59At the same time, the Muslims of India have maintained a distinct
religio-cultural identity with Urdu—a mixture of the Indian languages,
Persian and Arabic—emerging as their most common lingua franca
(Sikand 2006 ). Though commonly understood and spoken in parts of the
Indo- Gangetic belt, over time Urdu came to be seen as a ‘Muslim’ lan-
guage. According to the 2001 census, there are about 52 million or 5 per
cent Urdu speakers in the country (India, Office of the Registrar General
& Census Commissioner 2001 ).
The socio-cultural diversity has been reflected in the political arena
wherein no single party or ideology can be seen as the representative of the
Indian Muslims. The partition along religious lines and post-partition
riots made a vast majority of them suspicious of parochial or regional par-
ties. For long, majority of them tended to support parties and leaders
committed to secularism and this meant that the Congress Party remained
their principal option. They were also wary of religion-centric parties. The
grassroots support for Muslim-centric parties such as IUML and MIM has
been confined to specific pockets of Muslim-majority parliament constitu-
encies. The voting pattern of the Muslim electorates has often puzzled
pollsters though most have tended to vote for mainstream parties in the
national elections and settle for regional parties committed to secularism
in local elections (Verma and Gupta 2016 ).
As a result, Islam plays a vital role in India’s engagements with the out-
side world, especially the Middle East and more so vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia,
which prides itself as the heartland of Islam.
Long before the discovery of oil, Islam has been a source of engage-
ment between India and the Arabian Peninsula and they viewed each other
through the religious prism. As referred earlier, in the nascent stages, the
al-Saud rule relied on the philanthropic support of the Indian Nizams and
business community for the upkeep of the holy sites in Mecca and Medina
(Khalidi 2009 , 55; Azaryahu and Reiter 2015 , 33). The continuous flow
of haj pilgrims from Indian subcontinent since the early days when Islam
came to India and the accompanying trade was partly responsible for the
transformation of Jeddah as the commercial hub of present- day Saudi
Arabia. Likewise, the Saudi interest in India has been primarily religious.
Since the early days, the Saudi rulers and community leaders looked to
India as a home to a sizeable Muslim community. Far from inter-state
visits, meetings and engagements, it has been more of an inter- community
relationship.
ISLAMIC DIMENSION