As the communally-charged 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign enters its final stretch, it’s time to re-examine one of India’s most misunderstood concepts: secularism. The word has been subverted by political parties to create in Muslims a sense of permanent fear of “communal forces”.

The objective is not to empower Muslims, educate Muslims or modernize Muslims. The objective is to keep them in segregated silos: poor, under-educated and at the mercy of medieval mullahs. Their vote though is thereby guaranteed.

In Varanasi, AAP’s “secular” Arvind Kejriwal tells Muslims not to vote for “communal” Narendra Modi becaue they will not be safe under him. He does not tell Varanasi’s Muslims how they can better their lives through education, vocational training and social reform.

Like the Congress, SP, NCP, NC and the Congress’ rabidly communal allies AIMIM and IUML, Kejriwal does not address Muslim welfare. He addresses Muslim votes. Meanwhile, emboldened by a fraudulent secular discourse, Congress candidate Imran Masood, handpicked by Rahul Gandhi, threatens to cut Narendra Modi into pieces and is rightly placed in judicial custody.

Parties that call themselves “secular” – but in the classical sense of the word are not – such as the Congress, SP, NCP, NC, JD(U), AAP and others, end up dividing communities. They accuse “communal forces” of hate-mongering and divisiveness but are guilty of both to a far greater degree. They hide them under a veil of secularism.

Muslims must now rise above this perfidy and reject parties which regard them as Muslims first, Indians second. Both are parallel identities. One is not subservient to the other. By falling prey to the fear psychosis “secular” parties create in them, Muslims barter away their real freedom: the right to inclusive growth.

There is, however, as I have written before, a history to communalism in the subcontinent. Rahul Gandhi, Nitish Kumar, Sharad Pawar, Omar Abdullah, Arvind Kejriwal and Mulayam Singh Yadav should understand this history before they damage any further the secular Muslim cause they cynically profess to advance.

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The advent of British rule in the 1750s gave rise to modern communalism. After a century of military warfare, the British had conquered various bits of India: from Bengal, Madras and Bombay to Sind, Punjab and the Northeast. Following the First War of Independence in 1857 (wrongly termed by British historians as the Sepoy Mutiny), Indian sovereignty passed from the East India Company to the British Crown.

One of the first things the British government did as sovereign ruler of India was to plant the poisonous seed of communalism. That seed has germinated over the last 157 years and grown into a panoply of hatred and mistrust, leading to partition, rioting and suffering on a scale matched only by the Jewish holocaust in World War II.

How did the British set about this task? The army was the first target. Indians were strictly divided into regiments of Sikhs, Gurkhas, Pathans, Rajputs and Marathas. Meanwhile, the British ‘government’ in India removed all import duties on British-made cotton, destroying the infant industry in the subcontinent at a time of famine and widespread starvation-induced deaths in Maharashtra.

Thus while Britain was systematically eroding India’s future industrial and agricultural competitiveness, it was simultaneously injecting calculated doses of communal poison into India’s secular bloodstream.

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The Congress, like the British, has played a double game. It has appeased Muslims (with promises of job and educational quotas) and at the same time kept them economically and socially backward.

Predominantly-Muslim Turkey and Indonesia have shown how progressively Islam can be interpreted. Iraq, despite its serious ethnic faultlines, has many reformist social laws as do Malaysia and Egypt. Only in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and West Asian Arab monarchies do Muslims remain prisoners of the past.

Double-speaking, double-dealing politicians are largely to blame for this problem. Few Muslims can forget that some of the worst Hindu-Muslim killings took place in cosmopolitan Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1992-93 because of an internal Congress power struggle between Sudhakar Naik, then Maharashtra chief minister, and Sharad Pawar, then union defence minister.

For four days, from 8 to 11 January 1993, as hundreds of Muslims were butchered by Hindu mobs, the Mumbai police stood by watching and (in some documented cases) even encouraging the rioters. The Congress government’s commitment to real secularism was exposed: it did not punish the guilty in a riot which systematically targeted Muslims in India’s financial capital.

And so the teeming cauldron of Indian Muslims, caught in a tight secular embrace, continue to live in abject poverty. They are under-represented in the IAS, in business and in the professions: law, medicine, accountancy, management, engineering. Politicians give them sermons on secularism, not jobs.

To bring themselves into the mainstream, Muslims must regard themselves as Indians first. American Jews are an example. They are fiercely proud of their religion but they do not let their Jewishness supersede their Americanism.

Muslims must not allow politicians to set a communal agenda, however secular its grammar. Some of the worst offenders are educated, influential “celebrity” Muslims who do not speak out against this perversity and are thereby complicit in keeping their more vulnerable brethren in darkness.

As we ready ourselves to elect a new government, the message that should go out is this: the time for communal politics and appeasement of minorities is over. Give your vote to the party that will deliver on its promise to embrace the religion-neutral tradition of real, not fraudulent, secularism.

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