After his landslide reelection victory in May 2019, one of the first things he did with his new mandate, in August of that year, was to fulfill a long-standing demand of the RSS by revoking the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, IndiaвЂ™s sole Muslim-majority territory (over which Pakistan also claims sovereignty). Before he went into mainstream politics with the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, he cut his teeth as a member of its allied paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. ModiвЂ™s own Hindutva credentials run deep. вЂњConsequently their names and their outlook smack of a foreign origin. вЂњTheir holyland is far off in Arabia or Palestine,вЂќ Savarkar wrote. While Christians and Muslims could fulfill the first requirement, of patriotism, they would never be able to achieve the second. вЂњTo be a Hindu means a person who sees this land, from the Indus River to the sea, as his country but also as his Holy Land,вЂќ wrote the politician and activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1923 book, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? ( Hindutva, meaning вЂњHindu-ness,вЂќ has become shorthand for Hindu nationalism itself.) In SavarkarвЂ™s view, only those who regard India as both their country and their sacred Hindu homeland could be truly Indian. That founding ideology, however, has long been disputed by Hindu nationalists. His India would not be вЂњformally entitled to any religion as a nation,вЂќ he said, but a place where all faiths could coexist and be celebrated equally. A 2021 study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that by a wide margin, Indians of all faiths consider religious tolerance an essential part of what it means to be вЂњtruly Indian.вЂќ This civic value is as old as the country itself: Jawaharlal Nehru, IndiaвЂ™s first prime minister, rejected any concept of the nation as HinduismвЂ™s answer to Pakistan. T his ideal of a pluralist, secular India is popular not only among its religious minorities. For them, and for the countryвЂ™s religious minorities today, вЂњthe unmaking of secular India is a betrayal.вЂќ

вЂњThey were promised a secular nation,вЂќ he said. To Khan, it feels as though the India he has inherited is gradually becoming another version of the theocratic state his family turned away from all those years ago. Many of the Indian journalists, lawyers, activists, and religious leaders IвЂ™ve spoken with for this article say that the institutions on which the country once relied to keep this kind of ethnic supremacism in check-the courts, opposition parties, and independent media-have buckled. A raft of new laws has reached into their daily lives to interfere with the religious garments they wear, the food they eat, where and how they worship, and even whom they marry. Muslims and Christians alike have faced a surge in communal violence in recent years. The concern shared by many among the countryвЂ™s religious minorities, as well as by more secular-minded liberals within the Hindu majority, is that the countryвЂ™s secular and inclusive ethos is already beyond repair. But beneath the countryвЂ™s ostensible inclusivity runs an undercurrent of Hindu nationalism that has gained strength during the eight-year rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Religious minorities account for roughly 20 percent of the countryвЂ™s 1.4 billion people, who include about 200 million Muslims and 28 million Christians. Nominally, India remains a secular state and a multifaith democracy. Seventy-five years later, those warnings have gained a new prescience.

For his family, the promise of a pluralist India, as envisaged by the countryвЂ™s founders, trumped the warnings of the pro-Partition Muslim League (which went on to become the party of PakistanвЂ™s founders) that a Muslim minority would inevitably be subordinate to the Hindu majority.

Indeed, when Pakistan finally adopted a constitution, nine years after Partition, it enshrined Islam as the state religion. вЂњThey didnвЂ™t want to go to a theocratic state,вЂќ Khan told me from his home in Delhi. They could resettle in Pakistan, where they would be among a Muslim majority, or remain in India, where they would live as a minority in a majority-Hindu but constitutionally secular state.ДЇor Shah Alam Khan, whose great-grandparents were among the roughly 35 million Muslims who opted to live on the Indian side of the Radcliffe Line in the aftermath of Partition, his familyвЂ™s decision was in many ways a political gamble. W hen the British withdrew from the Indian subcontinent in 1947, paving the way for the independence of the newly partitioned nations of India and Pakistan, the Muslims of the region had a choice.

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