THE POWER OF MINGLING

AFTER PARTITION, IN 1947, INDIA AND PAKISTAN TOOK STRIKINGLY different paths. India chose the much more attractive one. The way religions rubbed along together, guided by those who held political (or military) power, varied greatly. In Pakistan, a predominantly Sunni Muslim country, tolerance for non-Muslims and for Sufis, Shia, Ahmadis, and other minorities gradually shriveled. At independence over one-fifth of Pakistan’s population, including 15 percent of the western part of the country, were non-Muslim. Jinnah, the country’s first leader, had spoken of creating a Muslim homeland where Christians, Sikhs, and others would also feel welcome. By 2016, however, non-Muslims were less than 5 percent of Pakistan’s population, and many non-Sunnis felt increasingly threatened by the Deobandi, Salafi, or Wahabi movements, including extremists who used accusations of blasphemy to intimidate members of minority religions or sects and steal their property. None of this was accidental, or a mere quirk of history. Politicians had long cultivated extremist groups in Pakistan. Military rulers had stirred up Islamist groups to use inside Afghanistan and India. From the Middle East came influential Wahabi thought, especially from Saudi Arabia, an ally of Pakistan’s government that channeled money for madrassas and mosques. It all helped to cultivate a harder version of Islam in Pakistan.

By contrast in secular and democratic India, with its majority Hindu population, religious minorities mostly looked more secure—despite some bloody exceptions, as in Gujarat in 2002. Hindus predominated and would always do so: census figures showed population growth rates slowing over the decades for all groups, including Muslims. But the non-Hindu population remained robust. A religious census in 2011 found that Hindus were just under 80 percent of India’s population and Muslims were nearly 15 percent. (The Muslim proportion will gradually rise this century, perhaps reaching a maximum of 20 percent.) Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, animists, and atheists, plus tiny scatterings of Jews, Parsis, and others, made up the rest. Nonetheless, because India was massive, its Muslim population was numerically huge. India had some 180 million Muslims in 2016, roughly equal to the Muslim population of Pakistan. Only Indonesia had a larger Muslim population.

One of India’s great successes was its survival as a confidently secular, multi-religious democracy—all the more hopeful in contrast to the misery next door. In Pakistan a near-genocide took place in 1971, targeting separatist Bengalis and Hindus (in the eastern part of the country). In India there could be local tensions, but by and large one was free to practice any religion—or none—and even the largest, Hinduism, did not overly dominate public life. India has never had a Muslim prime minister, but Muslims and members of other minority religions have been president and vice-president, as well as cabinet ministers, senior army figures, the boss of national intelligence, and beyond. In sport, in Bollywood, television, art, and literature, performers of any religion have been celebrated as national heroes. India offers a powerful message of inclusivity—a model that other countries troubled by religious strife might emulate. India has not always lived up to its model, as seen in persistent racism toward Africans in India, or ongoing caste and other intolerances, but in terms of its constitution and general practice it has mostly remained inclusive.

Yet India’s success was not preserved by accident or a quirk of history, either: it required deliberate work by leaders and institutions to sustain it. You needed only to look at the history of South Asia to understand that the region would be at serious risk of violent confrontation, if divisive political and other leaders were really set on stirring up trouble. Religious persecution and wars had been widespread. Travel to Sri Lanka, to its north, and you saw the aftermath of civil war launched by Tamil (Hindu) secessionists in 1983, after long repression by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority. That war ended after twenty-six years, in 2009, when the UN estimated that perhaps 100,000 people had died. In Bangladesh hundreds of thousands were slaughtered and over 10 million were expelled in 1971. In the Maldives, known to the outside world mostly as a honeymoon destination, the law of 2008 compelled all nationals to be Sunni Muslim. Extremists there smashed old statues in museums, along with other evidence of the country’s early Buddhist history.

Inside India, religious clashes occasionally erupted, such as in Assam in 2012, when Muslim settlers and tribal groups confronted each other for control of land. India had its own history of religious strife, especially before independence and at Partition. But under democracy India was relatively more stable and peaceful than most of its neighbors in South Asia. It was typically the country to which refugees fled, not the other way around (although a law proposed in 2016, under Modi, would have discriminated against Muslims from other countries who claimed refugee status, and in favor of Hindus and other non-Muslims seeking asylum).

