The cross-community solidarity India has witnessed in recent weeks in resisting the Narendra Modi government’s majoritarian assault on Muslim rights has prompted a wave of nostalgia in liberal circles, especially among Muslims, for the “good old days” of Hindu-Muslim unity. There’s a sense of bewilderment: “how have we come to this?” In recent weeks, I have heard and read many nostalgic accounts by liberal Hindus and Muslims invoking images of a lost paradise. 

My own memories of the past 70 years or so are somewhat different. I remember growing up in a climate of perpetual tension, strife, and violent flare-ups involving the two communities. As a young journalist in the 1970s, I reported on many of these. So frequent were these clashes, referred to as “communal riots”, that most major newspapers had teams of reporters on call 24/7 just in case one of the many hotspots – Aligarh, Meerut, Moradabad, Muzaffarnagar, Kanpur, and Muslim neighbourhoods of Old Delhi – exploded again. 

My memories are of forcible demolition of the Babri Masjid and the barely concealed glee of many self-proclaimed liberal Hindus; of the 2002 Muslim massacre in Gujarat that happened on Modi’s watch; of attempts to undermine Muslim institutions; of running battles over Aligarh Muslim University’s minority character; of delegitimisation of Urdu language; of Muslims abused as fifth columnists.

The truth is that it has been one very long haul for Muslims in independent India. To put it crudely, there never was a “golden age” of Hindu-Muslim relations; much of the history of independent India has been marked by mutual prejudice and suspicion. Every Muslim will have a personal story of discrimination – turned down for a job, refused a house, or called a closet Pakistani. I, too, struggled to find flats to rent in Delhi – and was turned down even by a fellow journalist ostensibly because his conservative parents preferred a vegetarian tenant. To put it in perspective, Muslims too have been guilty of anti-Hindu prejudice partly as a result of a deeply ingrained fundamentalist strain in the community, and partly as a reaction to aggressive majoritarianism of the Hindu Right.

Given this background of Hindu-Muslim relations (and, no, I am not exaggerating) there’s only one way to read my liberal friends’ nostalgia for the past: as an attempt to escape from a present that’s even more bitter. As the Roman philosopher Seneca said: “Things that were hard to bear (once) are sweet to remember.”

Nostalgia for an unhappy past is useful only to the extent that it shows how far down the slippery slope we have come – from covert discrimination to open anti-Muslim hate as effectively state policy. But even at the top of the proverbial slope – before we started slipping down – things were far from rosy. The important difference between then and now is that for all our mutual prejudices, at least we tried to be civil to each other and managed to rub along.  Many dismissed “iftar parties” hosted by political parties (including the BJP) in Ramzan as a stunt but it was an acknowledgement of the need to woo Muslim; a recognition that they mattered. However opportunistic, it was a nod to the idea of inclusion. 

What has happened is that as a result of a steady coarsening of political discourse even the old  facade of civility is gone and the gloves are well and truly off. Whereas once Hindu landlords felt the need to invent an excuse to decline a Muslim tenant, now housing associations openly declare a “no Muslim” policy. The Citizenship Amendment Act, which pointedly excludes Muslims from a list of persecuted minorities who will be entitled to seek Indian citizenship, and plans to deport Muslims who don’t have documents to prove that they are Indian citizens even if they were born and brought up in the country are by far the boldest demonstration of the Modi government’s aggressive majoritarian agenda of converting India into a Hindu state without formally declaring it as such. 

Ironically, the seeds of the whirlwind we are reaping today were sown precisely in the period that Muslims look back upon with such fondness. Particularly the 1980s, when Muslims got caught up in a divisive competitive culture war between the so-called secular and communal parties, both exploiting religion and cultural identity to build their respective vote banks. There was also a deep-seated  Hindu resentment over what they regarded as a Muslim sense of entitlement which the RSS and the BJP were able to tap into by whipping up the idea of Hindu “pride” and nationalism steeped in Islamophobia. 

Today’s “new” majoritarian India, in which Muslims have been reduced to political irrelevance and the status of second class citizens, is not an accident but the logical culmination of years of simmering anti-Muslim prejudice which was waiting to be harvested. Only those who didn’t see it coming are surprised and propagating the myth of a golden age of a Muslim-friendly India. The 19th century American writer Josh Billings mocked people “who mistake their imagination for their memory”. Among them are lots of Indian liberals.