1 city, 2 people — and India’s widening religious divide
1 year, 8 months ago

1 city, 2 people — and India’s widening religious divide

The Independent  

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. ___ India is home to some 200 million Muslims who make up the predominantly Hindu country’s largest minority group. Though India’s communal fractures date back to its bloody partition in 1947, most Indians trace the roots of the latest religious fault lines to a small temple city in northern India, where the Hindu nationalist movement was galvanized in 1992 after Hindu mobs demolished a historic mosque to make way for a temple. No Muslim opposes the construction of Ram temple, but such unilateral changes are impacting India’s culture,” he says, arguing the former mosque was essential to the city’s Muslim identity. Scorn for Mughal rulers, who are not ancestors of Indian Muslims and only shared a similar faith, is distinctive to India’s Hindu nationalists, who claim Mughals destroyed Hindu culture.

Religious City Hindu Muslims Hindus Ram Modi Das Temple Hindu Nationalists India Muslim Abidi  muslims  widening  india  muslim  ram  city  divide  abidi  indias  temple  religious  hindu

History of this topic

Dispelling population myths triggered by a working paper
7 months, 1 week ago

Dispelling population myths triggered by a working paper

The Hindu  

Many media reports and politicians have tended to misinterpret and sensationalise findings from a working paper put out by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, titled “Share of Religious Minorities: A Cross-Country Analysis ”. The working paper states: “the actual reasons for the change in the religious demography of a country is a multivariate phenomenon in a complex …

Four anti-Muslim claims dominating India’s election: What’s the truth?
7 months, 2 weeks ago

Four anti-Muslim claims dominating India’s election: What’s the truth?

Al Jazeera  

India’s Hindu nationalists have peddled conspiracy theories about Muslims. ‘Those with more children’ What Modi said: During an election rally on April 21 in the western state of Rajasthan, Modi claimed that if the Congress party came to power, it would distribute the country’s wealth among Muslims. ‘Congress will snatch mangalsutras, give them to its vote bank’ What Modi said: …

The changing face of religious demography
7 months, 2 weeks ago

The changing face of religious demography

New Indian Express  

An important study undertaken by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister —an analysis of the evolving status of religious minorities around the world—provides significant and renewed evidence of the demographic decline of the majority and the growing population of minorities in most nations including India. The working paper, which examined demographic change between 1950 and 2015 across 167 …

Has India’s Muslim population really exploded?
7 months, 3 weeks ago

Has India’s Muslim population really exploded?

Al Jazeera  

A new government report claims that the country’s Muslim population share has increased 43 percent since 1950, fuelling an unfounded conspiracy theory. The data shows, according to the paper, that in India, “minorities are not just protected but thriving” – even though multiple international reports and rankings warn of the country’s decline in religious freedom. “It is an exercise in …

India’s parliament has fewer Muslims as strength of Modi’s party grows
7 months, 3 weeks ago

India’s parliament has fewer Muslims as strength of Modi’s party grows

Associated Press  

MALAPPURAM, India — Preventing Muslim migrants from gaining citizenship. India has gone from being a country where Muslims were largely marginalized to one where they are “actively excluded,” said Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a political scientist and historian at New Delhi’s Ashoka University. so they remain enemies,” said Mehmood Bhai Khatri, a 64-year-old Muslim voter from Modi’s home state of Gujarat, …

Government Report on Population Sparks Political Controversy
8 months ago

Government Report on Population Sparks Political Controversy

Deccan Chronicle  

New Delhi: A recent government panel's findings on population dynamics ignited a fierce political debate as the ruling BJP and opposition parties clashed over its implications. The report titled Share of Religious Minorities A Cross Country Analysis sheds light on significant shifts in India's demographic landscape. While the BJP expressed concerns about the rapid growth of the Muslim population and …

Islamophobia and India’s election: Rising Hindu nationalism leaves Muslims fearful in India’s holy city
8 months, 1 week ago

Islamophobia and India’s election: Rising Hindu nationalism leaves Muslims fearful in India’s holy city

CNN  

Varanasi, India CNN — The sun glistens on the Ganges as Hindu devotees bathe in the holy river’s waters, and the Muslim call to prayer reverberates through the dusty air. But we are hopeless.” Varanasi lies on the Ganges, the most sacred river in Hinduism John Mees/CNN ‘We hide our names’ Modi’s BJP has its roots in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak …

Are Muslims a more unequal society in India?
1 year, 6 months ago

Are Muslims a more unequal society in India?