Keeping India’s society stable depended on constant effort from its leaders—political especially, but also religious ones, plus those in the media, in courts, and across many institutions, and including those within its massive, and mostly moderate, Muslim population. Yet radicalization of a minority of Muslims, notably some Sunni sects, as in other parts of the world, was also a concern. For most people in India, personal identity was not exclusively, probably not even predominantly, about religious belief. For many people, differences in geography, or of age, education, sexuality, profession, income, and more, could be at least as important as matters of religion. If you assessed the Muslim population as a single group, you could find distinct characteristics: on average, for example, Muslims were poorer than Hindus and faced worse prospects when measured by housing quality, wealth, employment, and the like. But then, inequality and variety within populations of the same religion were as significant as anything else.

Kashmiri Muslims often supported Pakistan’s cricket team, as a way of showing that they resented rule from Delhi. Some Kashmiris, as in the summer of 2016, protested against rule from Delhi. But very few Indian Muslims appeared to sympathize with extremists. A domestic terror group, the Indian Mujahideen, had grown from a student movement, and carried out violent attacks, possibly with help from Pakistan. In Hyderabad, in February 2013, bombs killed sixteen people in a market, for example. In June 2016 police arrested a group of men in the city apparently poised to conduct more attacks. But activity was sporadic. Remarkably few Indian Muslims showed interest in supporting extremists either at home or abroad, or in traveling overseas to support outfits such as al Qaeda or the Islamic State.

Yet as Hindu nationalism rose in India, it did risk provoking some Indian Muslims to become more assertive of their religious identity, too. Some people felt disaffected when Narendra Modi promoted practices closely associated with Hinduism, such as celebrating a national yoga day, over which a Hindu guru, Baba Ramdev, helped to preside in 2015. It was easy to imagine how a more Hindutva-minded leader could stir harder-line responses from some Muslims. One unknown, given Modi’s fierce determination to remain in office, was whether he might resort to using religious division to unite Hindu voters behind him, if the economy did not deliver promised returns. His past in Gujarat, after 2002, showed that such a worry was not fanciful.

Religious moderation in India looked robust, but what kept it that way was disputed. Hindu nationalists claimed it was the result of peaceful and moderate Hindus being in the majority. A more complete explanation was democratic India’s history of moderate leaders, the strength of democratic institutions, and the benefits of having a liberal, secular constitution and the rule of law. It helped, too, that the type of Islam seen in India for the past millennium or so, the more mystical Sufi form (to which some two-thirds of Indian Muslims loosely belonged), had been closely intermingled with Hinduism. Cultural ties were strong. Members of both big religions shared many cultural practices and as long as mingling between communities continued, then understanding and moderation would be facilitated. Unfortunately, some signs suggested that, as Indians became more educated, urban, and wealthy, such mingling was in decline.

Arshad Alam, a Bihari academic at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, summed this up as Islam in India becoming more “standardized” as traditional practices were replaced by more modern ones. He saw habits in rural India, long shared by Muslims and Hindus, rapidly disappearing. “Applying vermillion on the forehead of a woman, is this Islamic?” he asked, referring to a habit usually associated with Hindus. “In Bihar there is a big debate, because it is customary for both Hindu and Muslim to apply it. Barelvis [the majority Muslim group in the area] are associated with the practice,” he explained. Yet many Muslims were dropping the custom. Deobandi Muslims, who are more fundamentalist, “accuse them of adopting Hindu practice. Barelvis come under interpretative stress to conform, they are under pressure. This is happening now,” he added.

Arshad also described ceremonies to mark deaths and births: “Take the singing of folk songs. One genre, in eastern Uttar Pradesh and in Bihar, is ‘Sohar.’ It is sung during birth, though only for the birth of a boy. The women of the locality got together, both Muslim and Hindu. It is common to both Hindu and Muslim families, but Sohar is now seen as a Hindu practice. Men told Muslim women not to do it. It was an occasion and a space to break off rigid community boundaries. Now Muslim women won’t participate, so Sohar is an exclusive Hindu practice. They stop coming to Muslim houses, and Muslims don’t go to theirs. The collective bonding that was there has been impacted by Islamic reform,” he said, stubbing out a cigarette.

Ironically for an academic, Arshad worried that better education was shrinking the space where Muslims and Hindus could mix. As people read more—for example, on the Internet—more were defining themselves clearly by religion and as separate from neighbors of other faiths or sects. An example was how some Muslims decided to shun music. “I see Islam’s role changing, but what is there to hang on to? You lose your own music, because it is ‘Hindu,’ but you have no music then. There is cultural anxiety in our minds, suffocation. This process will continue and increase. Everyone wants education, so the more this process will increase. Education brings more insular Islam,” he said.

