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suggest that King Faisal personally intervened to invite India for the
Rabat meeting as he felt that a country of 60 million Muslims could not
be ignored on technical grounds (Pasha 1995 ). He also did not wish to
be seen to be abandoning the Indian Muslim community that became a
minority due to partition at the altar of Pakistan. King Faisal’s mediatory
efforts in Rabat proved insufficient to placate President Yahya Khan to
conceding to India’s presence at the Islamic summit (Pasha 1995 ;
Noorani 2010 ).
At a bilateral level, Saudi Arabia has been seeking to leverage the Indian
Muslim population to further its regional and global interests. Its leaders
have been making favourable statements concerning India’s ability to pro-
mote the welfare of its Muslim population. For example, during his visit to
India in 1955, King Saud observed: “I desire to say to my Muslim breth-
ren all over the world with satisfaction that the fate of Indian Muslims is in
safe hands.”^2 The joint communiqué issued in April 1982 during the visit
of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the Kingdom remarked that the
growth in bilateral relations “would not only be to mutual benefit and
advantage but would also contribute to the strength, security and stability
of their respective regions” (Annexure 4 ).
While the details are sketchy, Saudi Arabia has been a major source of
financial support for many charitable Muslim organizations in India that
are working for the uplift of disadvantaged sections of the community.
Some of the prominent organizations which benefit or in the past benefit-
ted from Saudi financial largesse include Al-Jamiya Al-Islamia and Islamic
Mission Trust (Malappuram, Kerala), the Islamic Welfare Trust and the
Mujahideen Arabic College (Palakkad, Kerala), Jamia Sanabil and Jamia
Millia Islamia (New Delhi), Jamia Salafiya (Banaras, Uttar Pradesh) and
the pan-India Ahl-e-Hadith movement (Sikand 2005 , 2016 ; Jaffrelot
2017 ). Through the building of mosques, madrassas and Arabic learning
institutions and the distribution of the holy text, Saudi Arabia has been
reaching out to the poorer and grassroots of the Indian Muslim popula-
tion (Sikand 2016 ; Jaffrelot 2017 ).
However, until the 1990s when the economy became the pre-eminent
Indian attraction for the outside world, the Islamic dimension proved to
be an impediment in the Indo-Saudi relations. While the government-to-
government contacts were ‘correct’, minimal and sparse, the bilateral ties
benefited from the large-scale people-to-people contact manifested
through haj.
(^2) The Hindu, 11 December 1955 cited (Mudiam 1994 , 87).
P. R. KUMARASWAMY AND MD. M. QUAMAR