Faith permeates India: From small wayside temples and churches, to mausoleums for Sufi saints. From throngs of pilgrims, to art in calendars, to Muslim clerics calling the faithful for Friday prayers. Indians’ faith manifests everywhere—be it in an omniscient God or a pantheon of many-headed, multicolored deities.

Yet my family is secular. In India this means they are not only irreligious, they believe all minorities have a special place in the nation, particularly India’s beleaguered Muslims. As children, my parents witnessed India’s independence movement against the British, and their adult loyalties lie more with national identity than ethnicity or religion.

Not everyone, of course, feels this way. If faith is everywhere in India, then so is conflict, which erupts every five years or so. Islam has a knack for turning a nation of mild-mannered quasi-capitalists into raging fanatics.

Muslims are often caught in violent entanglements with the country’s Hindu majority and Hindu-dominated government. For years, they have asserted that they are marginalized, discriminated against and hated. Hindus counter that Muslims are more interested in being Muslim than Indian—and openly ask why nearly every major conflict in the world involves Islam’s believers.

In my teens I did my part to complicate the world: I successfully absorbed a chauvinistic Hindu culture, rejected my family’s secularism and decided that Muslims only had a “special place” in India if they “behaved.”

And then I changed my mind.

Historically Speaking
Muslims make up some 12 percent of India’s 1 billion people, Hindus a little more than 80, while Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and a variety of other faiths represent the rest.

When the British invaded India in the 18th century, the Muslims had controlled the primarily Hindu country for five centuries. After being ruled by first Muslims and then the British, Hindus suddenly came to power in 1947, after India’s independence. Pakistan was created then, a consolation prize for Indian Muslims.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was Cambridge-educated and agnostic. He sought to improve relations among the country’s faithful, particularly between its large Hindu and Muslim populations. This secularism inspired many Indians, including my parents.

Today, Indian law provides equality for all citizens—even as the nation’s Muslims cite discrimination at school and work. Indeed, most national data show Muslims are often poorer and less educated than their Hindu and Christian compatriots. Yet, as critics of these claims are quick to point out, Indian law also grants Muslims special allowances: It permits them to follow their own religious laws, rather than national laws, a privilege given to no other religious group.

This ongoing discord has led to many deadly confrontations in which Muslims, as the minority, almost always end up second best.

Growing up in India, I absorbed this complicated history and daily reality. Three experiences in particular most profoundly shaped my understanding of Islam and its believers: First, a movie. Then, the riots I witnessed as a child and teenager. Finally, in high school, everything I thought I knew about Islam crumbled—with the destruction of a historic mosque.

I Meet Akbar
The movie, made in the late 1970s by a bald, bespectacled filmmaker called Manmohan Desai, was Amar Akbar Anthony. It could have been any of the dozens of films made by Desai between 1975 and 1995. They all had the same plot: Calamity befalls poor Hindu family, which is forced to split up. One of the parents, usually the pathetic mother, loses the sense of sight or speech. The other goes to prison framed by the rich capitalist boss for a crime he did not commit. The children—typically three boys—become separated, too. One is raised Hindu, the other, Muslim and the third, Catholic. In Amar Akbar Anthony, the children were religious but, true to the spirit of Indian secularism, respectful of other faiths.

After a series of twists and turns, romantic entanglements and fight sequences, the trio is united in the last 30 minutes of the three-hour film, with each other and their parents. They fight off the bad guys, embrace and drive off, singing, into the sunset. The end? Not quite.

The parents were Hindu after all, and so, in the end, all three children go back to being Hindu and live happily ever after as one big family. To a 4-year-old with little concept of religion and the divisions it brings, this explained a lot about my parents’ secular, multireligious vision of India. Amar, Akbar and Anthony, now Hindu but not fanatically so, could live together as friends, as brothers.

Apparently, as I learned later, adults viewed this film, and the world, differently. To them, differences were more pronounced, divisions more clear. A prevailing suspicion toward Muslims made many adults ask whether Akbar, despite his conversion to Hinduism, harbored a secret loyalty for Pakistan.

Brothers, Sisters and Riots
As a child, secularism was dinned into my head—by Amar Akbar and Anthony, by my parents, by my teachers. At school, every textbook began with the (now comically propagandistic) pledge: “India is my country. All Indians are my brothers and sisters.”

Unfortunately, there was profound disconnect between what we were taught and what was actually happening on our streets. In reality, Indians sometimes turned on their “siblings,” destroying their homes and killing one another.

I didn’t know it then, but I was growing up amid religious riots. Every few years, my sister and I were inexplicably confined to the house and adults huddled together for discussions we weren’t allowed to hear. A simple, “Pa, what’s happening?” was either ignored or answered with a glare. “This is no place for children,” we were told. “Go to your room.”

We didn’t have a television because my parents thought it would kill our love for reading and conversation—the bastards. As a result, there was nowhere to turn for news. My sister, older by five years and precocious, would wear an all-knowing expression on her face, refusing to share what she knew (or, as I now suspect, pretended to know).

During one period of rioting, I remember looking out of the window to see normally crowded streets empty of people and cars. Only the odd public transport bus plied its route—it was the ineffectual government’s effort to demonstrate control.

