[R-G] Behind the Mumbai Massacre: India's Muslims in Crisis

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1862650,00.html>
Thursday, Nov. 27, 2008
Behind the Mumbai Massacre: India's Muslims in Crisis
By Aryn Baker

The disembodied voice was chilling in its rage. A gunman, holed up in
Mumbai's Oberoi Trident hotel where some 40 people had been taken
hostage, told an Indian news channel that the attacks were revenge for
the persecution of Muslims in India. "We love this as our country but
when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?"
he asked via telephone. No answer came. But then he probably wasn't
expecting one.

The roots of Muslim rage run deep in India, nourished by a long-held
sense of injustice over what many Indian Muslims believe is
institutionalized discrimination against the country's largest
minority group. The disparities between Muslims, which make up 13.4%
of the population, and India's Hindu population, which hovers around
80%, are striking. There are exceptions, of course, but generally
speaking Muslim Indians have shorter life spans, worse health, lower
literacy levels, and lower-paying jobs. Add to that toxic brew the
lingering resentment over 2002's anti-Muslim riots in the state of
Gujarat. The riots, instigated by Hindu nationalists, killed some 2000
people, most of them Muslim. To this day, few of the perpetrators have
been convicted. See pictures of the terrorist shootings in Mumbai.

The huge gap between Muslims and Hindus will continue to haunt
India's, and neighboring Pakistan's, progress towards peace and
prosperity. But before inter-communal relations can improve there is
an even bigger problem that must first be worked out: the schism in
subcontinental Islam, and the religion's place and role in modern
India and Pakistan. It is a crisis 150 years in the making.

The Beginning of the Problem
On the afternoon of March 29, 1857, Mangal Pandey, a handsome,
mustachioed soldier in the East India Company's native regiment,
attacked his British lieutenant. His hanging a week later sparked a
subcontinental revolt known to Indians as the first war of
independence and to the British as the Sepoy Mutiny. Retribution was
swift, and though Pandey was a Hindu, it was the subcontinent's
Muslims, whose Mughal King nominally held power in Delhi, who bore the
brunt of British rage. The remnants of the Mughal Empire were
dismantled, and five hundred years of Muslim supremacy on the
subcontinent was brought to a halt.

Muslim society in India collapsed. The British imposed English as the
official language. The impact was cataclysmic. Muslims went from near
100% literacy to 20% within a half-century. The country's educated
Muslim élite was effectively blocked from administrative jobs in the
government. Between 1858 and 1878, only 57 out of 3,100 graduates of
Calcutta University — then the center of South Asian education — were
Muslim. While discrimination by both Hindus and the British played a
role, it was as if the whole of Muslim society had retreated to lick
its collective wounds.