Even as Prime Minister Modi lauds the plurality of India and the profound peacefulness of Sufi Islam, the RSS and its cohorts have been sparing no effort to drive a deep wedge between the Hindus and Muslims in our country. A single day’s newspaper tells us that the student Umar Khalid found, while being questioned in jail, that his interrogators had already decided his guilt before they talked to him, because he was a Muslim whose father had been an activist of the now banned SIMI. Anirban Bhattacharya was repeatedly cajoled by his interrogators to get all charges against him dropped by pinning all the blame for the February 9 sloganeering on Khalid. Waris Pathan, a Muslim MLA, in Maharashtra is suspended from the state assembly for refusing to chant Bharat Mata ki Jai. On the same day four Kashmiri students are arrested in Rajasthan because someone reported to the police that they were eating beef in their hostel. In Jharkhand, two Muslim cattle traders are murdered by a gang of criminals, and the public and the media immediately conclude that the killers belong to a cow-protection group. In Delhi the BJP MP from Agra, Ramshanker Katheria, (who is a member of Mr. Modi’s council of ministers, no less) publicly warns the UP state government that Agra will see a “different kind of Holi” if cases lodged against one BJP and two local VHP ‘leaders’ for making hate speeches against Muslims, comparing them to “’rakshasas’ who need to be cornered and destroyed”, are not withdrawn before the festival. All this news appearing on a single day evinces no shock because, from Ghar Wapsi, to ‘Love Jihad’, to throwing beef into a temple, to killing Mohammad Akhlaq, to changing the name of Aurangzeb Road in Delhi, such inflammatory statements and actions have become routine in the past 21 months. What is relatively new is the brazen attempt to intimidate anyone — like Kanhaiya Kumar or Teesta Setalvad — who has the courage to take up cudgels in defence of freedom of speech, thought, justice and legal process. The administration of punishment to them is through harassment, torture and beatings while in judicial custody, the cancellation of licences and denial of access to funds. Beneath all of this runs one leitmotif: Muslims are not ‘us’. In anthropological terms, they are the alien ‘other’ and don’t belong in a resurgent Hindu India. The Muslim conquest of India was an aberration, and its impact on Hindu culture must be erased. The damage was real, but was done aeons ago by rulers and generals now long dead. What does the Sangh parivar hope to gain from making people who are not even their lineal descendants pay a price today? Does it think that the community will take this lying down forever? And if it does not, can India be purged of 190 million Muslims? No matter what its motives are, if it persists it will push the country into civil war and force it to disintegrate, as the states in the south and east scramble to insulate themselves from the virus being exported from the north. Instead of a Hindurashtra India will become the world’s largest failed state. This may sound alarmist but beneath the surface calm, changes have been taking place in the structure of the Indian economy and society that have been weakening our collective faith in the possibility of a prosperous future. These are being felt most acutely by the youth, who have their entire lives ahead and do not see how they will traverse it. The need of the hour is to reverse these changes so that they can begin to hope again. The BJP/RSS is doing the exact opposite. Partition made the first serious dent in India’s syncretic culture by planting resentment and suspicion in Hindus, and a wary defensiveness in Indian Muslims. With the pre-partition Muslim elite having largely opted for Pakistan, the community desperately needed educational and economic assistance to recover their place in Indian society. But a bitter legacy of Partition was the Congress’s adamant refusal to even consider the reservation of jobs and seats in schools and colleges for Muslims, as this was the tool the British had used to split the Indian social fabric. V.P. Singh was among the first to recognise the long-term damage this had done. He understood that a rural peasantry newly empowered by the Green Revolution was demanding reservation in government jobs and colleges not for the sake of a handful of poorly paid sinecures, but to create an urban base from which their children and grandchildren could acquire the education that was the only avenue to the modern world. But he too shied away from making an overt commitment to Muslims on this incendiary issue. As a result, in the 1990s the rate of urbanisation among the OBCs surged ahead, while that of Muslims actually declined. As the Kundu Commission noted, a process of “exclusionary urbanisation” set in. The full impact of six decades of neglect was laid bare by the Sachar committee, which found in 2006 that not only was Muslim enrollment in secondary schools and colleges well below their share of the population, but their representation in salaried jobs was less than two-thirds of the national average. The imbalance was even worse in the Central government where despite being 14.4 percent of the population Muslims filled only four percent of the senior police and paramilitary posts, three percent of the IAS, 1.8 percent of the IFS, and perhaps most importantly, only six percent of the posts in the constabulary. The situation was equally grim in universities, banks and central public sector undertakings. The UPA government responded to the shock the report gave it by mooting an Equal Opportunities Commission and creating a ministry of minority (note, not Muslim) affairs. But six years later, no perceptible dent has been made in the structural disadvantages of the Muslim community. A study of actual disbursements till the end of March 2011 showed that of the allocation till then of Rs. 3,780 crores for minority concentration districts, only Rs. 846 crores actually reached the districts and only Rs. 131 crores had reached the intended beneficiaries. Despite this, when the ministry of minority affairs asked for Rs. 58,000 crores in the 12th plan, it was allocated only Rs. 17,323 crores. Muslims fared no better in raising concessional bank loans, for these were monopolised by Sikhs and Christians who secured 47 percent of the funds when they made up 21 percent of the minorities. Muslims who made up 69 percent got only 44 percent. It would have been surprising indeed if being at a perennial disadvantage had not created dissatisfaction, and a feeling of being discriminated against in Muslim youth who found their path into modern India severely constricted. Wahhabi Islam backed by an abundance of Saudi money and brand new mosques offered a new sense of purpose and source of hope. Gradually, but relentlessly, it began to erode the Sufi base of traditional Islam in India. But even this would not have not have dented communal harmony had Pakistan not intervened. Determined to take revenge for the splitting of the country in 1971, it began to actively encourage insurgency and dispatch of terrorists across the borders of Punjab and Kashmir. As all governments that have faced armed uprisings have learned, state responses to terrorism tend invariably to be indiscriminate. In India, this has meant sudden descents upon Muslim neighbourhoods; sustained, unfriendly interrogations; and an automatic presumption of Muslim involvement even when, as in the Malegaon idgah bomb blast and the burning of the Samjhauta Express, the victims are all Muslims. The casual ‘elimination’ of terrorists in staged ‘encounters’ sowed fear and anger, especially in young Muslims just when they had begun to realise that the economic resurgence of the country was passing them by. Quite suddenly, therefore, the ground beneath their feet began to quake. The Gujarat riots gave a new twist to the fear of young Muslims because for the first time in their lives they felt that the state had not protected, but actually targeted them. Ahmedabad, therefore, created India’s first homegrown Muslim Islamist terrorists. (A version of this op-ed appeared in print in The Wire (India) on March 26, 2016) (To be continued) The writer is a Delhi-based author and commentator