Muhammad, Mujeeb Afzal, Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian Muslims (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 451.
Tooba Khurshid
The rise of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has set India on a dangerous path. The growing intolerance against minorities, especially Muslims, has not only raised concerns about the ideological makeup of the party, but has also brought into question the political orientation of Indian state and society. Muhammad Mujeeb Afzal, in his book, Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian Muslims, canvasses the complex relation between Hindu nationalism and the Indian Muslims.
The book, spanning over seven chapters, explains in detail the rise of Hindu nationalism in Indian politics. Afzal analyses the relations between the two communities in three successive periods of modern Indian history; the Raj era, the post-independence Congress-dominated era and the post-Congress dominated era. The book starts with the ‘Construction of Identities in India’ and identifies the basis of antagonistic interaction between Hindu nationalism and the Indian Muslims. The process of construction of modern identities in India began with the arrival of British imperialism. The colonial masters with collaboration of local elites gathered and recruited people of diverse ethnic and geographical identities to fulfil the imperialistic requirements and to control the masses. This modernisation process disrupted the local traditional pattern of socio-political interaction and behaviour. Consequently, the origin of identities in India was essentially the result of interaction between British Indian Empire, its process of modernisation and the Indian society that created the space in which these identities were constructed.
