It also provided special treatment in government employment and access to public educational institutions for those who were socially and economically backward. The “idea of India” gave equal rights to all citizens.

BR Ambedkar (1891-1956), the architect of the Indian Constitution, belonged to a lower caste.

Mohandas Gandhi, India’s patron saint, changed the name of the low castes to “dalits” or the children of god. And then there was the highly divisive caste system that placed what the British rulers called the “scheduled castes” at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Religion was not the only dividing factor in India. As discussed later, this significant increase in the Muslim share deeply concerns Hindu extremists. There was no or little change in the Christian and Sikh shares. According to the 2011 Census the proportion of Hindus had declined to 79.8% while that of Muslims had increased to 14.2%. Christian and Sikhs were the third and fourth largest religious groups accounting for 2.3% and 1.8%, respectively. At the time India took its first census in 1951, the proportion of Hindus in the country’s population was 84.1% with Muslims accounting for 9.8%. The first generation of Indian leadership led by prime minisiter Jawaharlal Nehru believed that they had to find a system of political, social and economic governance that served a very diverse population. That was based on what the historian, Sunil Khilnani, called the “idea of India”. I am one of those students of Pakistan’s history who were impressed with the Indian governance experiment. Demonstrators shout slogans during a protest against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and a new citizenship law, in Kolkata, India.

The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani