🙂

3. The administrative and military machinery of the Raj is intact, vast and relatively modern, and can be redirected to new purposes. I listed this at 3, but this is probably what many people think of when they say “India has a chance, thanks to the Raj”. I think the downsides of colonization exceed any benefits they brought, but no doubt the existence of this apparatus gives India (and even the other successor states of the Raj) an edge over, say, Afghanistan, for better and for worse. Its a mixed blessing but its there, and it CAN potentially be directed to new ends.

4. A vast and successful diaspora (a source of ideas, ideals, money and skills)

5. Relatively good asabiya for such a large country (I dont buy this notion that Indian people in general are not patriotic. If anything, they are excessively and over-sentimentally patriotic . Patriotism matters. (Pakistan has even better asabiya, so this is necessary, but not sufficient 🙂 )

6. The biggest population in the world Demographic dividend. Another obvious point where the opportunity is there now, but wont be there forever.

And so on.. There is a lot more

Add your comments. (I have left the meaning of development vague, but what I personally mean is very conventional success as the first layer (the thought is that this layer itself implies others), so things like being a giant middle income or more economy, with no serious invasion fears and a clearly functional political and economic system that is a very big source of innovation and ideas for the whole planet; I dont mean people will be more virtuous, or a “new man” will be born after the glorious revolution).

BTW, here is a conventional western view of why a chance for very serious development exists in India (at least this was the view last year, relations are more tense now and the strategic directives behind such programs may have shifted)

Postscript: My conspiracy theory is that a thousand conspiracies are launched and some turn out to be workable, but nobody knows in advance that A or B is a sure shot.. It’s a leap into the dark 🙂 (hence, work for the ones you want, when the time is right, it will happen)

Paritrāṇāya sādhūnāṁ vināśāya ca duṣkṛtām |

Dharma-saṁsthāpanārthāya sambhavāmi yuge yuge

4 out of 5 stars.

Genre: Inglorious Basterds. This is a revenge fantasy. The Indian state did not (publicly) take revenge for the Kandahar Hijack, the parliament attack or the Mumbai attack. This bothers “Nationalist Indians” and one of them decided to make a fantasy movie about revenge being taken.. And he did a good job.

Storyline: Fantasy about an Indian super-agent sent to infiltrate Pakistani terrorist networks, ends up in Lyari in the most notorious criminal gangs in Pakistan, who turn out to be tangentially involved in Pakistani-sponsored terrorism (none of this has any connection with reality). Mumbai attacks make an appearance and that is the part of the movie that is closest to reality; the attackers did train in Karachi, the attacks really happened and they really did get massacre instructions over the internet during their “mission”. Whether Khanani was involved or not, I have no clue, but someone like him probably was involved in the overall jihad efforts, so those parts are not just fantasy. The role assigned to the Lyari gangs is pure fantasy though.

The rest is of course ALL fantasy. But as a movie, it works very well, as long as you keep in mind that this is a revenge fantasy on the lines of Inglorious Basterds, not some kind of historical movie or documentary. The love angle is the silliest part of the story, but it IS a fantasy and it’s a bollywood movie, so hardly unexpected.

The movie itself works very well as a movie. The stars all deliver good performances, and Akshay Khanna definitely steals the show. His portrayal of Rahman Dakait will live long and prosper. And Akshay is now a legit superstar in Lyari (you can check out reels from there to confirm this) and will be mobbed and much loved if he shows up there. Sanjay Dutt as SP Choudhry Aslam is outstanding and Ranveer does a good job as the hero.

The music is simply outstanding. The background score worked VERY well in the theater (so see with good speakers if you can) and the songs are all excellent and fit in well with the movie.

It is very much an anti-Pakistan movie, so I dont think patriotic Pakistanis will enjoy it too much, but if you are a normal working class Pakistani you can enjoy it and if you are from Lyari you will likely watch it again. With direct attacks on Pakistan as the world center of terrorism and thinly disguised portrayals of Asif Zardari and Nabil Gabol, it is absolutely no surprise that this was banned in UAE as well. In fact, ISPR will surely make a revenge fantasy of their own now (it will be mostly AI slop, but some actors will get such over the top dialogs that they will be entertaining, and some music may be good, that is my prediction about the revenge movie, and I am very sure it will get funded, but it will not match Bollywood in tech or production; my confidence that it WILL be made comes from the simple fact that the Pakistani deep state is VERY obsessed with making sure we always have a tit for every tat.. in this we are somewhat different from India, but closer to the world average).

