Muslims in India 'Targeted With Suspicion'

A senior government official in New Delhi, who spoke on condition he not be named, said it would be a grave error to tar India's 140 million Muslims with the terrorist brush. He said that despite occasional flare-ups of religious violence, radical groups seeking to exploit religious tensions have failed because India's secular democracy has been able to address Muslims' grievances and absorb them into Hindu-dominated society.

"To say that Indian Muslims are becoming terrorists, nothing could be a more dangerous assumption," the official said. He noted that to date, no Indian Muslims had been found to be involved in al-Qaeda. "There is a fundamental ethos shared by the majority of Muslims and Hindus," he said. "At the end of the day, the vast majority of both groups see through the game."

For years, however, activists have pointed out that Muslims, who make up about 15 percent of the populace, comprise only a tiny percentage of police, army officers, public servants and public university students. They have long blamed systematic exclusion by the Hindu-dominated government and society, and some have pressed for job and education quotas similar to those reserved for other Indian minorities.

Until recently, Indian officials tended to play down the problem, while some militant Hindu groups such as Bombay's Shiv Sena have denounced Muslims as self-defeating, religiously insular and untrustworthy because of their roots in Pakistan, the Muslim-ruled neighbor and rival nuclear power that broke off from India in 1947.

Now, there are signs that the establishment is belatedly recognizing the problem of Muslims being left behind. Outlook, a major newsweekly, ran a cover story last week on a 15 percent literacy gap between Muslims and non-Muslims. It described the high number of Muslim youths who quit school and become jobless as a newly "frightening" and "ominous" phenomenon.

There is also a growing realization that globalization, which has thrust India into a proud new era of information technology and international business development, has beamed a different message into its long-scattered and isolated Muslim communities. Instant access to information has raised their awareness of conflicts from Iraq to Lebanon and increased their identification with aggrieved Muslims elsewhere.

"It feels like the whole world is against Muslims," said one young man, checking his BlackBerry as he headed for Friday prayers at a mosque in Mahin, a lower-class Muslim district in Bombay where several hundred youths were rounded up and questioned after the train bombings.

Most people interviewed said they believed the bombings were the work of sophisticated international terrorists, not the result of homegrown, pent-up Muslim frustrations. But as Indian media reports this week described webs of connections between banned Indian Muslim groups, Pakistani radicals and pan-Arab militant groups, the line suddenly seemed to blur.

A variety of Hindus said they had good personal relations with neighbors or colleagues who are Muslim, and some said they felt confident India's secular fabric would survive the current specter of Islamic terrorism. But others confessed it was hard not to succumb to negative stereotypes and ill wishes toward the Muslim minority in the wake of so much mayhem and bloodshed.

"There is fear now in the Bombay psyche," said Ashok Seth, 45, a pharmacist who works near Nayanagar. "I am a Hindu and I sit and eat together with the Muslims in the next shop. They are not terrorists, they are my friends. But I'll be honest, there is a growing feeling that there is a fight in the world between the West and Muslims. And even here, some people say it's good if Muslims are being killed; the fewer left the better."

In the alleys of Mahin on Friday, clean-cut young men in jeans mingled with bearded religious students in skullcaps as hundreds of Muslims headed for the mosque. In 1993, Mahin was at the epicenter of religious rioting that convulsed Bombay and led to a series of bombings after Hindu radicals demolished a historic mosque.

But on July 11, as in wealthier Nayanagar, residents of this shabby district rushed to help victims of a bombed train that exploded near Mahin station. Everyone interviewed in the community said they condemned the train bombings, and several said they feared such acts made it even more difficult for Indian Muslims to achieve acceptance and success.

"Some brand this as a terror spot, but they should have seen how people came out with bedsheets to carry the wounded and the dead," said Deepak Talwar, 46, a lawyer in Mahin. "Of course Muslims' sentiments are hurt when they see gory images of Lebanon, but no one here wants to be a party to all that. Islam preaches harmony, and that is the only way for us all to survive."