The Muslim community over the years has suffered by assuming that secularism in theory and practice means the same thing.

It is time we stopped talking about communal riots” remarked Enayat Habibullah, a retired Major General of the Indian Army. “These are massacres of the Muslims by the Hindus. The aim is to push us back into ghettos.”That, at least, is the result.

Despite Nehru, the common culture has been under assault since Independence. Books have been written seeking to show that the Taj Mahal, one of India’s glories, was really more Hindu than Muslim.Indian history is being rewritten from the new point of view to describe the Muslims who ruled India for 700 years, as aliens and foreigners and Muslim rulers by and large as guilty of the worst intolerances, murders, rapes and plunders.

From the beginning, Kashmir has been the Indian Prime Minister’s special concern. Yet when Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed from the head of the Kashmir Administration and detained, Mr Nehru only happened to know of the event just as any other Indian citizen did–in the newspapers the next day. That is only one example of the incredible manner in which the Kashmir question has been handled.