Hindustan Times  

Speaking to BJP workers in Bhopal on June 27, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterated his Pasmanda Muslim outreach. PREMIUM People shop at a market ahead of Eid To be sure, this is not the first time someone is raising the question of socially driven economic inequality within the Muslims. The question of social stratification among Muslims, like caste among Hindus, …

India journeying towards majoritarianism since beginning: Asad
1 year, 6 months ago

India journeying towards majoritarianism since beginning: Asad

Deccan Chronicle  

Hyderabad: AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi, speaking at Addison in Illinois of USA, said that India’s journey as a country has been towards a majoritarian one since Day one. UP’s first CM Govind Vallabh Pant had said we should either remain together or leave.” He said that the BJP currently has 306 MPs without a single Muslim MP or minister in …

Religious Freedom Report 2022 is timed to tarnish the image of India and PM Modi ahead of his US visit
1 year, 7 months ago

Religious Freedom Report 2022 is timed to tarnish the image of India and PM Modi ahead of his US visit

Firstpost  

Case 1: It was an unusually busy and buzzy day in the otherwise sleepy village of Undhela in Gujarat’s Kheda district. But the State Department’s Religious Freedom Report 2022, released by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in Washington on Monday, has picked out Case 1, among other isolated incidents in India, to project the image of a majoritarian state …

1 city, 2 people — and India’s widening religious divide
1 year, 8 months ago

1 city, 2 people — and India’s widening religious divide

Associated Press  

AYODHYA, India — Syed Mohammad Munir Abidi says India is a changed country, one he doesn’t recognize anymore. ___ India is home to some 200 million Muslims who make up the predominantly Hindu country’s largest minority group. Though India’s communal fractures date back to its bloody partition in 1947, most Indians trace the roots of the latest religious fault lines …

How Ayodhya city reflects India’s widening religious divide
1 year, 8 months ago

How Ayodhya city reflects India’s widening religious divide

Al Jazeera  

Syed Mohammad Munir Abidi says India is a changed country, one he does not recognise any more. The 48-year-old Hindu priest says India is on a quest to redeem its religious past and that the country is fundamentally a Hindu nation where minorities, especially Muslims, must subscribe to Hindu primacy. Though India’s communal fractures date back to its bloody partition …

Unlike Pakistan’s minorities, every strand of the Muslim community is doing its business in India: Nirmala Sitharaman
1 year, 9 months ago

Unlike Pakistan’s minorities, every strand of the Muslim community is doing its business in India: Nirmala Sitharaman

The Hindu  

India is home to the second largest Muslim population in the world and those blaming the country on minority issues have no clue about the ground realities, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said. Addressing a Washington DC audience during a fireside chat at the Peterson Institute for International Economics on Monday, April 10, 2023, Ms. Sitharaman said the Muslim …

Communal rift highest in India, says Pew study
2 years, 1 month ago

Communal rift highest in India, says Pew study

Live Mint  

New Delhi: India was among a handful of countries that saw religious hostilities in the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, said a report released on Tuesday by the US think-tank Pew Research Center. Here’s what the Pew report says: Social Hostilities AT 9.4 out of a maximum possible score of 10, India’s Social Hostilities Index in 2020 …

Book Review | Missed chance to bring nuance to the conversation on Islam
2 years, 3 months ago

Book Review | Missed chance to bring nuance to the conversation on Islam

Deccan Chronicle  

This is a book for our times. Its success depended crucially on getting right three distinct ideas — that India is a layered and diverse society in every sense of the word and was fed through migrations over the millennia; that the nationalism engendered through the anti-colonial struggle could only be of a civic variety and not one based on …