Migration played a role. From India—and from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan—millions of young men and women, most of them Muslim, went to the Gulf, sending back tens of billions of dollars a year. That brought a great economic boon to states like Kerala, but it also began to change social habits—how some people dressed or shifting perceptions of what was considered attractive. The spread of Wahabi beliefs was one concern. Arshad pointed out that Wahabis were not necessarily more extreme than others, just as Sufis were not automatically more moderate. On the other hand, a lesson from Islamist extremism elsewhere, such as in Europe, suggested that Wahabi practices were associated with more hard-line attitudes—for example, toward non-Muslims. Arshad played down the significance of migration, but other experts saw outside influences encouraging the more inward-looking, conservative attitudes of some Muslims in India. Jamal Malik, who researched madrassas in South Asia, said migrants left for Saudi Arabia clean-shaven and many returned bearded and demanding that boys and girls be segregated in school. Such returning migrants were especially inclined to put one of their children into a madrassa, he said, and the numbers of such religious schools were growing.

In Delhi, Sultan Shahin, a middle-aged campaigner against Wahabist thought, ran a website, “New Age Islam,” that he said was intended to counter sites funded by Saudis to promote hard-line views among young Muslims in India. “I thought there should be a corner of the Internet where those on the verge of converting to militancy can get a contrarian view, entirely based on the Koran,” he said. He called Wahabi or Salafi Islam a “very, very poisonous ideology, getting help, support with massive petrodollars” from Saudi Arabia. “People develop a Wahabi mind-set of exclusion, feeling superior, alienating themselves. It is in the air,” he complained. He said that Delhi bookshops were crammed with publications that promoted ideas of isolation, and rejection of others, and that “books are either from Saudi Arabia or published here with Saudi funding. The same textbooks as are taught in Saudi Arabia. They teach that Wahabi Muslims should have no interaction with Jews, Christians, should listen to no radio or TV. Women whose grandmothers never wore a burka are today in hijab. Today men have a certain kind of beard, thinly trimmed moustache. This is Wahabi, spread by Jamaat. You see it on the roads in Delhi, Chandni Chowk, anywhere.”

He saw evidence that some fellow Indian Muslims had become more hard-line. “You see it has grown phenomenally in the beards, hijabs, burkas, the way people talk. Migration has a big impact. I saw this in Kerala. So many mosques have come up, which proudly declare themselves Salafi mosques. That was very surprising for me, because Wahabi or Salafi belief used to be so minuscule. Now so many are willing to identify as Salafi. It used to be one or two people who would come to the mosques one hundred years ago when it [Salafi or Wahabi thought] came to India. Saudis propagated Wahabism, but they had little money. Now so many are willing to identify themselves,” he said.

Others worried about the influence of the migrants to the Gulf who returned home to South Asia. Armed police guarded the book-lined home in Delhi of Taslima Nasrin, a liberal Bangladeshi writer in exile. An outspoken critic of radical Islam, Nasrin had won awards and honorary degrees from foreign universities, the European Parliament, and others. An atheist who trained as a doctor, she had campaigned since the 1980s against fanatics first in Bangladesh and then, after claiming asylum, in India. Several radical Islamist leaders called for her to be killed. (Many liberals, Hindus, bloggers, and anti-extremist figures inside Bangladesh were murdered by Islamist fanatics in 2015 and 2016.) She said she was the subject of three fatwas issued by clerics in Bangladesh, and five more in India. In 2007 an Indian Muslim cleric offered 500,000 rupees for her assassination. Her books were publicly burnt.

Nasrin claimed that many Muslims in South Asia (in Bangladesh, especially) were getting “more fundamentalist” by the year, referring to a surge in mosque-building, women who felt obliged to wear the burka, and attacks on girls’ schools since the 1990s. She campaigned against the “brainwash center, the madrassa,” and was worried by the business activities of Islamist groups involved in banks, schools, and hospitals in Bangladesh. She said that money flowing from richer Islamic countries, notably the Gulf, encouraged radical, hostile interpretations of Islam across South Asia.

