There was no golden age for Muslims in Nehru’s India

It’s a little-remembered fact that the Indian subcontinent once had the world’s largest Muslim population. Numbering 95 million, they were almost a quarter of India’s total population. Partition in 1947 still left them as the world’s largest Muslim minority, at 15 per cent of Hindu-majority India. More than 70 years later, no single study has successfully explained the consequences of that transition. This latest attempt, though often original and incisive, fails to bridge that gap, partly because it ends in 1977, thereby largely ignoring the major turning point that brought to power India’s current Hindu-chauvinist rulers.

The underlying premise of the book is a rather arbitrary division of Indian Muslims into two neat categories: Muslim nationalists, who opted for secession and Pakistan; and nationalist Muslims, who stayed on and did a Faustian deal with the Hindu-majority Congress party to retain their orthodox personal law. What that view fails to explain is how so many diverse Muslim intellectuals and politicians travelled back and forth between these two poles. A prime example was Jinnah, once loyal to India’s nationalist Congress as its ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim goodwill’, but who ended up as the founder-leader of Pakistan. The binary model completely fails to explain this cultural anomaly of a whisky-drinking, pork-eating Muslim clad in Savile Row suits founding a theocratic state.

Pratinav Anil is unsparing in his critique of the Congress party’s Hindu-majoritarian arrogance, which alienated Jinnah and so many other Muslim intellectuals. Those Muslims who stayed on in India, most of them unable to migrate, had to be grateful for second-class citizenship, denied fair political representation in India’s first-past-the-post electoral system, their lingua franca of Urdu starved of public funding.