Religious discrimination

Religious discrimination is treating a person or group differently because of the particular beliefs which they hold about a religion. This includes instances when adherents of different religions, denominations or non-religions are treated unequally due to their particular beliefs, either by the law or in institutional settings, such as employment or housing.

Quotes

• When public offices are distributed in consideration of race or creed and not of merit, when birth and not efficiency is the qualification demanded in those who are to serve the State, public posts rightly come to be regarded as the spoils of war ; the official system becomes a hereditary form of military pension and not a machinery for doing certain necessary services to the community at a minimum cost and maximum efficiency. The non- Muslim populations are, therefore, driven to conclude that they have no lot or part in such a State; it is alien to them, and its fall would mean no injury to the community but only a personal loss to a body of self-seekers. The Islamic theocracy when set up over a composite population has the worst vices of oligarchy and of alien rule combined.
  • Jadunath Sarkar , History of Aurangzib, Vol III.

• From time immemorial, service in the revenue department had brought daily bread to middle class Hindus able to read and write. Under Aurangzib, ‘“‘qanungo-ship on condition of turning Muslim"’ became a proverbial expression; and several families in the Panjab still preserve his letters patent in which this condition of office is unblushingly laid down. Several other instances of it are also recorded in the extant news-letters of his Court. ... In 1671 an ordinance was issued that the rent-collectors of the Crownlands must be Muslims, and all viceroys and taluqdars were ordered to dismiss their Hindu head clerks (peshkars) and accountants (diwanian) and replace them by Muslims. As the oficial historian of the reign exultantly points out, ‘By one stroke of the pen he dismissed all the Hindu writers from his service.”" (M.A. 528.) It was found impossible to run the administration after dismissing the Hindu peshkars of the provincial governors, but in some places Muslims replaced Hindu kroris (district rent-collectors). Later on, the Emperor yielded so far to necessity as to allow half the peshkars of the revenue minister and paymaster’s departments to be Hindus and the other half Muhammadans... In March 1695 all Hindus, with the exception of the Rajputs, were forbidden to ride palkis, elephants or thorough-bred horses, or to carry arms. (K. K. ii. 395; M. A. 370.)
  • Jadunath Sarkar , History of Aurangzib, Vol III.