M. J. Akbar, one of India’s wittiest journalists, who joined politics as a rare Muslim supporter of Modi and eventually became a minister of foreign affairs, also warned of the spread of fundamentalist Islam in India. “Go to see the headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat,” he advised. “The Tablighi Jamaat movement is the largest organization of Muslim mobilization in South Asia. Its purpose is not to convert Hindus or to interfere or intercede, its purpose is far more insidious: to turn Muslims into Wahabis. They preach distance. Their beards, you know, are knee-jerk beards. Missionaries are at the Nizamuddin station every morning, and they can get a 1-million-strong congregation at the drop of a skull cap,” he said, exaggerating. He complained that a close friend had joined the Tablighi Jamaat. The two used to gamble and drink together in Bombay, he said, but “now he has a skull cap and his beard is at least three-feet long. He is only interested in purifying Islam, going from village to village.” Akbar called the Tablighi movement and other fundamentalists “Wahabis of a type. They emerge from despair, the collapse of Muslim empire.”¹

The Delhi headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat was in a large, white, domed building in Nizamuddin, a relatively prosperous and central neighborhood. Alleys nearby were stuffed with bookshops, butchers’ counters, food stalls, as well as traders who sold skull caps, rose petals, blankets, and sandals. Inside the building was gloomy with all the charm of an underground carpark. Heaps of sandals and cheap shoes lay at the entrance. At the end of a long, bustling hall, a tiny office was lit by a single fluorescent light. The place looked worn. Books were tied up in bags of cloth, papers piled in tin trunks. A man sat cross-legged behind a low wooden desk with hinges made of thin brass. We sat on a threadbare carpet and drank sweet, milky chai from tiny square cups.

A member of the movement, a pharmacist from Bradford in northern England, pointed out rows of other young men who had gathered to eat and pray. Many were foreign visitors, and he identified “Sri Lankans, Bengalis, Canadians, everyone.” Devout, he spoke of the duty of dawah, inviting others to practice Islam in a pure way. He said his group organized large gatherings for new adherents every year (notably in Bangladesh), promoted a strict dress code and the virtues of fasting, and made daily “five-times prayer compulsory, like stopping at a red light.” Extra keen, he opted for a sixth session of prayer in the middle of the night. Asked what he thought of Sufi Muslims who prayed at a shrine next door, he dismissed them as “totally unIslamic” because they listened to music and, he said, prostrated themselves on the grave of a saint. It was also wrong to reach out to Shia Muslims, he added. He complained that in India and elsewhere “Islam had got tainted with idolatry” and said Muslims must dress in ways that assert their religion, and make clear their differences from non-Muslims. Women were segregated away from men. The place was dour and joyless. Even if the devout were not necessarily extremist, the message I heard seemed to confirm fears expressed by Arshad, Akbar, and others that such groups were encouraging division, not integration.

Swapping the gloom of the Tablighis’ hall for a Sufi shrine next door, a place of light, color, and noisy alleys, I felt as if I was leaving a drab corner of the Gulf and falling back into lively, intense but welcoming India again. Men chatted at the tomb of the Sufi saint. They were mostly clean-shaven, and took turns scattering rose petals from tin plates. Some laid silk cloths over the supposed body of the saint. Several soldiers with a banner posed for a photo in front of the tomb. People wore bright clothes, and incense burned in the courtyard. There were women, too, and a few oil lamps lit for blessings.

It was hard to believe that the austere Tablighi Jamaat could ever appeal to a large number of Indian Muslims, but their sway was growing somewhat. The Tablighis had only had a foothold in India for a century or so, but they drew on a school of thought established at a campus in the late nineteenth century a few hours’ drive north of Delhi. The Darul Uloom Deoband was the site of the most important madrassa in South Asia, set in a small town, busy with marigold sellers and car-repair businesses, and where buffaloes were herded through the streets. A grey mist hung over shops selling cellphones and an “Indo-America school of English language.” Founded in 1866, the Deoband madrassa was the source of the broad “Deobandi” strand of Islam that was followed, for example, by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its sprawling campus had a passing similarity to an Oxford college, with dormitories and libraries arranged around quadrangles and courtyards. It was home to 4,500 students. A spokesman said another 4,000 Deobandi madrassas, loosely affiliated with this one, existed across India—though he denied any connection with Deobandis abroad, let alone the Taliban.

