A Common Man’s Challenge to Fifteen Indian Prime Ministers
Panini
A country cannot understand a conflict while refusing to examine the ideas that give it purpose. That is the question I place before India’s political leadership: where is your systematic public examination of Islamic doctrine? Show us the texts you studied, the arguments you tested, and the conclusions you reached. Then put your writings beside mine.
I make this challenge as an ordinary man, an American citizen of Indian descent, and the publisher of reasoninrevolt.com. I have held no office and commanded no institution. My authority is whatever my evidence and reasoning can sustain. The same standard should apply to a prime minister. Political stature cannot substitute for an argument, and a reputation for learning cannot produce a book that was never written.
This inquiry began long before I had the leisure of retirement. It began with a question I could not answer about the treatment of Hindus in the Middle East.
I was born into a Hindu family in Hyderabad and grew up in a Marxist environment. Hindu religious practices held little interest for me. When I went abroad, I expected my work to matter more than the religion into which I had been born. Between 1976 and 1979, I worked for an Italian shipping company in Bandar Abbas, Iran. There I encountered religious contempt from some Indian and Pakistani Muslim colleagues and observed discrimination against other Hindus. The Iranians generally treated me better. That contrast disturbed me: why did some people from the subcontinent carry such hostility toward Hindus abroad?
My colleagues regarded me as Hindu. I had never told them I was an atheist; nor did my indifference to Hindu worship seem relevant to their judgment. An inherited identity was enough. I wanted to understand what I had witnessed, whether other Hindus faced the same treatment, and whether India’s leaders understood the problem. The Iranian Revolution gave me an opportunity to leave. By late 1979, I was living in New York. I had left Iran, but the question had followed me.
In the early 1980s, unusual circumstances brought me into contact with one former prime minister, three future prime ministers, and a prominent Marxist leader. These were separate meetings, not a single gathering. Such access would have been extraordinarily difficult for someone in my position in India. In New York, it became possible.
I met Morarji Desai, already a former prime minister, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee at a friend’s home. I met Inder Kumar Gujral in a restaurant. All three were on private visits. I met P. V. Narasimha Rao at the United Nations Plaza Hotel while he was India’s external affairs minister. Vajpayee, Gujral, and Rao would later become prime ministers. My meeting with Jyoti Basu took place at a Bengali community gathering during his visit to attract investment to West Bengal. I had sympathized with his party in my youth and hoped that a Marxist might offer an explanation the others had missed.
Youth gave me the confidence to approach them and the simplicity to expect an answer. My question concerned discrimination against Hindus in the Middle East: why did it happen, and what could be done about it? I was seeking an explanation of a wider problem, not asking these men to repair my personal circumstances.
More than four decades later, I remember their replies clearly enough to distinguish their approaches. Desai spoke of dharma. Vajpayee responded with Hindi poetry that I did not understand. Gujral spoke of understanding and diplomacy. They were gracious, but their answers did not explain what I had seen. Rao spoke in Telugu. As I recall, he said that neither he nor I could do anything about the problem and advised me to find work, support myself, and help my parents in India. Basu said he had come for investments, not to discuss religion. He asked me to write him a letter and promised a response. I wrote. No response came.
Those encounters belong to my biography. They are not the evidence on which I judge these men’s intellectual achievement. Courtesy proves no mastery of doctrine, and discourtesy proves no ignorance of it. My test is their published work. What did they study? What did they explain? What did they place before the public?
Over the following decades, my reading widened from discrimination to conquest, religious authority, Partition, and the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan. From Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquest of Sindh in 712 to 2026, 1,314 years have passed. I see an enduring theological and political problem running through that history. Enduring conflict does not mean uninterrupted warfare. Objectives can survive a cessation of fighting; ideas can outlive the institutions that first enforced them.