Why did Dhar mix Lyari up in this story? And was that a good idea? I think he mixed in lyari because Lyari gang wars are fantastic movie material and even if there was no real connection with the anti-Indian terrorism, for a movie it was a good element to fit into the story. Those gangsters mostly did die horrible deaths in real life and this too fits in well with the fantasy story, but it is worth keeping in mind that this connection is almost certainly fictional (if anything, some of them were working for foreign agencies, for example Uzair Baloch was formally accused of working with Iranian intelligence).

I will make a prediction about Dhurandhar part 2. I think they will get many or most of the figures shown in this movie to be killed in the next one as revenge by “unknown gunmen”, though in real life the unknown gunmen have not struck down any of the big fish till now.

That this revenge fantasy got a LOT Of pushback from Indian reviewers and critics (on the basis that it shows Pakistan too negatively and is too jingoistic) is a tribute to the naivete and innocence of the reviewers and the ecosystem they live in. We Pakistanis had no idea we have so many friends in India 🙂

Overall: well worth a watch. Three hours do fly past. It is very well made and most people will find it enjoyable, but patriotic Pakistanis may want to avoid it if such things raise their BP.

These are a couple of videos about the reality of the Lyari gangs and how this movie is playing there.

When Bhutto founded the People’s Party in Lahore — Hassan Mujtaba

It was Hameed Nizami, the owner of Nawa-i-Waqt, who introduced Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Lahore to the brother of Dr. Mubashir Hasan. However, Bhutto developed a friendship with Dr. Mubashir himself, and it was at Dr. Mubashir Hasan’s house that he laid the foundation of his then-new party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

The first Vice President of the Pakistan People’s Party was the former diplomat J.A. Rahim, who wrote the foundational documents (foundation papers) of the party based on socialist principles. It was the same J.A. Rahim who encouraged Bhutto to stay in the country and politically confront the Ayub regime after resigning from the government. Otherwise, Bhutto — intimidated by the terror and intimidation of Malik Amir Mohammad Khan, the then-Governor of West Pakistan (known as Kalabagh) — was spending his time vacationing in Europe.

The party’s famous slogan “Roti, Kapra aur Makaan” (Bread, Clothing, and Shelter) was actually borrowed from Habib Jalib’s famous poem: “Har insaan maang raha hai roti, kapra aur makaan” (Every person is demanding bread, clothing, and shelter).

In those days, among those who used to meet Zulfikar Ali Bhutto — who spent his evenings at Faletti’s Hotel — were Habib Jalib, and left-wing student leaders from Lahore like Zafaryab Ahmed and Hassan Wasti.

Those who attended the founding meeting of the party at Dr. Mubashir’s house are all present in the historic photograph taken that day. In the photo, Sheikh Rashid — unable to find a seat — can be seen sitting in Bhutto’s lap. Others visible in the picture include Meraj Muhammad Khan, J.A. Rahim, Dr. Mubashir Hasan, Mustafa Khar, Hayat Muhammad Sherpao, Syed Saeed Hasan, Abdul Sattar Gabol, Nafis Siddiqui, Qasim Abbas Patel, Kamal Azfar, and possibly Khursheed Hasan Meer as well.

It is also a tragic chapter that shortly after coming to power, Bhutto became displeased with the same J.A. Rahim. He had J.A. Rahim and his sons arrested, and had them subjected to brutal torture at police stations — including sexual violence against his sons. The man who carried out this violence was the notorious Karachi gangster Suleman Brohi. Suleman Brohi was later killed in the 1990s during the government of Jam Sadiq Ali or Muzaffar Hussain Shah.

It started with this tweet from Wall Street Journal columnist Sadanand Dhume:

In India, critics of the 19th century statesman Thomas Macaulay portray him as some kind of cartoon villain out to destroy India. In reality, he was a brilliant man who wished Indians well. Link to article. 

I replied: 

I have to disagree a bit with sadanand here bcz I think while cartoonish propaganda can indeed be cartoonish and juvenile, there is a real case to be made against the impact of Macaulay on India.. Education in local languages with hindustami or even English (or for that matter, sanskrit or Persian, as they had been in the past during pre islamicate-colonization India and islamicate India respectively) as lingua franca would have been far superior, and the man really did have extremely dismissive and prejudiced views, the fact that they were common views in his world explains it but does not excuse it. The very fact that many liberal, intelligent and erudite Indians of today think he was “overall a good thing” is itself an indication that his work has done harm.. BTW, there were englishmen in India then who argued against Macaulay on exactly these lines..