When we returned to school a few days later, rumors were everywhere: Weapons found in a mosque. Hindus setting a pig loose in a mosque. Muslims slaughtering a cow in a Hindu area.

At the end of it, hundreds dead, thousands injured, a city’s cosmopolitan veneer irreparably damaged and a young nation showing signs of a troubled middle age.

Then, in 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, daughter of Prime Minister Nehru, was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards—ostensibly because of her government’s policies toward a growing Sikh separatist rebellion. The minority Sikhs had always been peaceful, but now they were demanding secession from India.

I was 10.

Indira Gandhi was killed on a Wednesday—a fact that has never escaped my mind because it was the day they showed I Love Lucy on television. (My parents had finally deemed TV appropriate for their children.) But instead of Lucy, mournful music played on state-run Doordarshan, the only available channel.

My parents worried and rumors flew. I summoned my courage and approached my father as he watched a singer on television. “Appa,” I said, “are they going to show Lucy?” My father had never yelled at me much. That day, he did, for a sustained period.

“Thank god it was not the Muslims,” I heard my mother say. “Can you imagine what would have happened?”

Every time a bomb went off, a politician died of natural causes or someone was shot, Muslims ran scared. They were afraid when a cow was slaughtered—even in a country that has no ban on cow slaughter—because Hindus consider the cow holy. They knew it wouldn’t take much to channel an entire nation’s rage toward them.

Many years later, I read a book about the 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and a curious fact caught my eye: Muslim families—who had hunkered down in their homes and businesses, afraid one of their own had killed Gandhi—erupted in joy when they found out his killer was Hindu.

Should anyone live in such fear?

The Temple and the Mosque
By 1991, I was a teenage Hindu fanatic. Muslims, after all, were causing trouble in Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya—everywhere. But why India, a place where they had their own law, couldn’t they just coexist, blend in?

“It’s not that I hate Muslims,” I told my stunned family. “But they should learn how to behave.”

“Have you noticed,” I asked my sister who was studying in England and belonged to Amnesty International, “there’s trouble wherever they are?”

“I’m not intolerant,” I told anyone who cared to listen. “I’m intolerant against intolerance.”

My parents wondered what they did wrong. They’d fed my sister and me a healthy dose of skepticism about all religions—constantly emphasizing that secularism was the key to India’s existence.

In the midst of my fanaticism, yet another politico-religious storm was brewing between Muslims and Hindus. Its target: a 16th-century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya. Hindu fundamentalists believed the mosque had been built on the site of a Hindu temple, which was razed by Muslim invaders in the 1500s. The temple had been demolished to build the mosque, Hindu fundamentalists reasoned, so why not demolish the mosque and rebuild the temple?

Led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which would later win control of India’s federal government, Hindu fundamentalists began nationwide protests that aimed to show the mosque as a symbol of India’s misguided appeasement of Muslims.

Image by Kelly Igoe

Many Muslims vowed bloodshed if the mosque was demolished and urged the government to intervene. Security was bolstered around India, but the nation remained tense. Indians debated what would happen next, but no one doubted the government’s ability to thwart chaos and prevent widespread violence. If it ever became necessary to do so: In India, nothing happens until it happens.

It’s Dec. 6, 1991, the day of my biology exam. I pick up the morning paper and see that what the pundits said wouldn’t happen has, in fact, happened. The mosque is destroyed. The protests are deadly. For the first time that I can remember since my dog died when I was 9, I feel sad—but not as sad as the Muslims of Bombay.

My father drives me to school, and all along the way, Muslim protesters hurl stones and rocks at passing vehicles. Some windows are smashed. Cars are afraid to stop. They drive as fast as they can. One medium-sized rock just misses us.

“The poor bastards,” my father says.

I’m not sure what it was. Whether it was those three words or the mood I was in or the sight of all those people angered by the destruction of a mosque they’d never visited. But an inexplicable grief came over me. My father announced it was too dangerous to drive on, made a U-turn and drove away.

And that is how I found secularism.

Until It Happens
After the mosque fell, retaliatory violence against Hindus raged. This violence was then followed by attacks on Muslims. The government did nothing or was too powerless to stop it. Many Muslims left for Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, until 9/11, the United States. For Hindu fundamentalists, this mass Muslim exodus constituted a victory that their movement is unlikely to surpass.

But for secularists, the mosque’s destruction has different implications: Some see it as a watershed moment in India’s history, when nearly a billion people—including other religious minorities—decided that Muslims did not have the same religious rights as everyone else. Others, more optimistically, believe as I do: India is an ancient land that can endure the mosque’s demolition, just as it has withstood waves of invasions for nearly five millennia.

This optimism is not unfounded: The BJP, the Hindu nationalist party that spearheaded the razing of the mosque, lost national elections in 2004 to a more secular party. While acrimony remains, India now has a chance to pursue secularism, not conflict, and to choose what all of us, irrespective of what or whom we worship, need most: Food. Clothes. A home. Financial security. And equal access to opportunity.

The battle for India’s future comes down to two competing positions —majority Hindu control versus secular equality. Can a democracy of a billion people avoid the tyranny of the majority?

We will see. In India, nothing happens until it happens.