Muslims in Post-Independence India

Abstract

Abstract Many observers think that the outlook for India’s 13 percent Muslim minority is bleak. The Congress Party, the post-independence guarantor of secularism and minority rights, has been losing power in India’s state assemblies since the 1960s, to a host of different ethnic and regional parties. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the party’s grip on power at the national level was shaken by two different political movements: one based around middle-caste and lower-caste interests, and the other around an aggressively anti-minority Hindu nationalism. In the 1999 parliamentary (Lok Sabha) elections, one of these movements, in the shape of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), finally won enough seats to form a stable coalition in New Delhi.