Akshay Saseendran (@Island_Thought) replied:

Always believe that the past shouldnt be judged by the yardsticks of today… But Macauclay for better or worse brought English education to India which openned the doors to modern learning for a country whose education system at that point in time was fossilized to say the least. Wouldnt expect say elementary science in the 1800s to be in the vernacular when the money spent on education itself was miniscule… Also this has contributed to atleast India’s relative advantage when it comes to an English speaking workforce which can earn decent foreign exchange.

Me: 

I agree that we cannot judge the past by the yardsticks of today, but that was not the question. ALL Asian cultures and countries were scientifically and economically far behind Europe in 1835 and all paid the price in various ways. Some of the elites tried to adopt western knowledge and methods and Japan actually succeeded at first attempt, others took a more roundabout route.. places like Turkey, Egypt, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, China all learned new knowledge. But none of them abandoned their own language as medium of instruction in the long run and over time they have managed to develop fairly modern educational systems in their own languages. There is no reason why various Indian subcultures could not have done the same. Or rather, there may be reasons, but they represent Indian weaknesses, not some sort of superior choice made by India.. the aim of national development is not earning foreign exchange by being better able to serve in some foreign army after all :)_

To which Vinod (@vinodkumarpm1) replied:

A minor point. If British had decided an Indian language for higher education it would have been Persian. Persian was the official language in most part of India when British arrived. I had read that British chose English over Persian to reduce the chances of a future Indian rebellion. From a Hindu perspective, English was always preferable to Persian as Persian is considered as the language of Islamic rule and supremacy.

Me: Possible. Though they could also have picked hindustani.. they were more comfortable with it and so were many Indians.. It was definitely considered for this role, but English was picked because of the reasons enumerated by Macaulay

Meanwhile Akshay added:

Agree to some parts… But India currently has 22 official languages… The countries you just mentioned are literarily homogenous Nations with a same lingua franca! That is not the case here… Also subcultures developing indivisually without contributing to the national whole creates risk of Balkanization On 2nd thoughts, Macaulay did India a favour & went against the tenets of “Divide & Rule” policy which vernacular education would have been He brought in a link language which was as alien to a Tamilian as it is to a Hindi speaker thereby helping create National Consciousness without exacerbating linguistic chauvinism.

me: 

1. My point is not that English should or could now be replaced easily or even needs to be replaced.. history creates its own new realities. By now, it is also an Indian language, but the theoretical argument still matters because the argument is less about what language to use today and more about how one sees history and Indian culture vs Anglo culture and whether one conceives of India as inherently incapable of certain things or just that accidents of history led to X instead of Y and WE are adapting and adopting on our own terms. That also changes how one deals with realities today and tomorrow.. an anti-macaulayite can also write in english and continue to teach in IIT in English, but his vision does create a pressure at every decision point to promote a more culturally rooted alternative. What would have happened if Macaulay had gone with the suggestion to use indian languages and if Indians had written their own version instead of adopting macaulay’s vision of the worth of this vs that is also an argument about how one sees India and its potential and its worth.. that is also part of why we have this argument. The thought is that the same impulses that make us favor macaulay’s views also affect how we make NON-LANGUAGE related decisions today, not in 1835.

I think I had a point 2 in mind, but by now I am not sure what it was.

Meanwhile, on the question of alternatives, here is a long tweet from user @shrutammegopaya

