India’s Citizenship Amendment Act passed in 2019 was put on hold to be implemented before the elections of 2024 with a purpose. It provides naturalization for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who fled to India from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh before December 31, 2014, but have lived and worked in India for six years.
The law is exclusionary because the Muslims have been deprived of this facility. Based on faith, this law hurts the secular spirit of the Constitution, hence unconstitutional. In the background of this law, we may briefly look at the history of the Muslims’ presence in the Indian subcontinent.
Human migration is a natural phenomenon happening since antiquity. It was done basically in search of food. Later, when the humans became more intelligent, they did not only search more sophisticated resources but also permanent homes. Therefore, later migrations took the shape of invasions. For India, it is said that a wave of migration from East Africa or Southern Europe happened about 30,000 years age.
However, the most notable was the Aryan migration or invasion which took place around 2000 BC. when the semi-nomadic people from Eurasian steppe spread over a greater part of Europe in the west and over Turkey, Iran, and India in the east.
Later, the invasions took the shape of Empire-building. The desire for this came out of the human instinct in a leader/king/nation compelling them to extend their sphere of influence by occupying other’s land.
Thus, over time, we find many dozens of empires in the world like that of Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, etc. The Akkadian and Sumer Empires of the present Middle East are said to be the oldest that existed around 24000 BC.
The Indians have not only themselves faced the greatest empire of the world, the British Empire, but also had built their own empires like the Mauryas (320 BC), the Guptas (320 AD), and the Mughals (1526 AD). These stories date back to the period when the modern international law was not written.
In those days such migrations, invasions, and empires were deemed legitimate. In this regard, India has been such a magnetic land that it has invited invasions from the Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, Kushans, Huns, Arabs, Turks, Afghans Portuguese, Dutch, French and British.
It was only the Europeans who conquered the land without the intention of settling down here. And of those who settled in India, all except the Muslims were absorbed in the Vedic religion.
The Muslim invasion and empire building in India had begun with the first Arab invasion of Sindh in 712 A.D. The historian Arnold Toynbee writes about this invasion in "Mankind and Mother Earth", Chapter 50:
“The Arab conquests were also facilitated by the directive in the Koran that ‘People of the Book’ were to be tolerated and protected if they submitted to the Islamic Government and agreed to pay a surtax. The benefit of this directive was extended from Jews and Christians to Zoroastrians, and eventually to Hindus as well”.
Subsequent Muslim settlements in India were made through the invasions of Shahabuddin Ghauri and Zaheeruddin Baber. Only a few Muslims came from other areas in search of economic opportunities because travelling to far off lands was not easy in those days, and could be made only on horses and carts.
The Muslims who first came to Sindh started interacting soon with the local people in every walk of life. IH Qureshi writes in "The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent":
“In 886 the Quran was translated in Sindi on the request of a Hindu chief. Arab historians who visited the region in the tenth century noted that the urban population spoke both Arabic and Sanskrit. The cultural interchange was most productive. The Kufa leather workers trained the Makran and Sind tanners in the art of tanning leather with dates.
"This improved the finish of indigenous leather products and made them softer. Sind shoes now fetched a high price and were regarded as a luxury item in the caliph’s territories.
"Sind breeds of camel were also upgraded, and the demand for them rose in neighbouring countries. On the other hand, Sanskrit works on astronomy, medicine, ethics, and administration were introduced by Sindi intellectuals to the translation bureau at the Abbasid court".
It was only the Europeans who conquered the land without the intention of settling down here
As regards the Sultanate period, Romila Thapar writes in "A History of India", Volme one, Chapter 13:
“The concept that there was a separate community or ‘nationality’ of Hindus and Muslims did not exist during this period... The fusion of cultures in any case cannot be judged by the writings of a prejudiced minority (Muslim courtiers) determined to hold aloof: it can only be judged by the cultural pattern of the society as a whole.
"From the pattern of society in the Sultanate period it is evident that a synthesis of the two cultures took place, although this synthesis did not occur at every level and with the same intensity. Furthermore, the pattern which emerged was to mature in the period subsequent to that of the Sultanate”.
Later, the Mughals, on their part, became a universal symbol of power and endowed grandeur to India by their rule so that the word Moghul earned its place in the lexicon as “magnate”.
They remained a stable unifying force for two centuries so strongly that in the War of Independence of 1857 against the British the Indians of all faiths assembled under the banner of the Moghul king Bahadur Shah Zafar.
The Sultanate and Mughal periods were a melting pot when the rajas of all faiths did not only employ army commanders belonging to the other’s faith but also made political and military alliances on the same basis against the rivals of their own faith.
In the span of 1200 years, the Muslims living in Indian Subcontinent, the majority of whom are local converts, are Indians in every aspect of life. It was the British who exploited the faith factor and turned the Indians into Hindus and Muslims. Sadly, some of us still carry that legacy and thrive in schism.
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*Retired civil servant, has worked in United Nations, British Commonwealth and SAARC. Books: "The India of Ancient Times", "The Culture of Tolerance, A study of Indian History", "India as seen by Early Muslim Chronicles", "Religion, God, and Islam", "Hindustan, Ibtedai Muslim Mourekheen ki Nazaron Mein" (Urdu). Currently based in New York
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