At 75, India’s democracy is under pressure like never before
2 years, 4 months ago

At 75, India’s democracy is under pressure like never before

Associated Press  

NEW DELHI — The Aug. 5 demonstrations by India’s main opposition Congress party against soaring food prices and unemployment began like any other recent protest — an electorally weak opposition taking to the New Delhi streets against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s massively popular government. “And now, 75 years on, to witness it being dismantled systematically and in shockingly violent ways …

Right Word | Change in ‘religious demography’ of India is not hyperbole, it is a real threat
2 years, 5 months ago

Right Word | Change in ‘religious demography’ of India is not hyperbole, it is a real threat

Firstpost  

Dr JK Bajaj of the Centre for Policy Studies did some path-breaking work by breaking down the Census 2011 data and the results clearly indicate the need to ponder upon the issue of ‘religious demography’ of India Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath recently expressed concern over an adverse fall out of an imbalance in the religious demography of Bharat. …

Hard truths from the rubble of communal conflagrations
2 years, 8 months ago

Hard truths from the rubble of communal conflagrations

The Hindu  

The spate of riots that erupted around the recently held Ram Navami festival and Hanuman Jayanti in States such as Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Bihar, West Bengal, Rajasthan and in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri seem to be have begun a new chapter in Hindu-Muslim violence. Thus, from the Babri Masjid’s destruction to the demolition of a part of Jahangirpuri’s Jama Masjid this year, …

India: Is politics fueling attacks on Muslims?
2 years, 8 months ago

India: Is politics fueling attacks on Muslims?

Al Jazeera  

On Tuesday, April 26 at 19:30GMT: A wave of violent attacks on India’s Muslim population has the community on edge. But critics say it is the latest attempt to harass India’s Muslim minority, which makes up roughly 14 percent of the country’s 1.4 billion population. Human Rights observers say recent incendiary rhetoric by politicians from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu …

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | BJP a political beneficiary of Hindu-Muslim clashes
2 years, 8 months ago

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | BJP a political beneficiary of Hindu-Muslim clashes

Deccan Chronicle  

There was a clash between groups of Hindus and Muslims near a mosque in Jahangirpuri in northwest Delhi on the evening of Sunday, April 17, as a Hanuman Jayanti procession called Shobha Yatra was passing by the mosque. A determined BJP government at the Centre — the municipal corporations come under the jurisdiction of the Union home ministry in the …

India's complex position on Islamophobia
2 years, 9 months ago

India's complex position on Islamophobia

The Hindu  

Last week, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a consensus Resolution declaring March 15 annually as the ‘International Day to Combat Islamophobia’. Mr. Tirumurti did “condemn” Islamophobia along with all other religiophobia, but at that point he could have specifically added that India cannot but be concerned with Islamophobia because Muslims form a substantial part of the country’s plural society. …

Assembly poll results and after: Why Muslims and the BJP need to talk, and talk fast
2 years, 9 months ago

Assembly poll results and after: Why Muslims and the BJP need to talk, and talk fast

Firstpost  

The effort should be to try and strike a balance between minority rights and the majority community’s sensitivities, which it believes have been ignored in the name of secularism In the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, a distant cousin of mine — an old Congress loyalist — who lives in a small town in eastern Uttar Pradesh, called …

Nehruvian Secularism Condemns Muslims Not as Equals but as Permanent Minority to Hindus: Kerala Governor
2 years, 9 months ago

Nehruvian Secularism Condemns Muslims Not as Equals but as Permanent Minority to Hindus: Kerala Governor

News 18  

As the Karnataka high court is set to deliver its verdict on whether women students should be allowed to enter educational institutions in a hijab, Kerala governor Arif Mohammad Khan said he believed that the controversy is a “conspiracy”. The most fundamental folly of Nehruvian secularism is that it condemns Muslims not as equals but as a permanent minority to …