This isn’t true. First let’s try to understand who Macaulay was arguing against. There were two camps who opposed his “minute” on education – 1. The Orientalists – led by HT Prinsep, HH Wilson, Lancelot Wilkinson 2. The Vernacularists – led by Brian Hodgson, William Adam The strawman that is erected is that Indians would’ve been deprived of “Enlightenment” advancements in Europe but for Macaulay. But neither the Orientalists nor the Vernacularists argued for statism where education in India is untouched by advancements in the West. Orientalists – argued for a model where western science gets grafted on to the Sanskritic tradition, through translations which many of these orientalists were working on. E.g. Charles Hutton’s early 19th cen textbook on Mathematics was already translated (or being translated) into Sanskrit around the time Macaulay was writing his minute! Lancelot Wilkinson’s “Sehore” experiments in central India are another case in point where the heliocentric model was taught to local brahmins , and attempts were made to integrate it in existing brahminical learning, with successsful results! Vernacularists – offered an alternative model where vernacular languages are used as media to teach the “new” learning from Europe. WIlliam Adam made the case that a large enough network of schools already existed in Bengal that could leverage learning material in vernacular languages. This is consistent with the observations of later scholars like Dharampal and even contemporaries of that period like Thomas Munro in Madras. The Orientalists and Vernacularists lost the battle. Macaulay triumphed. The result was not some resounding success we all should be proud of. It essentially had a negative impact on education and literacy rates at the mass level with closure of traditional schools, creating a small elite (exactly as Macaulay envisaged). Even as late as 1931, Indian literacy rate was barely 9%. Likely not a big improvement from say a century earlier. Probably even a decrease (though I don’t have data to back this) W.r.t. Macaulay’s comments on single shelf of Europe vs entire Sanskrit corpus : No need to beat yourself up and wallow in shame. There were many areas where existing Indian knowledge held its own, and areas where it didn’t. The Scientific Revolution of 17th and 18th cen was a unique event. India caught up with it more slowly than it might have otherwise, thanks to Macaulay. Macaulay’s minute suited Britain the best, because his goal wasn’t “enlightenment” of India, but to create a class of anglo-literate people in India who could run the lower rungs of government. Instead of importing expensive labor from Britain. In that respect, his minute made perfect sense to the powers that be

Postscript: distantly related 🙂

A user wrote about the 19 year old memorizer news: ‘Zero’ Contribution to Society, Economy & Development But a 19-year-old fellow who shud be studying & building his future is being celebrated for something that adds nothing to our progress. Years of political theatrics hv turned our nation into circus..

I know that various groups are honoring him as part of their political or religious agenda and not all groups or agendas are necessarily harmless, but that is a separate issue. But this objection on purely economic utilitarian grounds led me to say:

A culture is more than just economics.. people also need protection from outsiders and own criminals, and people benefit from having fellow feeling, respect for law, and models of how to live and work.. They can argue about which cultural package works better but it would be ridiculous to think they can live without one.. Culture is the software that makes communal life possible. Valuing “culture” can be overdone (or misused, exploited), but it is not possible to be prosperous without one.. And this is just some of the arguments from a non religious pov for such activities.. From the pov of a believer they obviously have far more to offer..

And our own contributor @kaeshour stepped in with:

The original post is utilitarian. People *chose* to do stuff because they find it fun and enjoyable. This kid’s choice is no different from being a rock musician or a qawwal or whatever. He has learnt a performative art form, and is good at it.

Postscript 2: This is also distantly related and came up on X and @hindookissinger posted: A lot of these letters kind of tell you that there was some kind of mass brainwashing in India that had been done against Germans. All these letters when they talk of Germans, talk about them as some kind of enemy that has to be defeated. Very jarring from a modern Indian PoV..

I dont think this inaccurate, but it made me think of a topic that I have had discussions about before and I had to jump in..

Me: It is unfair to call it brainwashing.. The notion of namak halal (true to your salt) was a very powerful indic value at that time (and a good one).. It was a fair contract, these were volunteer soldiers, not draftees, they joined because it was a good career (by rural standards, the pay was good, and brits took care of the “martial races” in other ways too (Punjab still shows the effects of benefits showered on returning servicemen and their people in general) and their officers treated their men with respect.. In return the soldiers fought loyally for them.. They did not care about the propaganda as much as they cared about not losing face as cowards.. Some of the finest soldiers in the world in that domain.. There is no need to apply modern nationalist notions on peasants who were living a pre modern life.. Of course some stirrings of nationalism were already present and exceptions existed, but on the whole it was a loyal army where both sides held up their side of the bargain (there are cases where British officers risked own careers defending “their men” against some unfair action of the British govt.. Not everyone is fighting a national war, for pre modern people honor mattered more and was quite a personal and local issue, not a national one.. My grandfather was a congressite and a nationalist who had dropped out of college and become a fugitive in the public protests that followed jallianwala bagh and had no sympathy for the Army as such, but I will never forget a discussion where someone pointed to a story in a book about the British defeat at kut al amara and how the turks (who were cruel to their captives) lined them up and brought this subedar (Muslim) forward and offered him his sword back if he joined fellow Muslims against the infidel British, and the guy broke the sword on his knee and threw it away and said do you think I am such a dishonorable person (and probably died in cruel captivity as a result) .. to us the subedar seemed to be the bad guy who is slavishly serving the British Empire against his own people but my grandfather did not agree.. HE would not join the Army himself, but he knew that the people who did were honorable people and this was an honorable act..