The madrassa was set up in reaction to British colonial rule—and the uprising against the British a decade earlier—in the belief that Muslims would make progress only after educating themselves. The Deobandis also responded against Sufis, wanting to create a clearer gap between Muslims and non-Muslims. The spokesman said the Deobandis promoted “purification,” living by the word of the Koran. The head of the madrassa, Abdul Qasim Nomani Mohtamim, with a white beard and white skullcap, suggested that Indian Muslims, as elsewhere, “are getting more religious,” for which he praised groups such as the Tablighi Jamaat and madrassas. “The number of mosques is rising. Those who follow the tenets, who get beard, ensure their appearance, we see more people like that,” he said. He agreed, “to an extent,” that those who labor in the Gulf bring back more fundamentalist values. He denied that the Deoband accepted Saudi donations, though he suggested other Islamic groups might. “The Deoband movement is effective and strong,” he said. “The Tablighi Jamaat has offices all over the world. In thought they are Deobandi. You can see the influence. People accept this form of thought.”

Others saw evidence of religious hardening. The government of Kerala had long claimed that Muslim extremism was rising, especially after young fanatics in 2010 amputated the hand of a college professor, saying he had insulted the Prophet. A politician in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, whose party drew mostly Muslim votes, once said that “in the last twenty years we have seen a revival of the Muslim faith, or how to use it for political benefit.” In Kashmir, a special case, surveys suggested that youngsters were becoming more religiously observant. A predominantly Sufi Muslim area, in the past decade or two it saw the rise of Wahabi-style practice. Some older Muslim friends in Delhi and elsewhere spoke of their sons, who were keener than they ever had been to keep a fast for Ramadan, memorize the Koran, or attend mosque.

But did these changes amount to general radicalization within one of the largest Muslim populations in the world? The most striking detail about Islam in India remained the moderation that looked widespread and well established, rather like in Indonesia, and in striking contrast to Pakistan or Bangladesh. Nor was there much evidence of Islam becoming an effective rallying issue for political ends. Indian law forbids explicit appeals to religion at elections. Congress had long cornered the Muslim vote, making it difficult for rival parties to emerge and define themselves as Muslim. Perhaps that could change, given Congress’s steady decline. It is possible that Muslim voters will grow more conscious of their religion, and less trusting of Congress, in the face of Hindu nationalism under Modi. But efforts to develop strong Muslim parties saw only limited success.

A party called the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, popular in Hyderabad, made occasional forays to other states to try and muster support from Muslim voters. Another outfit claimed to be truly a pan-Indian Muslim movement, called the Popular Front of India. Its leader, P. Koya, in a scruffy corner of south Delhi, was hardly a firebrand. He was more left wing than religious, and more bothered about confronting “neo-liberal” capitalism than spiritual affairs. His group, founded in 2006, was accused of extremism by the Kerala government, which said it promoted conversions to Islam and associated with the banned Indian Mujahideen. He denied it.

Videos online did show a disturbing side of the Popular Front, its supporters marching in big, military-style parades—the Muslim equivalent of the paramilitary, Hindu nationalist RSS. “We want a pan-India Muslim organization,” P. Koya said, and “some kind of religiosity is slowly getting strengthened.” But he did not welcome foreign influences. He, too, lamented the influence of the Gulf, and “the Salafi mosques [that] have slowly made in-roads into the community.” He believed that the “influence of Gulf countries is very damaging for the Muslims,” and said Saudis supported Salafis in India, who served as a propaganda front. He worried about divisions, saying three rival Wahabi sects competed for followers in Kerala, drawing money, respectively, from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Gulf. He estimated that Kerala alone had twenty thousand madrassas, perhaps a quarter of them Salafi or Wahabi. In Delhi, he counted five rival Salafi groups active, which he said reflected divisions among the clergy back in Saudi Arabia.

Signs of religious hardening were still modest. Yet the perennial risk was that politicians would whip up ill-feeling for the sake of electoral gain. In September 2013, in villages scattered around a town called Muzaffarnagar, clashes between Hindu (notably of the Jat group) and Muslim neighbors turned deadly. As I drove along narrow roads between sugarcane fields, a few days after the worst bloodletting, the consequences were clear. At one madrassa around one thousand men, women, and children had taken shelter, some of the more than forty thousand Muslims who had been chased from their homes. Rakisha Begum, in her thirties and dressed in yellow, said she escaped her village, Kutba, where “our house was set on fire and eight people were killed.” “Girls were molested, dragged about. People were cut in pieces, they used axes. We were so scared, they came inside the houses and killed. It was very sudden.” By tradition, Hindu Jat landowners dominated the village whereas Muslims tended to work the fields as laborers. But in recent years more Muslims had been getting better-off and buying land, too. She blamed a village leader, a Hindu, for ordering the attackers “to kill Muslims.” “The killers were Jats and they were from the village, they had swords and axes. We know who did it. But there was no tension before this, we lived happily as Hindus and Muslims,” she said. Her former neighbors, she said, cut one of her children’s ears with a knife.