The connection I want examined is specific. Doctrines that condemn polytheism and image worship come into direct conflict with Hindu traditions that practice them. When that condemnation becomes a program of government, the disagreement concerns the freedom of actual people to maintain their religion. A theological judgment has become a question of law, citizenship, and power. That transformation demands explanation.
Kashmir alone cannot explain the India–Pakistan conflict. Religion was central to the demand that divided India, and the relationship between religious identity and state authority remains central to my inquiry. I regard nuclear-armed Pakistan as an existential threat to India. “Rebel province” expresses my civilizational judgment of a divided Indic homeland. The political question is how such a division arose and why the antagonism persists. The invasions I am discussing took place on lands where Indic civilization flourished; Hindu armies had not conquered Mecca or Medina to provoke them. The invaders’ stated aims deserve examination alongside their military acts.
This is why prime ministers should study doctrine. They exercise authority over a country whose security and cohesion are affected by claims about divine authority, religious law, and the status of nonbelievers. During the Cold War, understanding Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao was part of understanding the movements shaped by their ideas. India’s leaders had an equally compelling reason to investigate doctrines invoked in conflicts affecting their own country.
Where revelation claims final authority over government, the separation of religion and state cannot be accomplished by verbal reassurance. A state cannot simultaneously treat religious law as supreme and claim independence from it. In that sense, secular Islam is a contradiction in terms. Muslims can defend secular government, and Muslim-majority societies can establish secular institutions. The contradiction concerns the supremacy of revealed law, not a Muslim citizen’s capacity to support equal citizenship. Goodwill cannot resolve a disagreement about who has the ultimate right to make law. The disagreement must be understood.
Gandhi falls outside this comparison because he was never prime minister. His immense influence deserves a separate judgment. Mine is that his philosophy of nonviolence failed the decisive test of Partition: it neither preserved a united India nor prevented the slaughter. Its moral appeal did not secure the political agreement it required. That failure warns against assuming that a philosophy persuasive within one tradition will automatically persuade those who begin from different premises. Here, however, I am examining the people who held governmental power.
Counting Gulzarilal Nanda’s acting service, my comparison covers fifteen prime ministers: Jawaharlal Nehru, Gulzarilal Nanda, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Rajiv Gandhi, V. P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar, P. V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, H. D. Deve Gowda, I. K. Gujral, Manmohan Singh, and Narendra Modi.
My charge is that their published record contains no systematic examination of Islamic doctrine adequate to the problem I have described. I invite readers to overturn that judgment with the relevant work. A history of Mughal rule, an account of Partition, or a speech about communal harmony does not by itself answer the question. Where is the sustained examination of the Quran, Muhammad’s life, Hadith, and jihad, connecting textual claims to political objectives and testing competing explanations?
Nehru is the obvious place to begin. Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India demonstrate the breadth of his historical interests. Yet breadth is not the same as doctrinal depth. In his letter to Muhammad Iqbal of June 18, 1936, responding to theological questions, Nehru wrote: “I am neither competent enough nor interested enough to deal with them.” Iqbal, the poet and Muslim philosopher, criticized Nehru in Islam and Ahmadism: “I fear the Pandit’s articles reveal practically no acquaintance with Islam and its religious history during the 19th century.”
Their exchange concerned Ahmadism. It is evidence about that controversy, not a verdict on everything Nehru ever knew. It nevertheless establishes a legitimate starting point: where did Nehru subsequently supply the sustained study I am seeking? Where is the comparable work of the other fourteen? The answer must consist of writings that readers can examine.
Such an examination begins with the sources. The Quran is Islam’s central scripture. The Sira comprises accounts of Muhammad’s life. Hadith reports preserve accounts of his sayings and actions. Read together, they inform teachings about belief, law, authority, and warfare. A serious inquiry must consider passages in relation to one another and ask how their interpreters move from religious judgment to political obligation.
Quran 9:5, in the paraphrase used in my original account, says that once the sacred months have passed, believers are to fight the polytheists wherever they are found: seize them, besiege them, and wait in ambush for them. But if they repent, establish prayer, and give zakat, they are to be left alone, since God is forgiving and merciful.