Another postscript: From @shrutammegopaya

The rhetoric in Macaulay’s minute distorts what the debate was about in the 1830s Macaulay wasn’t arguing against brahmins trying to prove the superiority of “Enlightenment” literature over Sanskrit corpus (though his verbiage gives that impression) Macaulay’s arguments were against fellow Brits – Orientalists who made a firm case to “modernize” education in India through the medium of Sanskrit or other vernacular languages The debate was not on what to teach, but on pedagogy and medium of instruction The upshot of the Macaulayite revolution – the closure of thousands of traditional schools across the country – was a terrible, terrible thing for India

And another tweet from me that is relevant:

All such assessments imply one thing at least.. That the arguer does not believe that the various Indian polities were capable of even attempting an alternative, but I see no reason to believe this at all.. In fact the evidence suggests that the marathas were definitely conscious of the need to catch up, but more instructively, several princely states in British times were eager to adopt new learning and sometimes did a better job of it than British administered India.. The notion that all India would be a stagnant hellhole without the benevolent Raj was a feature of British propaganda, not of history.. It is itself a Macaulayputra tic to believe otherwise..

Full Text of the Famous minute on education. 

2ND OF FEBRUARY, 1835

As it seems to be the opinion of some of the gentlemen who compose the Committee of Public Instruction, that the course which they have hitherto pursued was strictly prescribed by the British Parliament in 1813, and as, if that opinion be correct, a legislative act will be necessary to warrant a change, I have thought it right to refrain from taking any part in the preparation of the adverse statements which are now before us, and to reserve what I had to say on the subject till it should come before me as a member of the Council of India.

It does not appear to me that the Act of Parliament can, by any art of construction, be made to bear the meaning which has been assigned to it. It contains nothing about the particular languages or sciences which are to be studied. A sum is set apart “for the revival and promotion of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories.” It is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature, the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanscrit literature, that they never would have given the honorable appellation of “a learned native” to a native who was familiar with the poetry of Milton, the Metaphysics of Locke, and the Physics of Newton; but that they meant to designate by that name only such persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the Hindoos all the uses of cusa-grass, and all the mysteries of absorption into the Deity. This does not appear to be a very satisfactory interpretation. To take a parallel case; suppose that the Pacha of Egypt, a country once superior in knowledge to the nations of Europe but now sunk far below them, were to appropriate a sum or the purpose of “reviving and promoting literature, and encouraging learned natives of Egypt,” would anybody infer that he meant the youth of his pachalic to give years to the study of hieroglyphics, to search into all the doctrines disguised under the fable of Osiris, and to ascertain with all possible accuracy the ritual with which cats and onions were anciently adored? Would he be justly charged with inconsistency, if, instead of employing his young subjects in deciphering obelisks, he were to order them to be instructed in the English and French languages, and in all the sciences to which those languages are the chief keys?

The words on which the supporters of the old system rely do not bear them out, and other words follow which seem to be quite decisive on the other side. This lac of rupees is set apart, not only for “reviving literature in India,” the phrase on which their whole interpretation is founded, but also for “the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories,”–words which are alone sufficient to authorise all the changes for which I contend.

If the Council agree in my construction, no legislative Act will be necessary. If they differ from me, I will prepare a short Act rescinding that clause of the Charter of 1813, from which the difficulty arises.

