This book is regarded as a personal manifesto, a statement through the history of partition and its aftermath, of the values which India's Muslims should cherish and of the national priorities they should promote. It provides the reference-point for understanding India's Partition and its legacy.

This book is regarded as a personal manifesto, a statement through the history of partition and its aftermath, of the values which India's Muslims should cherish and of the national priorities they should promote. It provides the reference-point for understanding India's Partition and its legacy.

The success of Indian secularism lies in the ways in which its minorities have lived and negotiated their existence with the State and the broader society at large. Yet it remains painfully true that over the past decade, the story of Indian Muslims has been circumscribed by the broader Hindutva agenda. An assessment of the future of Indian Muslims must necessarily be read within the context of the rise militant Hindu nationalist politics and its impact on the secular fabric of the country. Hindu-Muslim unity, the defining moment of Indian secularism has come under renewed threat. The present volume tries to map the tensions and predicaments of Indian Muslims arising as a result of that threat. The papers included here study the ways in which Hindu Right forces such as the RSS and the Bajrang Dal view the Muslims and in a certain sense construct them. Does the rise of Hindutva necessarily force the Muslims towards alienation or is there a section, which looks at the BJP differently? How does the stress on Indian pluralism translate in terms of Muslims' relationship with the State? What has been the response of the State to such demands? The volume also brings into focus ways in which Muslims themselves make their life meaningful; whether through investing in education or even a change in terms of practising their own religion or the way they have historically related to other political formations. It is at the three interrelated levels of the state, politics and society that the present volume charts out the issues of Muslims and the multifarious ways in which they live and give meaning to Indian secularism.

This book unfolds the recent history of over one hundred million Muslims living in India, details their fears and anxieties, delineates their main currents of thought and examines their responses to the socio-economic processes affecting the country as a whole. Legacy of a Divided Nation begins by describing the specific features of Indian Islam, the reconstruction of a specifically Muslim identity by the British and its legitimisation by the Indian nationalist movement, all of which are crucial in understanding the roots of India's Partition. Issues relating to the identity, integration and 'minority appeasement' of Indian Muslims are analysed within the wider context of Hindu-Muslim relations in the colonial period and in the secular trajectory plotted by lndia since l947. The effect of economic, legal and social change on the Muslim population also features strongly in the work, as do its patterns of political and religious allegiance and responses to the wave of anti-Muslim sentiment unleashed by India's Hindu nationalists, notably the BJP.