Kaleem Kawaja asks: where do Indian Muslims go from here?

After waiting for sixty years to have political parties and others lobby for them and help resolve their problems, today the future of the Muslim community lies in taking a bold lead and seeking the active help of the majority Hindu community and the power structure. They need to calmly persuade majority Hindus that their backwardness is a national Indian problem just like the backwardness of the lower caste Hindus, and that it is not a problem of just the Muslim community.

If the Muslims are trying to retain their Indo-Islamic identity then so are all major ethnic groups in India. Punjabi Hindus have very different social practices than Tamil Hindus; Bengali Hindus have totally different social practices than the Gujarati Hindus; UP/Bihar Hindus have completely different cultural practices than the Andhra Pradesh Hindus. So why should mainstream India interpret the attempts of the Indian Muslims to retain their distinct identity as lack of integration and nationalism? Why not lend a helping hand to help break their state-of-siege?