The argument which I have been considering, affects only the form of proceeding. But the admirers of the Oriental system of education have used another argument, which, if we admit it to be valid, is decisive against all change. They conceive that the public faith is pledged to the present system, and that to alter the appropriation of any of the funds which have hitherto been spent in encouragmg the study of Arabic and Sanscrit, would be down-right spoliation. It is not easy to understand by what process of reasoning they can have arrived at this conclusion. The grants which are made from the public purse for the encouragement of literature differed in no respect from the grants which are made from the same purse for other objects of real or supposed utility. We found a sanatarium on a spot which we suppose to be healthy. Do we thereby pledge ourselves to keep a sanatarium there, if the result should not answer our expectation? We commence the erection of a pier. Is it a violation of the public faith to stop the works, if we afterwards see reason to believe that the building will be useless? The rights of property are undoubtedly sacred. But nothing endangers those rights so much as the practice, now unhappily too common, of attributing them to things to which they do not belong. Those who would impart to abuses the sanctity of property are in truth imparting to the institution of property the unpopularity and the fragility of abuses. If the Government has given to any person a formal assurance; nay, if the Government has exdted in any person’s mind a reasonable expectation that he shall receive a certain income as a teacher or a learner of Sanscrit or Arabic, I would respect that person’s pecuniary interests–I would rather err on the side of liberality to individuals than suffer the public faith to be called in question. But to talk of a Government pledging itself to teach certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those sciences may be exploded, seems to me quite unmeaning. There is not a single word in any public instructions, from which it can be inferred that the Indian Government ever intended to give any pledge on this subject, or ever considered the destination of these funds as unalterably fixed. But had it been otherwise, I should have denied the competence of our predecessors to bind us by any pledge on such a subject. Suppose that a Government had in the last century enacted in the most sole,nn manner that all its subjects should, to the end of time, be inoculated for the smallpox: would that Government be bound to persist in the practice after Jenner’s discovery? These promises, of which nobody claims the performance, and from which nobody can grant a release; these vested rights, which vest in nobody; this property without proprietors; this robbery, which makes nobody poorer, may be comprehended by persons of higher faculties than mine.— I consider this plea merely as a set form of words, regularly used both in England and in India, in defence of every abuse for which no other plea can be set up.

I hold this lac of rupees to be quite at the disposal of the Governor General in Council, for the purpose of promoting learning in India, in any way which may be thought most advisable. I hold his Lordship to be quite as free to direct that it shall no longer be employed in encouraging Arabic and Sanscrit, as he is to direct that the reward for killing tigers in Mysore shall be diminished, that no more public money shall be expended on the chanting at the cathedral.

We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?

All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India, contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.

What then shall that language be? One-half of the Committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.–But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.

It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.

How, then, stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence; with historical compositions, which, considered merely as nar- ratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled; with just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade; with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said, that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia; communities which are every year becoming more important, and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.

The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can patronise sound Philosophy and true History, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medi- cal doctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier,–Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school,–History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long,–and Geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.

We are not without experience to guide us. History furnishes several analogous cases, and they all teach the same lesson. There are in modern times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society,–of prejudices overthrown,–of knowledge diffused,–taste purified,–of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.

The first instance to which I refer, is the great revival of letters among the Western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the begi:ning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost every thing that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus; had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island; had they print- ed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and Romances in Norman-French, would England have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some departments,–in History, for example, I am certain that it is much less so.

Another instance may be said to be still before our eyes. Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which has previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the crusades, has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities.–I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest ftmctions, and in no wise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London. There is reason to hope that this vast empire, which in the time of our grandfathers was probably behind the Punjab, may, in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. And how was this change effected? Not by flattering national prejudices: not by feeding the mind of the young Muscovite with the old women’s stories which his rude fathers had believed: not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas: not by encouraging him to study the great question, whether the world was or was not created on the 13th of September: not by calling him “a learned native,” when he has mastered all these points of knowledge: but by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach. The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

And what are the arguments against that course which seems to be alike recommended by theory and by experience? It is said that we ought to secure the cooperation of the native public, and that we can do this only by teaching Sanscrit and Arabic.

I can by no means admit that when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to Superintend the education of a nation comparatively ignorant, the learners are absolutely to prescribe the course which is to be taken by the teachers. It is not necessary, however, to say any thing on this subject. For it is proved by unanswerable evidence that we are not at present securing the Cooperation of the natives. It would be bad enough to consult their intellectual taste at the expense of their intellectual health. But we are consulting neither,–we are withholding from them the learning for which they are craving, we are forcing on them the mock-learning which they nauseate.

This is proved by the fact that we are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanscrit students, while those who learn Engiish are wiling to pay us. All the declamations in the worid about the love and reverence of the natives for their sacred dialects will never, in the mind of any impartial person, outweigh the undisputed fact, that we cannot find, in all our vast empire, a single student who will let us teach him those dialects unless we will pay him.

I have now before me the accounts of the Madrassa for one month,-in the month of December, 1833. The Arabic students appear to have been seventy-seven in number. All receive stipends from the public. The whole amount paid to them is above 500 rupees a month. On the other side of the account stands the following item: Deduct amount realized from the out-students of English for the months of May, June and July last, 103 rupees.

I have been told that it is merely from want of local experience that I am surprised at these phenomena, and that it is not the fashion for students in India to study at their own charges. This only confirms me in my opinion. Nothing is more certain than that it never can in any part of the world be necessary to pay men for doing what they think pleasant and profitable. India is no exception to this rule. The people of India do not require to be paid for eating rice when they are hungry, or for wearing woollen cloth in the cold season. To come nearer to the case before us, the children who learn their letters and a little elementary Arithmetic from the village school-master are not paid by him. He is paid for teaching them. Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanscrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanscrit and Arabic are languages, the knowledge of which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects the state of the market is the decisive test.