Quran 21:98 states:
“Lo! ye (pagans) and that which ye worship beside Allah are fuel for Hell. Thereunto ye will come.”
Quran 98:6 states:
“Lo! those who disbelieve, among the People of the Scripture and the idolaters, will abide in fire of hell. They are the worst of created beings.”
The surrounding verses of 9:5 include treaty exceptions and protection for someone seeking safe conduct. Those provisions belong in the analysis. So does the question these passages raise for a society containing polytheists and image worshippers: under what interpretation do they retain equal freedom, and under what interpretation does their worship become something to suppress?
Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi made the political ambition explicit. An influential Islamic political thinker and the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, he presented Islam as an order governing public life. In the following excerpts from Jihad in Islam, pages 6–7 and 22, he wrote:
“Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it. The purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of its own ideology and programme, regardless of which nation assumes the role of the standard-bearer of Islam or the rule of which nation is undermined in the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic State. Islam requires the earth—not just a portion, but the whole planet …. because the entire mankind should benefit from the ideology and welfare programme [of Islam] … Towards this end, Islam wishes to press into service all forces which can bring about a revolution and a composite term for the use of all these forces is ‘Jihad’. …. the objective of the Islamic ‘ Jihād’ is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of state rule.”
Brigadier S. K. Malik, a Pakistani army officer, connected his reading of the Quran to military strategy. In The Quranic Concept of War, pages 59–60, he wrote:
“Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved… It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision on the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him.”
In a nutshell, this is the doctrine of Islam. That is the thesis I put before the reader: religious condemnation joined to a claim of political supremacy. These passages are central to my argument, and the connection I draw between them must withstand examination. Maududi and Malik do not speak for every Muslim. They do state political and military objectives that an Indian government has reason to understand. If they misread their sources, demonstrate the misreading. If their ideas shape institutions, trace that influence. Dismissing the question leaves the argument unanswered.
Majid Khadduri, a scholar of Islamic law, helps clarify what continuing conflict can mean. His account of classical jihad distinguishes a continuing doctrinal state of conflict from continuous fighting and includes peaceful as well as violent means. That distinction illuminates my thesis without proving every part of India’s history. Each historical connection still requires evidence: who acted, what they sought, and how doctrine influenced their decisions.
The fate of religious communities gives this inquiry human weight. Afghanistan’s Hindu community has nearly disappeared; its Buddhist past survives chiefly in historical and archaeological remains. Pakistan still has millions of Hindus, whose existence must not be erased by a sweeping claim of extinction. Conquest, conversion, restrictions on worship, destruction, and displacement demand careful study. Precision strengthens the indictment where evidence supports it.
Bill Warner offers one example of an attempt at systematic analysis. A writer and former university professor trained in physics and mathematics, he founded the Center for the Study of Political Islam. His work approaches Islam through the political and social consequences of its foundational literature for non-Muslims.
Warner reads the Quran, Sira, and Hadith together, organizing passages through categorical and statistical frameworks. He measures the content he classifies as political doctrine, examines contrasting rules for believers and nonbelievers, and arranges material chronologically and thematically. His approach treats the literature as a connected body of claims about social and political order, open to comparison and measurement.
I value that ambition. Counting passages, however, does not make an interpretation irrefutable: the categories must be defensible, the coding reproducible, and the conclusions supported by the texts. Readers should test Warner’s method as they test mine. What I ask of India’s leaders is an inquiry of comparable seriousness and scope, available for public scrutiny.
Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel are important partial exceptions to the wider failure I criticize. They examined doctrine, although I do not consider their work a comprehensive philosophical solution. Their existence is a reason to make the argument more exact. This essay concerns the fifteen prime ministers. Later essays will examine secular intellectuals, Communist and Marxist intellectuals, Hindu conservative intellectuals, and Muslim intellectuals separately, including the institutions and political movements associated with them. Each group must answer for its own published record.
