Graham E. Fuller and Ian O. Lesser of U.S.-based think-tank RAND Corporation, writing in Geopolitics of Islam and the West (1996), explain the Pak-Indo relationship quite objectively. The history of the rival nation’s ties, based on “cultural fault-lines” of the region, span a broad part of the world. The arc of the Muslim world reaches from the Straits of Gibraltar east along the length of the Mediterranean, up through the Balkans, the Black Sea, across the Caucasus and southern Russia, down through Western China, across India (as a minority population), along the Burmese border with Bangladesh, through southern Thailand, Malaysia, and down into Indonesia and parts of the Philippines. Islam also has its southern borders in Africa, where Islamic Africa extends down into the Sahel, West Africa, as well as deep South along the East African coast. Most of the civilizations that border Islam are Christian, but not all—especially in East Asia, where Islam borders Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and in Africa, where it adjoins animist faiths viewed by Islamists as prime recruitment areas.
Those who express visceral cultural anxieties about Islam, such as Samuel Huntington, speak of Islam’s “bloody borders.” Indeed, strategic and cultural conflict has taken place on these borders over many centuries. They are hardly unique as places of confrontation, however; world history is replete with bloody borders across East Asia, Western Europe, the pre-Islamic Near East, Latin America, and Africa. If it comes to ethnic stereotyping, white Europeans are the most culpable in terms of blood spilled in conflict, certainly in the 20th century. Apart from the emotive value of talking of “bloody borders,” such a description tells us very little about the nature of such conflicts in the coming century. Conflict can emerge at virtually any sort of cultural border.
Islam in the Indian Subcontinent
Islam in the Indian subcontinent no longer adjoins the West or the Christian world; it interacts with the Hindu world. Nonetheless, for Islam it is a cultural border of considerable tension, with direct impact on Islam’s broader global outlook. Some Hindu political parties within India implicitly and explicitly talk of cooperation with the West against the “Islamic threat.”
The history of the Indian subcontinent also reveals features of role reversal in power relationships between Muslims and Hindus. India was ruled by the Muslim Mughal dynasty from the beginning of the 17th century until the British took over India in the early 19th century. The Mughals were originally Turkic in origin and came directly out of Central Asia via Afghanistan to conquer and rule India from Delhi, creating a dynasty that was one of the highpoints of Indian cultural development. A minority Muslim population thus ruled over a Hindu majority for centuries only to have the roles reversed as British rule gradually accorded greater power to Hindu institutions, culminating in the eventual dominance of the Hindus after independence in 1947. Some autonomous Muslim princely states, such as Hyderabad, existed intact within India until independence.
Indian Muslims after Pakistan
Muslims thus had a profound sense of loss of place and power. Their proportional demographic weight in India was then vastly reduced with the creation of a breakaway Muslim state, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh), and the emigration of a large number of Indian Muslims to Pakistan and Bangladesh. Today Muslims represent no more than 12 percent the Indian population—a massive drop in their relative proportion of the population before the Partition of India. Communal tensions remain high.
India’s Congress Party has sought to give the Muslims special cultural concessions in return for their long-term loyalty to the party, while Hindu-nationalist parties have grown angry at those concessions and seek to Hinduize the entire country. Over 40 years of hostility between Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu India have further strained relations, sometime even calling into question the loyalty of India’s Muslims in Pak-Indo conflicts. Differences are mainly religious, for Indian Muslims otherwise share intimately with Hindus common culture, food, music, and even language to a considerable extent. No clear-cut ethnic differences remain apart from religion.
Religious conflict in India
Power relationships between the two communities are also at the center of the conflict. Over 100 million Indian Muslims (the second largest Muslim community in the world) are destined to live as a permanent minority in India because their scattered population is unlikely to ever break away or declare an autonomous region inside the country. Because of Islam’s stress on the religious importance of maintaining a consolidated community under the rule of Muslims, this kind of minority status for Indian Muslims in an overwhelmingly Hindu state is particularly painful. The growth of powerful Hindu nationalist and even chauvinist parties in India raises the prospect for greater internal conflict and bloodshed, with no solution, however radical, in sight other than gradually acquired common sense and coexistence on both sides. India is one of the few states in the world where such a large Muslim population has no other options except emigration.
Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir
The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, with its predominant Muslim majority, is the only significant area where the potential of separatism is realistic and high. The Muslim rebellion (or intifada) in Kashmir is growing, based on Kashmiri grievances and fueled by Pakistani support and ruthless unenlightened security measures by the Indian state against the Muslim population as a whole. Consistent refusal of the state to hold a plebiscite in the area has been at the heart of the Pak-Indo quarrel for decades. In a plebiscite, Muslim-majority Kashmir would almost surely vote for outright independence from India, but not necessarily for subsequent unification with Pakistan. The issue is highly volatile and has been a key cause of past Pak-Indo wars. Most Indians see retention of Kashmir, even by coercion, as a non-negotiable matter of principle and essential to the preservation of the multiethnic Indian state as a whole. Thus Muslim separatism is also a factor in India, although only in Kashmir.
India established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992 and has publicly spoken of cooperation with Israel against Islamic fundamentalism. India is equally concerned about the emergence of five new independent Muslim countries in nearby Central Asia that strengthens the “Islamic strategic depth” of Pakistan, replacing the Soviet-dominated, officially pro-India, non-religious Central Asia of the past. Although the Central Asian states seek good relations with India, Delhi is nonetheless worried about the potential growth of fundamentalism there and the growing role of other Islamic countries in Central Asian politics and economics.
Islam and India
In short, the Indian subcontinent possesses significant flashpoints for Islam in the future that cannot be completely divorced from Islam’s problems with the West. The chief difference is that Hinduism, rather than Christianity, is Islam’s main challenger and, in Muslim eyes, oppressor. The problems are territorial (Kashmir), religious (preservation of the Islamic community and its religious privileges in India), political-psychological (the legacy of former Muslim dominance and the subsequent Hindu dominance over Muslins) and military (India versus Pakistan).