The West needs to engage with the growth of Indian Muslims, says Tufail Ahmed, a British journalist of Indian origin and an Associate of the American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC.

In which part of the world Muslims have been regularly voting and participating in elections for more than half a century? There is only one such country, among the many created by the United Kingdom: India. Out of its 1.12 billion people, the population of Indian Muslims was an estimated 160 million in 2006 and growing. This is not a small number. India has the world’s second largest Muslim population after Indonesia and the population of Indian Muslims today exceeds the combined populations of Australia, France, Britain and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is therefore pertinent, for those in the West who believe democracy to be an essential buttress for individual freedoms and good societies, to examine the present and future growth of Indian Muslims.

Because of India’s sustained democracy, featuring pluralism, a free press and widely held trust in the rule of law, the life of Indian Muslims has followed a different trajectory from that of their counterparts worldwide. An anecdotal illustration of the Indian exception is that American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were struck by the fact that among the Taleban and al-Qaeda detainees who came from all over the Muslim world, none came from India. Subsequent research has shown that not a single Indian Muslim went to Afghanistan during the 1980s and the 1990s to train in Osama Bin Laden’s terror camps. There is not even an isolated case of a Muslim of Indian origin being implicated in terror plots, except Dhiren Barot, an Indian Hindu who converted to Islam after moving to Britain and has been sentenced to forty years in prison for planning ‘colossal’ carnage using radioactive dirty bombs in the United States and the United Kingdom. After 9/11, Indian Muslims defied the religious authority of the Imam of Delhi’s seventeenth-century Jama Masjid mosque and his call to join the Taleban’s fight against American forces in Afghanistan. Similarly, Indian Muslims have not joined jihadists waging war in Iraq or elsewhere. Is this a product of Indian democracy?

In his recent book The World Is Flat, New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman wondered if the norm is for Indian Muslims not to be attracted by the Taleban and al-Qaeda ideologues. He observed: ‘A few [Indian Muslims] will one day find their way to al-Qaeda – if it can happen with some American Muslims, it can happen with Indian Muslims. But this is not the norm’. India’s pluralistic society, a democratic context and free press provide Muslims with tools with which to air their grievances and articulate their aspirations. At the international level, however, there is no consideration – academic or political – of Indian Muslims as a democratic polity. The United States and the European Union need to examine closely the growth of Indian Muslims, as a rising India engages with the wider world.

The need for understanding Indian Muslims in terms of their democratic experience was underlined by David Frum, former speechwriter to US President George W. Bush. Frum noted in his online diary of 16th December 2003, at National Review Online: ‘Americans need to maintain enough emotional distance from Pakistan to recognise that over the longer term, it is democratic India, not Pakistan, that is likely to emerge as America's most important security partner in South Asia. And, ironically, it may yet be the…[160 ] million Muslims of an increasingly free-market and open-minded India who lead Muslims worldwide toward the modern and moderate Islam that is the ultimate reply to the violence of extremist Islam’.

The Western belief and experience that democracy undermines the violent ideologies and religions is widely shared in India, where a number of religious scholars have spoken in morally clear terms against suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians, whether Hindus, Christians or Jews. After the Mumbai train attacks of 2006, Fuzail-ur-Rahman Hilal Usmani, a Mufti of Darul Uloom at Deoband, the second largest centre of Islamic learning after Cairo’s Al Azhar, observed that ‘killing even one innocent person is akin to the massacre of all humankind’. Khalid Rashid of the 300-year-old Dar-ul-Ifta in the city of Lucknow issued a fatwa against terrorists after the 2006 Benares bombings, noting that ‘the murder of one innocent person amounted to the murder of entire humanity’. After the Delhi attacks of 2005, a number of leading Muslim organisations, including Jamaat-e-Islami, issued a fatwa against ‘inhuman’ and ‘un-Islamic’ terrorist acts. After the Taleban called Muslims to join their jihad against American forces in Afghanistan in 2001, leading Indian Islamic scholar Wahiduddin Khan stressed that ‘Muslims would be better off fighting this jihad’ and Mufti Mohammed Mukarram of Old Delhi’s Fatehpuri Mosque observed that the ‘Taleban’s jihad does not apply to Indian Muslims’. Kalbe Sadiq, a leading Shia scholar, even asked the government of India to declare fatwas as illegal. These statements are part of a big Indian conversation, reinforced regularly by literally hundreds of television news channels. While similar fatwas have been issued in many Muslim countries, they are becoming a trend in India’s democratic space.

