ABSTRACT
There is a school of thought which believes Indo-Pakistan hostilities originated in the long period of Muslim rule over India, which lasted nearly a thousand years before the advent of the European colonial powers. The implication is that the Muslims of India were willing to accept governance by other foreign powers like the French or British, but were not willing to face the prospect of being ruled by a Hindu majority in an India free from colonial domination. There is another school of thought that holds the view that the Hindu-Muslim synthesis achieved by Indian civil society (as the Muslim rulers settled down in India adopting India as a home) was fragmented by the extremist Islamic orthodoxy of Aurangzeb’s rule from about 1658 to 1707. There have been speculative theories as to what would have happened had Shahjahan’s eldest son Dara Shikoh succeeded to the Mughal throne rather than Aurangzeb, who killed his elder brother and usurped the throne. Historians have speculated that Dara Shikoh would have revived and continued the patterns of governance initiated by his greatgrandfather Akbar the Great, policies which were followed to some extent by Dara’s grandfather, Jahangir. Muslim assertiveness and Hindu resentment dating from the period of Aurangzeb bore the seeds of Hindu-Muslim antagonism, according to these theorists. A third theory about Hindu-Muslim tensions attributes them to the political forces at work during the British rule of India from the 18th century to Independence. This school of thought explains Hindu-Muslim antagonism as follows. The British to a large extent wrested political power from Muslim rulers in different parts of the country. Consequently, Muslims were neglected and deliberately subjected to discriminatory treatment in the initial period of British rule, whereas Hindus were favoured with opportunities to participate in the lower levels of administration and to become incrementally involved in economic and commercial activities. This enabled Hindus to become the more
prosperous and progressive partners of the power structure of British India till the first decade of the 20th century. From being the rulers of India, the Muslim community became a comparatively backward and politically powerless segment.
