The threat of a parallel Islamic state in India (Where Islamic = Saudi fanaticism that has little to do with actual Islam)

Though India is the home to world’s second largest Muslim population its large majority are overwhelmingly secular. It was our recent history which had created the sense of the separation or ‘the other’ resulting in the Partition of the great Sub-continent.

Before that, under the Sultanate and the Mughal period India was absolutely secular and nationalistic rather than religious in politics, administration, war and trade. On the other hand the concept of the ‘Islamic State’ dates back to the period immediately after the demise of the Prophet in the eight century when the entire Arabian peninsula and beyond was brought under one single political control.

However that concept were lost or distorted in the following centuries especially after the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate at Damascus and the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad. The coming of the non-Arab Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth century brought plurality and diversity to the Arab dominated Islam which was very much homogeneous. But its decline and subsequent fall after World War I to European imperial powers created a vacuum in the present day Arab Middle-East where Islam was experiencing a fast moving exposure to the hitherto unknown colonialism of the West and was getting to adopt new life.

At this critical juncture the political and territorial ambition of one Arab tribal chieftain, Ibn Saud formed the foundation which later came to be known as Islamic state. The system of Islamic state has contributed in shaping destinies of different nations of the world and reshaped the geo-political configurations of the world. India too, experienced the influence of the Islamic state order in its post-Independent period resulting in the further alienation of its Muslim population from the mainstream coupled with the hostile socio-political set up due to the Partition.

Now India is facing a threat of being a parallel Islamic state for its Muslims, thanks to the free hand given to certain organizations advocating such a separate system in the name of minority rights. Read More