Behind Mumbai

India is home to 154 million Muslims, the third largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan. Tolerable inter-communal relations are the sine qua non of Indian stability and ascendancy. India has more to lose from extremist Islam than arguably any other country in the world. The Mumbai terrorists announced themselves as the Deccan Mujahideen. The Deccan is a rugged plateau region in south-central India that Aurangzeb, the fierce Sunni emperor of the Mughals (India’s most historically significant Muslim dynasty) could never subdue and in fact died trying in 1707. The Islamic Mughals vanquished all of northern India, Pakistan, and a good part of Afghanistan, but they could never consolidate the Deccan against the Hindu Maratha warriors. This Mughal history has taken on heightened symbolism in India in recent years precisely as a result of globalization and the expansion of electronic communications and education, all of which have sharpened the country’s religious divide.

In the early Cold War decades, India’s ruling Congress Party, the party of independence, sought to unite both Hindus and Muslims under the umbrella of a shared community and new nation-state. It worked, more or less, until the 1970s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi enacted dictatorial emergency decrees that erased much of the romantic sheen from Congress’s image. New imagined communities then started to form. In the 1980s, and particularly in the 1990s, with the opening up of the Indian economy to the outside world, Indians, especially the new Hindu middle class, began a search for roots to anchor them inside an insipid world civilization that they were joining as a result of their new economic status. This enhanced status, by the way, gave them new insecurities, as they suddenly had wealth to protect.

“The BJP is one of several Hindu nationalist organizations that promotes a revisionist view of Indian history, in which the Mughals and other Muslim dynasties of the medieval and early modern era (which helped create India’s dazzlingly syncretic civilization - but who also brought terrible depredations upon the Hindus) are considered interlopers in what should have remained a purely Hindu civilization and story-line.”

The Hindus were there before the Muslims,end of discussion.

Making it harder for the Obama administration to effect a rapprochement between the two countries

This is delusional. Islam cannot co-exist with any other religion or government.

Sura (2:191-193) - "And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution of Muslims is worse than slaughter of non-believers...and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah."

Sura (5:33) - "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement"

Sura (8:12) - "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them"

Bukhari (52:177) - Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."

Tabari 7:97 The morning after the murder of Ashraf, the Prophet declared," Kill any Jew who falls under your power."

Ibn Ishaq: 327 - “Allah said, ‘A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. Muhammad, you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion.’”

>>Aurangzeb

Preceded by one of the Great Mughals of India, Akbar, who even took a Hindu wife, had spiritual and religious leaders of both religions in his Court and was responsible for a flowering of the arts and culture, his court being a syncretist domain, with learning welcomed. Then he died.

Aurangzeb was a modern Jihadi predecessor, all over the Deccan his rampages resulted in the destruction of not only temples but of entire communities, men slaughtered, women taken as concubines and war booty. SSDD.

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