And it is this democratic context of India that is shaping the development of Indian Muslims in a direction that is qualitatively different from that of Muslims elsewhere. The only other country that comes close to resembling the experience of Indian Muslims is Turkey, where Islamic leaders joined Rabbis to condemn the 2003 bombings of Jewish and British targets in Istanbul.

After the British Empire withdrew from India in 1947, the educated middle class Indian Muslims left for Pakistan. Those left behind were mostly the poor, the artisans and a few rich families. Indian Muslims did not have role models. Half a century later, Muslim children have fresh role models such as twenty-year-old tennis sensation Sania Mirza who overcame the orthodox Muslim neighbourhood of Hyderabad to become the first Indian to win a title at Wimbledon, cricketer Irfan Pathan who emerged on the scene after the Gujarat riots of 2002, the richest Indian Azim Premji of software firm Wipro and a host of Bollywood actors such as Amir Khan and Salman Khan. In a country of over one billion people where half of them are youths, it’s unique that Muslim children are identifying with young icons. And in a most astonishing reminder of how Indian Muslims have registered their growth, new cricketer Munaf Patel, asked last year who was his role model, told a reporter: ‘Who could be my role model? I am my own role model.’ This innocence is amazing but not atypical of how Muslims had to make their way over the past few decades, without the support of a middle class.

The positive development of Indian Muslims has resulted from two key factors: democracy and pluralism. The President of India is a Muslim, Dr. Abdul Kalam; the Vice President is a Hindu, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat; the Prime Minister is from the Sikh minority, Dr. Manmohan Singh; the leader of the largest ruling party Congress is an Italian-born Christian, Sonia Gandhi. The beauty of Indian democracy is not merely the fact that leaders from minority communities are ruling this large and rising state; its beauty is multiplied by the majority Hindu community’s willingness to accept and elect them. This secular idea that equal citizenship can be accorded to everybody who lives by the principles of a democratic republic is truly a gift that came to India through British rule.

However, the Indian Muslim community is not without its problems. One is acutely aware of a number of anti-Muslim riots that have harried Indian Muslims over the past decades. Since 1989, terrorist attacks have occurred more regularly. After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence thought that it could accomplish the same feat in the Indian part of Kashmir. Kashmiris have always campaigned for autonomy; however, killings began only after 1989. Moreover, fatwas have been issued against the short dress of tennis star Sania Mirza and fast foods. There has also been theoretical and material support from the international left to align Indian Muslims and socialists against the Indian state. Despite these attempts, Indian Muslims did not participate in protests against the alleged draining of the Koran in a Guantanamo Bay toilet or the Danish Prophet Muhammad cartoons, except for a sizeable protest in Mumbai. The average Indian Muslim is conscious of charting a positive path for himself – possible due to democracy, pluralism, a growing economy and hundreds of television channels.

How should the West evaluate Indian Muslims? Fortunately the United States and the United Kingdom have recently set a precedent. After the 2002 anti-Muslim riots of Gujarat, the two countries denied visas to Narendra Modi, the state’s chief minister and member of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. The riots were seen to have occurred at the behest of his government, which also enjoyed support of the BJP-controlled federal government. This example must be emulated, and, moreover, must be accompanied by international pressure on Pakistan to eradicate all jihadists. Most importantly, Washington, London and Brussels need to enhance academic, political and diplomatic efforts for the study of Indian Muslims whose role in the rise of India will be critical in the coming years.

Tufail Ahmed's writings are also at found here.