A young man, Mohammad Usman, with a bandaged head, said he was shot as he drank tea at home. “We threw bricks at the attackers, they started firing,” he said, adding that his uncle was killed: “He was trying to escape and they cut his head with a sword and shot him.” Usman said relations between Jats and Muslims “were previously very good,” and Muslims had even voted for a Jat to become the village headman. A clothes seller, Mohammad Akbar, said the village mosque and madrassa were attacked, and members of his extended family were killed. The village of some four thousand people had around seven hundred Muslims—roughly the same proportion as in India as a whole. He repeated that “there was no tension before between Hindus and Muslims.”

The killings were part of wider clashes between Jats and Muslims that month, sparked by a fight and then the murders of young men, over a woman. It was disturbing to hear how quickly an apparently calm and stable community turned to murder. Underlying tensions no doubt existed: the Jat landowners worried that Muslim farmworkers were getting too wealthy and influential, as many had bought or built decent houses and were becoming landowners. More significant, however, was the fact that a big election was looming.

The village itself was reached along a pot-holed road that passed through the sugarcane fields where some of the killings had occurred. Peacocks and white egrets appeared from otherwise abandoned fields. The village was spookily quiet: most doors were bolted and windows shuttered. A few dogs slept in the road, and in a doorway a man lay on a charpoy. Larger homes had murals, some had painted peacocks. At one house a couple of men were willing to chat and a crowd eventually gathered. The men first denied any violence, then said all the Muslim residents had fled after burning their own houses as a ruse to get compensation. Harbir Singh, who owned a large house with cows in his courtyard, said “nothing has happened” and claimed that his various Muslim employees had all been treated well, that “relations were nice. We gave them gifts at Diwali and they gave us sweets at Eid.” Yet the men also explained that they had locked down the village, fearing that Muslim men might attack through the fields.

The charred ruins of a small house with yellow walls had a blackened satellite dish on the roof, a toilet in a tiny outside shed. A neighbor in his twenties sniggered as he surveyed the damage, saying every Muslim home had been full with “fifteen or sixteen members” and “they burnt their own home for compensation.” He added that Muslims “are so lazy, they sell their land, their debts are so high, they cannot pay interest on it, so they seek compensation.” He pointed out the nearby mosque. It had burn marks, evidence of petrol bombs, though the damage was slight. “Attackers from outside tried to burn this,” he said, implausibly. “They came from the fields, they wanted to create tension here. The Hindus wanted to live peacefully.”

At least sixty-two people died around Muzaffarnagar late in 2013. Years later, tens of thousands of people remained displaced. Many believed that politicians had deliberately whipped up the violence, in time for campaigning for the general election that began a few months later. These events helped to unite the majority Jats into a strong voting bloc. Politicians—notably Amit Shah, Modi’s close ally—crudely exploited the situation. Though it was mostly Muslims who were displaced or killed, Jats also felt that they had been victims. In the campaign Shah urged Jats to take “revenge” at the ballot box.

For some analysts this was proof of a readiness by the BJP, under Modi, to use a “plan B”—religious division to form blocks of Hindu voters, especially in semi-rural areas of big northern and central states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Haryana. That would constitute a huge risk. Nobody could be sure that a spark of violence in one area, such as happened in Muzaffarnagar, would not spread and cause a wider fire of religious confrontation. The moderate middle serves India well—not hard-line movements on the Muslim side, such as the Tablighi Jamaat, nor intolerant and hard-line movements, the Hindutva believers, among Hindu nationalists. The highest-ranking politicians, notably Modi, had to discourage such fires and not fan intolerance.

Like India’s Hindu and other populations, its large Muslim population was still most distinguished by moderation, despite these creeping anxieties. In general, India had much to offer the world in terms of how it avoided tension, or conflict, but it still had to deal more effectively with confrontation, as had happened in Gujarat or Muzaffarnagar, and with the long-running sore in Kashmir. India has done well to keep various religions mingling, and it should remain an inspiration to other countries struggling to cope with migration and to find tolerance of different practices and belief—assuming that it can sustain moderation beyond the first seventy years of independence, and assuming that tensions in neighboring countries do not spill over the borders. But remaining an inspiration also requires leaders who are set on preserving the idea of India as a tolerant, secular, and liberal place—not ones who are merely ready to exploit division to win elections.