My own response goes beyond textual criticism. Stephen F. Roberts expressed the starting point for dialogue in a sentence I find compelling:
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
To a Muslim reader, my question is straightforward: what evidence justifies accepting one revelation while rejecting the others? I ask the same question of Hindus and of anyone who claims supernatural authority. My own answer receives no exemption from scrutiny. A common standard of inquiry is the beginning of an honest conversation.
My philosophical proposal combines materialism as ontology, logical empiricism as epistemology, secular humanism as ethics, and free minds and free markets as social policies. Each commitment answers a different question. Ontology asks what exists. I begin with the material world and examine human conditions, relationships, and institutions. Beliefs can have real consequences even when their supernatural claims are false. Understanding those consequences requires studying both the beliefs and the circumstances in which they operate.
Epistemology asks how we know. Logical empiricism directs me to clarify a claim and ask what evidence supports or challenges it. Revelation cannot settle a public disagreement by declaring itself authoritative. Ethics asks how we ought to treat one another. Secular humanism places human welfare, dignity, and equal freedom at the center. Citizenship must not depend on accepting a prophet, a scripture, or an atheist’s philosophy.
Free minds require the freedom to question, believe, disbelieve, and change one’s mind. Free markets express my commitment to voluntary exchange and economic freedom. Neither freedom should depend on religious identity. I want supernatural claims subjected to inquiry, education, and criticism. Compulsory atheism would betray the freedom this argument seeks to defend.
A materialist account of reality does not dictate a single economic system. Economic arrangements must be assessed by their results. Bertrand Russell made a related distinction in his essay Dialectical Materialism, separating the merits of Marx’s economics from his metaphysics. He wrote that “but for the influence of Hegel it would never have occurred to him that a matter so purely empirical could depend upon abstract metaphysics”. Russell’s criticism of the dialectic is part of that argument. The useful principle is that an economic claim must stand on its own evidence.
China and Vietnam illustrate the possibility of combining official Marxist commitments with extensive market activity. Their reforms have accompanied major growth and poverty reduction, while substantial state ownership and political controls remain. Those experiences do not establish unrestricted free markets or free minds. They show why a philosophical label cannot substitute for examining institutions and outcomes. My defense of intellectual freedom includes the freedom to criticize the state and its official philosophy.
This is the framework I offer for confronting claims of sacred political supremacy. Its application requires institutions, education, diplomacy, and security policy. A philosophical argument does not perform those tasks by itself; it identifies the principles by which I believe they should be judged. No inherited revelation should confer a superior right to govern, and no citizen should possess fewer rights because of disbelief.
I return, then, to the comparison. My writings are available at www.reasoninrevolt.com, including my book Islam and the Clash of Civilizations. Put them beside the combined published work of these fifteen prime ministers. Ask which foundational texts we examined, how we connected doctrine to events, whether we considered rival interpretations, and what solution we proposed. I believe my work offers a more extensive and coherent examination of these questions. That belief is a challenge to be tested, not a verdict readers must accept.
I apply the test to Narendra Modi as I apply it to Nehru and every prime minister between them. I credit Modi with greater awareness of the danger and substantial efforts to protect India. Those judgments do not supply the missing systematic study. Party loyalty cannot fill a bibliographical gap.
I am not going to look for a non-existent needle in a haystack. If the study exists, bring it forward: title, author, argument, and text. That invitation does not make absence self-proving. It makes my challenge answerable. Show what I overlooked, expose a faulty inference, or demonstrate a stronger explanation. The contest belongs in the open, where every reader can inspect the evidence.
An unanswered question followed me from Bandar Abbas to New York. The passing decades turned it into a larger question about a country’s intellectual preparation for conflicts that threaten it. The standard is no longer what a young man heard in a private conversation. It is what leaders entrusted with public power placed before the nation—and what an ordinary citizen has placed before them.
Put their writings beside mine. You be the judge.