There was no golden age for Muslims in Nehru’s India

Under the much-vaunted new secularism, Muslims were treated as second-class citizens at best - and were often the victims of mass pogroms

From magazine issue: 01 April 2023

Muslim families flee for refuge in the fort of Purana Qila on the outskirts of New Delhi in September 1947, after rumours of an imminent attack on the Jama Masjid mosque. [Getty Images]

issue 01 April 2023

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Zareer Masani

There was no golden age for Muslims in Nehru’s India
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It’s a little-remembered fact that the Indian subcontinent once had the world’s largest Muslim population. Numbering 95 million, they were almost a quarter of India’s total population. Partition in 1947 still left them as the world’s largest Muslim minority, at 15 per cent of Hindu-majority India. More than 70 years later, no single study has successfully explained the consequences of that transition.