Ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya
So as it happens, all over the world wherever Islam went it’s domination was complete. Just like Christianity, Islam helped establish a common identity and create a sense of nationalism among its adherents. Any non-believers (just like in Christianity), were systematically driven out from all the “shared” resources. The whole notion of Nation is basically an umbrella concept to hold other identities such as shared religion, shared language, shared norms and mores etc.But India became a problem for Islam because India already had a notion of shared identity through its religion Hinduism. The thing about Hinduism is that its definition is so loose, anyone can start calling himself a Hindu and there is no way anyone can prove it otherwise. So Islam had a big trouble in dominating India. Through sheer perseverance and due to the fact Afghanistan has always been sparsely populated, it was quite successful. As it reached Pakistan, it met huge resistance through hardened fighters of that area called Rajputs. To cut long story short, the Muslims rulers, over generations, finally decided that it is simply easier to stop converting their subjects into Islam if they want to continue to rule. They made peace and alliances with Hindu rulers and basically maintained a lavish lifestyle by only focusing on taxes and maintenance of army. This is the advent of Mughal empire.
Muslims clerics hated this progress that can best be described as ‘church-state separation’ for Muslim rulers of India. The more moderate voices of Islam (such as Sufis) got room, though. They went around and converted the poor Hindus, untouchables, and lower castes. It was a social upliftment for these poor people, but they still carry, to this day, the burden of their origin. In short, what happened was that Islam in India unknowingly imported casteism.
So when British came, they dug all this history and then taught it to their bureaucrats. Now Britain is tiny tiny small country with a population that can be run over with a horde of horses, so they hired loyal-to-the-crown Indians for bureaucratic positions.
Fast-forward to 1947, when British were leaving, they basically handed over all this shit to their bureaucrats. These bureaucrats fashioned themselves as the original rulers of India. For Muslims, that meant “carrying-on the torch of Islamic conversion” and purging the moderate voices. For that the British carved out Pakistan (and later, Bangladesh). This is what is happening there. For the rest of the India, moderate voice of Hindus won over the hardliners and Nehru fashioned himself as a British crown instead of any pre-British-Raj era Hindu ruler. So you see India has democracy, for certain definition of democracy. That’s all the history of ruling class.
Bangladesh is still having an internal power struggle between hardliner Muslims who think they are superior as they are descendants of original Muslims invaders, and the people who identify as native Muslims. The poor class has become basically a football that gets labeled as per convenience and kicked around everywhere. This has caused massive immigration to India over many decades that was tacitly supported by communist governments in neighboring Indian states, as well as Burma which was going through civil upheaval.
That upheaval has ended, though. Recently, India has gotten a new Prime Minister [youtube.com] who panders to the hardliner Hindus and is totally against Muslim immigration. Since India has always supported Aung San Suu Kyi [wikipedia.org] over military rule of Burma, together they are creating a stronger “nation” – and that means kicking out the “foreigners”. So the poor Muslims who had run away from Bangladesh, and suddenly finding the “foreign” lands even more hostile.
