India Muslim population

Introduction Although home to a Hindu majority, India has a Muslim population of some 150 million, making it the state with the second-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. While many Indian Muslims achieve celebrity status and high-profile positions abroad and in India’s government—the current president is Muslim—India’s booming economy has left the nation’s largest minority group lagging behind. Muslims experience low literacy and high poverty rates, and Hindu-Muslim violence has claimed a disproportionate number of Muslim lives. Yet Muslims can impact elections, using their power as a voting bloc to gain concessions from the candidates who court them. Are Muslims marginalized in India? Yes. The Muslim literacy rate ranks well below the national average and Muslim poverty rates are only slightly higher than low-caste Hindus, according to a November 2006 government report (PDF). Muslims—mostly Sunnis—make up 13.4 percent of India’s population, yet hold fewer than 5 percent of government posts and make up only 4 percent of the undergraduate student body in India’s elite universities. The report also found that Muslims fall behind other groups in terms of access to credit, despite the fact that Muslims are self-employed at a far higher rate than other groups. Are Muslims disadvantaged to the same degree across India? It provided exhaustive research on Muslim socioeconomic conditions, and made a wide range of proposals, from evaluating textbooks to ensure they promote religious tolerance to recognizing degrees from madrassas to combating Muslim unemployment rate. But experts wonder if the report, like previous studies, will result in far-reaching changes. “The conclusions aren’t very revolutionary and I wouldn’t expect much in the way of policy change from it,” says Steven Wilkinson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on ethnic politics in India. Wilkinson says the report builds on previously available data, fails to offer clear analysis about the nature of Muslim marginalization, and leaves in question whether solutions should focus on Muslims or general public poverty alleviation. Hindu nationalists—represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—also criticized the report, and accused the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition of publishing it to gain political support from the Muslim voting bloc. One BJP leader denied Muslims had ever faced discrimination inIndia and called the study “distorted, politically-motivated, and dangerous” (Hindu). Hindu voters in southern states “made Muslims a pivotal swing group in the south very early on.” For decades, India’s National Congress party, running on a secular platform, won elections with the help of the Muslim vote. But waning Muslim support for the party, along with a plethora of choices (there are some 170 political parties Hindu nationalists stoke fears, arguing that Muslims’ higher birth rate and an influx of migrants from Bangladesh threaten India’s Hindu majority. Hard-line Hindu nationalists argue Indian Muslims (as well as Christians) converted from Hinduism and should reconvert to the majority religion. Although Hindu nationalists played a minority role in India’s parliament in the decades after independence, they drew popular support and experienced rising popularity after the 1980 establishment of the BJP. The BJP, a socially conservative party which has moved toward a more secular platform in recent years, held a parliamentary majority from 1998 through 2004. Candidates for the BJP, now the nation’s main opposition party, have sought win votes by opposing government benefits for Muslims and proposing to build a temple on the site of a former mosque in Ayodhya, a city in India’s most populous and politically important state of Uttar Pradesh.