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Friday, February 27, 2026

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India: the weight of history

Very few of today’s Muslims in India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh, for that matter) are descended from Central Asian conquerors. Most are descended from native-born Hindus who were forcibly converted to Islam, or changed their religion later to escape the Hindu caste system or the higher taxes paid by non-Muslims, or even sometimes for genuinely religious reasons. In a truly secular India, it wouldn’t matter, which is why the country’s founders insisted that it should be secular. But that’s not what Narendi Modi wants, and Modi is winning.

India can never expel 170 million Muslims. There’s nowhere else for them to go. The goal of Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP—Indian People’s Party) is to redefine them as an underclass without rights, and at the same time to preserve them as a permanent ‘threat’ that keeps Hindus united behind the BJP, writes Gwynne Dyer. Photograph courtesy of Commons Wikimedia
Opinion
BY GWYNNE DYER
August 13, 2020
Opinion | BY GWYNNE DYER | August 13, 2020

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