Public debates on Indian Muslims often make one basic mistake: they collapse all minorities into a single category and then declare that âeveryone is thriving because a few individuals have done wellâ. This flattens history, erases structure, and turns civilisational questions into census arithmetic.
1. Minorities Are Not Interchangeable
Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists offer no meaningful analogy to Indian Muslims.
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Jains were never politically central to the subcontinent.
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Sikhs built a regional power, not a pan-subcontinental order.
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Buddhists have been demographically marginal for a thousand years.
Indian Muslims were different. For centuries they formed the civilisational elite of North India; shaping courts, languages, music, etiquette, food, architecture, and the ways Indian states understood power. Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Hyderabad were not enclaves. They were the centre of the political and aesthetic world of the Indo-Gangetic plain. A fall from centrality is not comparable to never having been central at all.
2. Individual Success Is Not Structural Health Continue reading Who can speak for the “Muslim minority” of India?