India’s Muslim minority: religious violence and why India’s crime statistics cannot be trusted

The first part of this chapter asks who is a Hindu. Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) is based on perceived threats to Hindu demographic, cultural and political dominance, so the contours of these fears need to be understood as a starting point for any discussion of religious violence in India. In the second part of this chapter, I examine the nature of that violence and explain why the official crime statistics of India cannot be relied on as a way of understanding the experiences of India’s Muslim minority. In rewriting this part of the chapter, I have added greater details. Since publishing my chapter in the first edition of the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India (2016), violence against Muslims appears to have worsened, facilitated by state-driven codification of discrimination against this minority. These changes are the focus of the third part of this chapter called ‘New Trends since 2015'. Finally, I compare all the above information with three of the most important official reports about the situation of Indian Muslims in the section titled ‘Whom to believe’. The reports span the period 2006-2019 and provide insights into the underrepresentation of Indian Muslims in India’s political, administrative and security institutions and how this prevents them from influencing the design and implementation of policies. The lack of representation in the state and private sectors of the Indian economy ensures that the hatreds of Hindu nationalism continue to grow unfettered and to the detriment of Indian Muslims and other minorities too. The consequences of this for Indian development and democracy are serious for Muslims which are India’s largest minority-more than six times more numerous than the Christians-and since 1980, they have been recognised as having the highest proportion of ‘backwards’ amongst them.