With the strength of the Hindu nationalist political movement polarizing religious communities in India over the last two decades, the Muslim minority has faced socioeconomic marginalization and at times been targeted by violent attacks.

When India was granted independence in 1947, and Pakistan split off to become a homeland for Muslims, India was set up as a secular country embracing pluralism. But that promise has not mirrored many minorities' real-life experiences.

"India is secular, so as a country they have celebrated their Muslims, but that does not usually apply to Indians themselves," said Meenakshi Ganguly, a Human Rights Watch researcher who has lived and worked in India for more than three years.

As the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist party, gained momentum in the 1980s and then won the parliamentary majority from 1998 through 2004, "there was a campaign of hate that we still haven't seen the end of," Ganguly said.

"The BJP embraces, and has always embraced, the ideology of Hindu nationalism, which fundamentality believes that Hindus are the owners of the nation, and Muslims have a history of disloyalty and should not be given any privileges," said Ashutosh Varshney, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, and an expert on ethnic conflict in India.

While the party no longer holds the majority in parliament, it is still one of the most popular in the country and some states are still BJP run because of India's federal system. The experience of Muslims living in these states, including Gujarat, can be vastly different than those in other regions of the country.

"In South India, Muslims are more prosperous, less fearful. In North India it is more dangerous," said Theodore Wright, political science professor emeritus at State University of New York at Albany, who studies Muslims in India.

The outsiders within
At the time of partition, many Muslims chose to stay in India instead of moving to Pakistan for economic reasons, because they could not afford to make the long move or because of Indian nationalist sentiment.

"The creation of Pakistan meant that Muslims became the 'other'," said Ali Asani, a Harvard University professor of Indo-Muslim languages and culture. "Those Muslims that stayed back in India have always had this label."

In November 2006, a report commissioned by the Indian government on the status of the country's Muslims, who are the largest religious minority and make up 13.4 percent of the population, found that they had fallen behind even the lowest caste of Hindus, known as untouchables, in socio-economic indicators in some states.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's office summarized the findings of the report, saying the Muslim population is "relatively poor, more illiterate, has lower access to education, lower representation in public- and private-sector jobs."

In urban areas, Muslims are mostly relegated to "slums characterized by poor municipal infrastructure," the statement said. Much of the ghettoization seen in cities occurred when Muslims fled Hindu areas after incidents of violence.

The report issued recommendations to improve the status of Muslims, including establishing an Equal Opportunity Commission, and creating diversity incentives for education, employment and housing.

The Union Minister for Minority Affairs approved some of the recommendations in August 2007, but they have yet to be implemented.

Communal violence
Communal violence between Hindus and Muslims has deep roots in India and was particularly bad around the partition. Politically motivated riots aimed at Muslims intensified in the last decade as Hindu nationalist popularity grew.

The violence hit a high in 2002, when a train carrying Hindu activists was attacked by a Muslim mob and 58 were killed in a fire on the train. The incident set off riots around the country and as many as 2,000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat, the U.S. State Department's 2003 Report on International Religious Freedom documented.

In March 2006, a government commission determined the train fire was an accident rather than a Muslim conspired crime.

Regional experts and academics now refer to the violence that followed as a pogrom.

"The big-scale riots were state sponsored. There was deliberate targeting of Muslim stores and Muslim homes," said Human Rights Watch's Ganguly.

In the aftermath of the 2002 riots, India's National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court criticized the government of Gujarat for its weak prosecution of Hindus implicated in the violence.

Incidents of violence often are politically motivated with the goal of winning votes from Hindus or intimidating Muslims, but they are set off by an event such as the slaughter of a cow or an inter-faith couple eloping, said Wright.

At least every month, there is a new attack, Ganguly said. And the failure of the state to prosecute attacks by Hindus exacerbates the problem, she added.

"It feeds into Muslim anger. There are attacks by Muslims as well, but as a state you need to provide a sense of justice that the laws apply to all," she said.

In more recent incidents, the government has tried to fend off such riots. When terrorists attacked Hindu temples at the disputed site of Ayodhya and Varanasi in 2005, the government quickly spoke out to discourage riots by Hindus.

"The argument is that [Christians] proselytize ... that, according to Hindu nationalist ideology, must be vigorously fought," said Varshney.

In 2006, the U.S. State Department's India Religious Freedom Report stated, "Some Hindu organizations and others frequently alleged that Christian missionaries lured converts, particularly from the lower castes, with offers of free education and health care."

Other reports show that Christians have been the target of forced conversions or re-conversions by Hindus. In 2005, the National Commission for Minorities asked the governments of Rajasthan and Maharashtra to stop forced reconversions in a response to attacks on Christians and a social boycott against Christians who didn't convert.

Smaller religious minorities in India, such as Buddhists and Sikhs, have had little issue with Hindus in recent years, in part because the religions are considered closer to Hinduism. While the federal government has publicly recognized and spoken about the need to give religious minorities more access to education and job opportunities, as well as protection from violence, the state and local governments are often not in line with the federal ideals, said Asani.

"There is recognition there is a problem. There have been committees and reports, sometimes the courts have even ruled, but the federal government tends to find its hands politically tied," said Asani.

-- By Talea Miller, Online NewsHour