Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged regional leaders on Saturday to recruit more Muslims into the police and intelligence agencies to help counter a growing sense of insecurity in the minority community.

Singh said there was an underlying sense of insecurity among Muslims due to what he called erroneous links made by the West between terrorist attacks and Islam, leading to the entire community being tarnished.

A similar attitude was being fuelled in India as well with security agencies targeting large sections of Muslims while investigating terrorist attacks they suspect to be the work of militant Muslims, he said.

Singh’s comments came a little more than two months after a series of bombs on commuter trains in Mumbai, India’s financial hub, killed 186 people. The attacks were blamed on domestic Muslims with links across the border in Pakistan.

Indian Muslims, estimated to number about 140 million in a total population of 1.1 billion, account for the world’s third largest Islamic population after Indonesia and Pakistan.

Although India’s secular constitution promises equal rights and opportunities to all communities, Muslims have traditionally registered lower educational levels and, as a consequence, higher unemployment rates than the majority Hindus, analysts say.

They are also grossly under-represented in public sector jobs and in the army, police and other security agencies.

On the other hand, the rise of hard-line Hindu revivalist groups in the late 1980s and the global war on terrorism blamed on Muslims had played on their fears, they say.

Singh said the sense of insecurity among India’s Muslims could have “terrible consequences for the country’s polity” and called for pro-active efforts to erase it.

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