The title of this article is taken from India's British-adopted way of speaking and dealing with what they saw as the problems posed by the area's Muslim population. When the British arrived in what became their largest colony in the empire that they built in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, they initially came as traders to the eastern part of the sub-continent.

Most of the trading the British were interested in was done by Hindu merchants. Delicate Indian silks and other hand-woven fabrics were popular with the residents of London and other large cities in Britain. Muslims were not traders and very few were weavers. Upper-class Muslims had ruled India not only as emperors, with Delhi as their capital, but also as princes governing hundreds of states scattered around the area.

To bring this class of Indians under their control, the British rulers needed a combination of show of force and royal rewards. Knighthoods were liberally handed out to Indian Muslims. Sir Muhammad Iqbal, the poet laureate of Pakistan, was one such beneficiary. In 1857, what came to be called the Great Indian Mutiny, most of those who took part in the rising were Muslims. The mutiny was put down using brutal force in which mostly Muslims suffered. This was then the background to what the British began to call their "Musalman problem." It is my contention that the current rulers of India are governing their country in a way that too has resulted in their "Musalman problem."

Under Narendra Modi, the long-serving prime minister, he and his political party, the........

© The Express Tribune