Other evidence is not wanting, if other evidence were required. A petition was presented last year to the Committee by several ex-students of the Sanscrit College. The petitioners stated that they had studied in the college ten or twelve years; that they had made themselves acquainted with Hindoo literature and science; that they had received certificates of proficiency: and what is the fruit of all this! “Notwithstanding such testimonials,” they say, “we have but little prospect of bettering our condition without the kind assistance of your Honorable Committee, the indifference with which we are generally looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement and assistance from them.” They therefore beg that they may be recommended to the Governor General for places under the Government, not places of high dignity or emolument, but such as may just enable them to exist. “We want means,” they say, “for a decent living, and for our progressive improvement, which, however, we cannot obtain without the assistance of Government, by whom we have been educated and maintained from childhood.” They conclude by representing, very pathetically, that they are sure that it was never the intention of Government, after behaving so liberally to them during their education, to abandon them to destitution and neglect.

I have been used to see petitions to Government for compensation. All these petitions, even the most unreasonable of them, proceeded on the supposition that some loss had been sustained- that some wrong had been inflicted. These are surely the first petitioners who ever demanded compensation for having been educated gratis, for having been supported by the public during twelve years, and then sent forth into the world well furnished with literature and science. They represent their education as an injury which gives them a claim on the Government for redress, as an injury for which the stipends paid to them during the infliction were a very inadequate compensation. And I doubt not that they are in the right. They have wasted the best years of life in learning what procures for them neither bread nor respect. Surely we might, with advantage, have saved the cost of making these persons useless and miserable; surely, men may be brought up to be burdens to the public and objects of contempt to their neighbours at a somewhat smaller charge to the state. But such is our policy. We do not even stand neuter in the contest between truth and falsehood. We are not content to leave the natives to the influence of their own hereditary prejudices. To the natural difficulties which obstruct the progress of sound science in the East, we add fresh difficulties of our own making. Bounties and premiums, such as ought not to be given even for the propagation of truth, we lavish on false taste and false philosophy.

By acting thus we create the very evil which we fear. We are making that opposition which we do not find. What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth; it is bounty-money paid to raise up champions of error. It goes to form a nest, not merely of helpless place-hunters, but of bigots prompted alike by passion and by interest to raise a cry against every usetul scheme of education. If there should be any opposition among the natives to the change which I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more formidable will that opposition be. It will be every year reinforced by recruits whom we are paying. From the native society left to itself, we have no difficulties to apprehend; all the murmuring will come from that oriental interest which we have, by artificial means, called into being, and nursed into strength.

There is yet another fact, which is alone sufficient to prove that the feeling of the native public, when left to itself, is not such as the supporters of the old system represent it to be. The Committee have thought fit to lay out above a lac of rupees in printing Arabic and Sanscrit books. Those books find no purchasers. It is very rarely that a single copy is disposed of. Twenty-three thousand volumes, most of them folios and quartos, fill the libraries, or rather the lumber-rooms, of this body. The Committee contrive to get rid of some portion of their vast stock of oriental literature by giving books away. But they cannot give so fast as they print. About twenty thousand rupees a year are spent in adding fresh masses of waste paper to a hoard which, I should think, is already sufficiently ample. During the last three years, about sixty thousand rupees have been expended in this manner. The sale of Arabic and Sanscrit books, during those three years, has not yielded quite one thousand rupees. In the mean time the School- book Society is selling seven or eight thousand English volumes every year, and not only pays the expenses of printing, but realises a profit of 20 per cent. on its outlay.

The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly from Sans- crit books, and the Mahomedan law from Arabic books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear at all on the question. We are commanded by Parliament to ascertam and digest the laws of India. The assistance of a law Commission has been given to us for that purpose. As soon as the code is promulgated, the Shasster and the Hedaya will be useless to a Moonsiff or Sudder Ameen. I hope and trust that before the boys who are now entering at the Madrassa and the Sanscrit college have completed their studies, this great work will be finished. It would be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things which we mean to alter before they reach manhood.

But there is yet another argument which seems even more untenable. It is said that the Sanscrit and Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written, and that they are, on that account, entitled to peculiar encouragement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant, but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature incuIcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcileable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly pre- served. It is confessed that a language is barren of useful know- ledge. We are to teach it because it is fruittul of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false History, false Astronomy, false Medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably and decently bribe men out of the revenues of the state to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?

It is taken for granted by the advocates of Oriental learning, that no native of this country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They do not attempt to prove this; but they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education which their opponents recommend as a mere spelling book education. They assume it as undenlable, that the question is between a profound knowledge of Hindoo and Arabian literature and science on the one side, and a superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the other. This is not merely an assumption, but an assumption contrary to all reason and experience. We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our language sufficiently to have access to all the most abstruse knowledge which it contains, sufficiently to relish even the more delicate graces of our most idiomatic writers. There are in this very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos. Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to a Hindoo as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth, in a much smaller number of years than our unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanscrit college, becomes able to read, to enjoy, and even to imitate, not unhappily, the compositions of the best Greek Authors. Less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles, ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.

To sum up what I have said, I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813; that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied; that we are free to employ our fiinds as we choose; that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing; that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic; that the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic; that neither as the languages of law, nor as the languages of religion, have the Sanscrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our engagement; that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed.

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

I would strictly respect all existing interests. I would deal even generously with all individuals who have had fair reason to expect a pecuniary provision. But I would strike at the root of the bad system which has hitherto been fostered by us. I would at once stop the printing of Arabic and Sanscrit books, I would abolish the Madrassa and the Sanscrit college at Calcutta. Benares is the great seat of Brahmanical learning; Delhi, of Arabic learning. If we retain the Sanscrit college at Benares and the Mahometan college at Delhi, we do enough, and much more than enough in my opinion, for the Eastern languages. If the Benares and Delhi colleges should be retained, I would at least recommend that no stipends shall be given to any students who may hereafter repair thither, but that the people shall be left to make their own choice between the rival systems of education without being bribed by us to learn what they have no desire to know. The funds which would thus be placed at our disposal would enable us to give larger encouragement to the Hindoo college at Calcutta, and to establish in the principal cities throughout the Presidencies of Fort William and Agra schools in which the English language might be well and thoroughly taught.

If the decision of his Lordship in Council should be such as I anticipate, I shall enter on the performance of my duties with the greatest zeal and alacrity. If, on the other hand, it be the opinion of the Government that the present system ought to remain unchanged, I beg that I may be permitted to retire from the chair of the Committee. I feel that I could not be of the smallest use there–I feel, also, that I should be lending my countenance to what I firmly believe to be a mere delusion. I believe that the present system tends, not to accelerate the progress of truth, but to delay the natural death of expiring errors. I conceive that we have at present no right to the respectable name of a Board of Public Instruction. We are a Board for wasting public money, for printing books which are of less value than the paper on which they are printed was while it was blank; for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology; for raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an encumbrance and a blemish, who live on the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that when they have received it they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives. Entertaining these opinions, I am naturally desirous to decline all share in the responsibility of a body, which unless it alters its whole mode of proceeding, I must consider not merely as useless, but as positively noxious.

Unfortunately, there were some clashes between authors and commentators recently and I am afraid that such has been my lack of attention that I have not even read most of the posts in question. So I think it is time to face the facts and admit that I am not going to be able to take a more active role and should therefore withdraw from responsibilities I am not able to fulfil. I hope to remain an author here and I hope to do more podcasts as well. Razib and whoever he designates/invites/allows will continue to run the blog and I wish them the best. I hope it remains a place where diverse voices from the Indian subcontinent can continue to debate the issues that are important for people of Indian origin (and people in general) all over the world.

I hope the authors I brought on will continue to write and comment as well.

How many fires are there, how many suns?

How many dawns? How many waters?

I ask this, O fathers, not to challenge.

O Sages, I ask it to know

(RigVeda Book 10, hymn 88)

We will recover from this. I just deleted several posts and I hope the authors will not start it up again 🙂

And Kabir, please, try to limit yourself to one post a day. Educational and informative ones are better than daily “RSS is coming” warnings 🙂

I have not been busy elsewhere and dont get to pay much attention to the blog and unfortunately, we seem to be seeing a lot of harsh comments and blog posts and general unhappiness. I am not promising miracles (I think the comment section will remain something of a mess, but we will try to clean up even there) but I hope we can get on even keel soon. Please do stick around, we will try to make some improvements and if you are an author who has not written for a long time, please do write more so that the quality of the posts can go up..

Omar