FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It's become a familiar sight
across the Muslim world -- worshippers fired up by imams
after Friday services, chanting slogans against America,
against Israel, for the Taliban.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Osama bin Laden was a creation of America; now he has turned against them and they are crying. I think the whole thing is against Islam.
DE SAM LAZARO: We spoke to this man outside Delhi's main mosque, built at the same time as the Taj Mahal 400 years ago. Like the surrounding Muslim community, it is the legacy of the Mughals, who reigned here for three centuries before the British colonized India.
In numbers, India has one of the world's largest Muslim
populations. At 130 million, it's second only to Indonesia
-- more than any Arab state.But many Indian Muslim leaders insist this fiery rhetoric reflects only a small minority of their generally liberal community. In 1947, the departing British partitioned the country to create the Islamic state of Pakistan, but many Muslims, by choice or circumstance, stayed on in India.
MR. SALMAN KHURSHID: If their forefathers decided they wanted to stay with 80 percent Hindus rather than 100 percent Muslims, go to Pakistan -- if they decided to stay here, it means they're liberal, it means they want a secular country, they want a country that isn't dominated by religion.
DE SAM LAZARO: India is a democracy, with no official religion, but it hasn't been free of religious strife. In spite of their large population, Muslims are outnumbered six to one by Hindus. In recent years, the country has seen a rising influence of Hindu nationalist parties ... who want a more Hindu, less secular India.
And when nationalist Hindus see these fundamentalist Muslim demonstrations, they brand all Muslims as unpatriotic or sympathetic with Pakistan, leaving moderate Islamic leaders in the middle, according to Salman Khurshid.
MR. KHURSHID: We get rapped from the majority, saying
"This is what your Muslims are saying." If we come to their
defense, we become targets ourselves. If we don't defend
them, we become alienated from our community. They're destroying
the basic links between the majority and the minority by
taking these extreme positions, positions in which they
cannot achieve anything. I mean, if they want to do that,
they should just get together and go to Afghanistan and
fight the Americans. They only make speeches in the streets
of Delhi.
UNIDENTIFIED
MAN #2: It is not a good thing, nobody can support it.
MR. KULDIP NAYYAR (Columnist/author): Terrorism,
if it is allowed to breed in one country, at one place,
is going to spread out, and this fundamentalism of any kind,
of any religion, whether it is Hindu, Muslim, Christian,
Jew, everything -- that's not the thing, because it doesn't
fit with a democracy.
MR.
KHURSHID: Somebody walks into your living room, you're
told not to be on the doorstep. You can drive them out,
not beyond the doorstep. And when the U.S. is hit, it can
cross seven seas to hit the enemy. Why these double standards?
Why the double standards? We are perturbed about Pakistan
harboring terrorists who would hit India. Everyone wants
Osama; nobody wants the people who inflicted pain and injury
to us. They are in Pakistan, they are in Sri Lanka, they
are sitting in other places and nobody is talking about
them.