Majoritarian violence is slowly tearing India apart
2 years, 11 months ago

Majoritarian violence is slowly tearing India apart

Al Jazeera  

In India, the new year started with a perverse attack on the country’s Muslims. Just a few weeks earlier, several far-right Hindu leaders openly called for genocide against Muslims at a three-day religious summit held in northern India’s Haridwar city. Also in December, India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi made connections between Muslim figures from India’s distant history and current-day …

BJP’s UP playbook takes religious tone to counter caste divide
3 years ago

BJP’s UP playbook takes religious tone to counter caste divide

Hindustan Times  

As it moves closer to the assembly election, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s pitch to retain power in Uttar Pradesh has acquired a religious undertone to counter caste-based differences that the party fears can adversely impact its political fortunes. Party functionaries aware of developments in the state said even as the BJP is banking on the Modi-Yogi duopoly of a “decisive …

‘The spell of Modi has been broken’
3 years ago

‘The spell of Modi has been broken’

The Hindu  

DrThomas Blom Hansen, a renowned scholar on Hindu nationalism, is currently Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, California, and Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Chair at Stanford University. Many of those who support the BJP—and that includes a large proportion of India’s educated middle classes—love the idea of Hindu pride and Hindu power. There was a suspicion among many Muslim League politicians …

Data | Fertility rates decline across religions in India, sharpest drop recorded among Muslims
3 years, 3 months ago

Data | Fertility rates decline across religions in India, sharpest drop recorded among Muslims

The Hindu  

The religious composition of India’s population has remained largely stable since Independence as fertility rates have declined across all religious groups, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. There has been a significant decline in fertility rates across religious groups, with Muslims recording the highest drop. Drop in fertility levels The chart depicts the steep fall in fertility …

Fertility rates of Hindus and Muslims converging: study
3 years, 3 months ago

Fertility rates of Hindus and Muslims converging: study

The Hindu  

The religious composition of India’s population since Partition has remained largely stable, with both Hindus and Muslims, the two largest religious groups, showing not only a marked decline but also a convergence in fertility rates, according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center, a non-profit based in Washington DC. From 1992 to 2015, the total fertility rates …

The propaganda in India that Muslims will outnumber Hindus by 2035 is governed by prejudice, not facts
3 years, 5 months ago

The propaganda in India that Muslims will outnumber Hindus by 2035 is governed by prejudice, not facts

The Hindu  

In response to a question about his government’s relief measures for the victims of the communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002, which claimed nearly a thousand lives, Chief Minister Narendra Modi remarked callously: “What should I do? In the game of numbers, Sakshi Maharaj felt, Muslims, who constituted 14.2 per cent of the population in the country, were poised to …

Nature of religiosity in India
3 years, 5 months ago

Nature of religiosity in India

The Hindu  

FEAR of the mysterious, the unknown, death and defeat is the foundation of religion, declared the British polymath Bertrand Russell in 1927. By contrast, among those who said religion was less important in their lives, 39 per cent expressed a similar view. Women, Indian adults without a college education and those who said religion was very important in their lives …

Data | People in South India are far more liberal in matters of religion and nationalism: survey
3 years, 6 months ago

Data | People in South India are far more liberal in matters of religion and nationalism: survey

The Hindu  

People in the South of India tend to be more religiously integrated and less opposed to interreligious marriages, data from a nationwide survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre show. Though people from the southern States are equally, if not more, religious than citizens in other parts, relatively fewer of them consider theirs to be the "one true religion". People …

The Pew study’s glazed picture of our religious tolerance
3 years, 6 months ago

The Pew study’s glazed picture of our religious tolerance

Live Mint  

A major Pew Research Center survey of religion across India, based on nearly 30,000 face-to-face interviews of adults conducted in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020, was recently published. Across the major religious groups, most people say it is very important to respect all religions to be ‘truly Indian.’ And tolerance is a religious as well as civic …

Living together, separately
3 years, 6 months ago

Living together, separately

Hindustan Times  

The findings of the latest Pew survey on religion in India raise questions that lie at the heart of India’s contemporary political debates. While it is tempting to conclude that existing social barriers are insurmountable, it is also true that more Indians than at any point in history are defying caste and religion structures in making life choices, including marriage. …

