By 2050, India will have the largest populations of two religions in the world: Hinduism and Islam. The actual number of Muslims in India will be about 311 million in 2050, about 11 percent of the global Muslim population. As per the research, rise in the Muslim population is high due to the young median age of 22 and high fertility rates, while 26 is the median age for Hindus in India. In India, Muslim women have 3.2 children per woman on average, while the figure for Hindu and Christian women is 2.5 and 2.3 children respectively.
These population trends may cause anxiety among non-Muslims worldwide, who already appear to be affected by issues involving Islam. For example, the rise of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in the Middle East has caused migrations to Europe, while there are concerns on the nature of Islam itself, as it affects communitarian relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims in many parts of the world. In the streets of London, groups of Islamist men stop non-Muslim couples from holding hands in public, saying it is un-Islamic; European cities are witnessing the emergence of Islamic enclaves where only Sharia laws are practised by Muslims who do not use the local policing and legal systems, and run their own courts.
India is already a Sharia-compliant State in many respects, notably on the issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance and a host of religious institutions as well as a large number of madrassas funded by the secular Indian State.
There are also cultural movements that are affecting the liberty of Muslim women. For example, there were no burqas in the villages and towns of India about two decades ago, but now there is a flourishing trend in favour of them, which appears to be altering the character of Indian society in a fundamental way. By 2050, India's towns will have social enclaves in which Muslims will have their own Islamic lifestyles and distinct Arab food and clothing, which will no longer resonate with the pluralism and co-existence of India of today.
Furthermore, no Indian think tank is presently studying the Arab influences brought in by Muslims working in the Gulf. The new population projection of Indian Muslims will also adversely affect the Muslim-Hindu relations.
India is already holding contentious debates about different issues involving Islam, especially with regards to the arbitrary practice of triple talaq sanctioned by the dominant sections of Islamic clergy in India. There is a fear that the rights to equality and liberty of Muslim women can no longer be protected by the Indian State due to the Muslim community's behaviour, which prevents the State from making substantive policies for Muslims.
Indian Muslims are opposing a movement for equal rights to be legislated as part of the Uniform Civil Code despite not knowing yet what specifics will constitute such a code finally. The rising population changes the Muslim community's political and cultural behaviour. There are regions in India which are being proudly described as "mini-Pakistan" by Muslims, not by Hindus. In the states of West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and many other pockets, Muslims no longer behave as a minority community. In fact, this so-called minority community is electorally assertive and politically demanding, while forcing the majority Hindus to behave as a minority, notably at the election times by wearing caps and courting their minority votes.
Largely due to the incompetence of the Union Home Ministry, whose job it is to shape the country's rule of law, the Indian State too has learnt to bend its law enforcement to suit the Muslims. For example, Hindus such as Kamlesh Tiwari can be arrested for criticising the prophet of Islam, but the Indian State seems to be totally powerless against Islamic clerics who publicly announce rewards for beheading anyone who criticises Islam.
This political behaviour of Indian Muslims, emerging from their growing demography, is also disturbing for another reason: It is difficult for police officers to arrest Muslim criminals hiding in Muslim localities; for such an arrest to be made, the police need to have an entire battalion to enter the locality.
The behaviour of Indian Muslims is overwhelmingly shaped by Islamic clerics, not by mainstream Muslim intellectuals or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) run by Hindus who basically endorse the anti-liberty and anti-women positions of clerics, thereby bearing upon the character of the Indian State and its ability to manage communitarian relationships.
This is complicated by the fact that the world's largest Islamic movements have their headquarters in India. For example, the headquarters of the Barelvi-Sufi Islam is in the town of Bareilly. The global centre of the Deobandi-Wahhabi Islam is in the town of Deoband. The international headquarters of the Ahmadiyya Muslims is in the town of Qadian in Punjab. The global headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat is situated in India's national capital. All of these are revivalist movements in Islam.
With the rising Muslim population, these Islamic groups are becoming more assertive and are also seeking to influence the country's politics by aligning with different political parties whose leaders go on to endorse the Muslim communal behaviour in the name of secularism which basically is pro-Muslim sectarianism in the Indian context.