No inconsistency occurs when Indian Muslims, like other Indian or democratic people anywhere else, demand respect for democratic and human rights for any community anywhere, be it Muslim or not. And it would occur even less if Indian Muslims also, like all others, raised their voice (which unfortunately they do not do as much as they should) against terrorism and senseless killings of any kind and not only elsewhere but in Kashmir also. But they are invited to incur an inconsistency when they are invited by Islamic countries in the name of Islam to support Kashmir's accession to Pakistan on the ground only that like Pakistanis Kashmiris are also Muslims.
As they sift the material of their history, the Indian Muslims encounter many rocks and stones of which some are mere impediments and some useful for the social structure they need to build for themselves. Apart from their present numbers and their former status as rulers, seven of their specific experiences are of greater relevance than the rest. These are: the attempts made in some periods of Muslim rule to evolve a composite Hindu-Muslim culture; the overthrow of Muslim rule by British invaders; the interaction between Indian nationalism and Pan-Islamism; the Khalifat movement and what the Turks themselves did to the Caliphate and what that did to Pan-Islamism; the partition of India and its aftermath; and the adversarial relationship between India and Pakistan.
The composite culture, especially as it came to be in the times of Akbar the Great, is among the richest of Indian experiences. But it had some serious limitations as the building material for a joint national home of Hindus and Muslims.
First, it remained at the level of the courtiers and their works and like much else that shaped the court in those days it did not influence the Hindu and Muslim mass mind very much. Second, at the elite level, as M.R.A. Baig points out in his. The Muslim dilemma in India (Vikas), "culturally a lot of Muslims, Mahrattas, Rajputs, Jats etc." (remained) imitation Arabs and Persians". Third, even at the level of the court, the composite culture included very little out of the pre-Muslim period of Indian history, and so excluded what to the Hindus is the golden period of their history.
Thus the Indian Muslim political elite neither had an anchorage in the non-Muslim ocean which surrounded them nor in the history of the land they inhabited. Their main anchor was in their position as rulers. Therefore, they were particularly defenceless against the psychological trauma upon losing empire and power. They also did not acquire the alternative anchor of nationalist resistance to a foreign invader. In fact, further estrangement between them and their Hindu neighbours occurred because of the difference between the attitudes of the two towards the intruding British.
The Muslim did not oppose the intruder because the latter had displaced him but because he was a non-Muslim and in general further accentuated the Islamic rather than the Indian identity of Indian Muslims.
A cascade of consequences followed. Muslim presence declined and Hindu presence increased in the institutions of the new higher western education; therefore also in the new jobs in the new professions which were opening up but required the new education; the estrangement between the two communities was aggravated by new jealousies; the modernist reformers among the Muslims, such as Sir Syed Ahmed, responded by encouraging higher education among the Muslim elites further moved away from the nationalist movement, which became more and more Hindu, under a leadership drawn more and more from Hindus in the new learned professions and from the newly expanding urban middle classes.
When mass-based politics came the differences only increased. The nationalist goal now came to be a fully independent and democratic India. This was construed by many Muslims as rule by a permanent Hindu majority and the removal of a countervailing British presence. This became the seed from which the partition was to spring.
More concretely it was reinforced by the first mass event of the freedom movement, opposition to the partition of Bengal into what would have become a Hindu majority West Bengal and a Muslim majority East Bengal. The Hindus saw it as a nationalist event, to prevent the partition of the nationalist movement in Bengal on religious lines. The Muslims saw it as an attempt by Calcutta based Hindu landlords to hold on to their zamindaries in East Bengal.
But the roots of this Muslim view of nationalism go much deeper, into the Islamic world view held by Indian Muslims.
This world view was expressed very pithily by Mohammed Ali of the Khilafat fame who said in 1931. "We are not nationalists but super nationalists, and I as a Muslim say that god made man and the Devil made the nation." In practise of course there is a contradiction here and has always been, because it means that Muslims of the Muslim majority countries can be nationalists without ceasing to be Islamic, because their nation is Islamic, but this reconciliation between Islam and nationalism is not available to the Muslims in countries in which they are in minority because in these countries the majority, and therefore, the state, may have a different faith, and faithfulness to such a state might be good nationalism but bad Islamism.
This compounds the problem of the Indian Muslim because, as weighed down by the fact that while once they were the rulers they now looked like becoming a permanent minority, Indian Muslims tried to find solace in the political philosophy of the Islamic world view. As elaborated by the poet Iqbal, it preaches that national frontiers are irrelevant to the Muslim nation, which is worldwide and has only one centre, the Holy Mecca; and since country-based nationalism "as a political concept relegates Islam to the background as a 'private opinion' (Baig) it is nationalism that the Muslim should relegate to the background.
This comforted some sections of Indian Muslims in three ways during the freedom movement. It told them, first, that even though they were a minority in India they were, nevertheless, part of a far flung and once very powerful nation, the Ummah; second, it offered a rationalisation to those Muslims who were out of sympathy with or even opposed to the Indian nationalist movement; and third it gave the cushion of a belief to the Muslims of the Hindu majority provinces who knew that most of them would have to remain in India and yet, in an act which would be illogical without this belief, were more ardent in supporting Pakistan than say the Muslims of Punjab or the Frontier Province.
But these props did not obscure the uncomfortable fact, uncomfortable alike for nationalist Hindu and Muslims, that as the freedom movement grew in force and size, so also grew the gulf between the Hindus and Muslims on each of the three main issues of the independence movement: freedom, unity and democracy. So also grew the wedge which the pan-Islamic view of nationalism was driving between large sections of the Hindus and Muslims.
The Khilafat movement did draw more Muslims into a political movement than anything else had before. But the nature of the movement itself was such that it only made the Muslims only more romantically inclined towards pan-Islamism as an internationally fraternal Muslim force. And it made more Hindus more aware that more Muslims were so inclined.