What Indians think about religion and religious differences, in five charts
3 years, 6 months ago

What Indians think about religion and religious differences, in five charts

Live Mint  

Indians profess respect for all religions but want to live their own lives among co-religionists, a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre shows. Building Ghettos The majority of people across all religions say that the freedom to practise all religions freely is important to their own religion, and to their identity as Indians. 80% of Muslims say it …

What lies at the root of the insecurities of Indian Muslims
3 years, 8 months ago

What lies at the root of the insecurities of Indian Muslims

Live Mint  

When Ghazala Wahab put down her first ideas for this book in 2017, it was conceived as a kind of counter-voice to the Zakir Naiks of the world. Events overtook Wahab’s writing at many points, forcing her to expand the idea of the book to encompass the peculiar politics of Indian society and Muslims’ place in it, culminating in the …

India a 'Dangerous' Place for Religious Minorities: South Asia State of Minorities Report 2020
4 years ago

India a 'Dangerous' Place for Religious Minorities: South Asia State of Minorities Report 2020

News 18  

The last year ended with nation-wide protests against a series of controversial citizenship amendment laws passed by the government of India in December. And now, the South Asia State of Minorities Report 2020 has found that India has become increasingly intolerant of dissenters as well as religious minorities. The annual report looks at the status of civic space and personal …

Delhi communal violence: City's past shows Hindu-Muslim enmity predates Hindutva, political parties and even Partition
4 years, 10 months ago

Delhi communal violence: City's past shows Hindu-Muslim enmity predates Hindutva, political parties and even Partition

Firstpost  

This week, as Delhi struggles with the fallout from weekend violence which ended in a temple in the city’s Chawri Bazaar area being vandalised, the 1974 riots — one of the deadliest Hindu-Muslim clashes in post-Independence Delhi — are a useful prism to inspect what happened, and wh Editor’s note: Fresh violence in north eastern Delhi, which erupted over the …

Time to address Muslim anxieties | Opinion
5 years ago

Time to address Muslim anxieties | Opinion

Hindustan Times  

Has India succeeded in addressing issues related to the Muslim minority, notwithstanding the entire array of constitutional rights and guarantees? Did Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies towards the Muslim minority provide the right substance for their welfare and progress? The assertion of the community’s exclusive identity by its leaders may have provided comfort and assurance, but it prevented it from moving sufficiently …

Sermons on faith pose challenge for Modi 2.0
5 years, 6 months ago

Sermons on faith pose challenge for Modi 2.0

Deccan Chronicle  

There is something about American political sermons and the early period of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tenures in office. Days before his visit to New Delhi, Mr Pompeo released the annual report of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which had categorised India as being among the countries where “it is increasingly difficult to separate religion and politics, a …

Modi 2.0: Reaching out to all
5 years, 7 months ago

Modi 2.0: Reaching out to all

Deccan Chronicle  

The laddoos will be savoured in the spanking new BJP headquarters. The results can’t be announced till five vote-verified-paper-audit-trail per Assembly segment are matched with the vote count of EVMs — a concession the Supreme Court gave to the wailing Opposition parties who “feared” digital voting may be rigged — though no credible evidence was ever available. The NDA should …

Few bad people not symbol of nation: Dalai Lama
5 years, 9 months ago

Few bad people not symbol of nation: Dalai Lama

Hindustan Times  

India is a country where religious harmony has existed for centuries and a few incidents of violence cannot become symbolic of the entire nation, Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama said on Thursday. Asked about an alleged attack on a Muslim family in Gurugram recently, he said at a press conference in Delhi that he would like to take a …

Politics of religion has no room as India rises
5 years, 9 months ago

Politics of religion has no room as India rises

Deccan Chronicle  

The notion that a strident anti-Islam national sentiment can co-exist with India’s geopolitical ambitions is laughable. Most Indian political parties follow this principle, including a few, which oddly are allies of the ruling BJP in the existing National Democratic Alliance, like the Janata Dal of Nitish Kumar and the Akali Dal of the Badals, as also the Telugu Desam Party …

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