Singh said Indian Muslims were increasingly feeling insecure due to the West's erroneous association between Islam and terrorism.

NAINITAL, India — Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged regional leaders on Saturday, September 23, to recruit more Muslims into police and intelligence agencies to counter the growing insecurity and alienation among the Muslim minority.

Addressing a conference of heads of 14 states ruled by his Congress party, the premier 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, Reuters reported.

"Perhaps there is now a strong case for augmenting the number of personnel from minority communities in police forces and in the intelligence apparatus," Singh told the meeting, referring to Muslims.

"We can at least try and redeploy capable officers belonging to the minority communities to sensitive areas in large numbers."

India is home to an estimated Muslim population of 140 million, the world's largest Muslim population after Indonesia and Pakistan.

Hindus account for more than 80 percent of the country's 1.1 billion population while Muslims make up about 13 percent.

Although India's secular constitution promises equal rights and opportunities to all communities, Muslims have suffered decades of social and economic neglect and oppression.

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

They have registered lower educational levels and, as a consequence, higher unemployment rates than the majority Hindus and other minorities like Christians and Sikhs.

They account for less than seven percent of public service employees, only five percent of railways workers and around four percent of banking employees.

Erroneous Association

Singh said Indian Muslims were increasingly feeling insecure due to the West's erroneous association between Islam and terrorism.

Crackdowns by Indian security agencies on Muslims while investigating attacks in Mumbai train bombings have fueled the feeling of insecurity among the Indian Muslims, he added.

"I think it reflects a great weakness of the law-enforcing mechanism when it lines up the entire population of a locality for questioning," Singh said.

At least 186 people were killed in a series of bombs on commuter trains in Mumbai on July 11.

The attacks, blamed but not claimed by Muslim groups, prompted police raids on Muslims in the city and the detention of hundreds, fuelling the sense of alienation and persecution among the sizable minority.

Singh warned that the sense of insecurity among Indian Muslims could have "terrible consequences for the country's polity", calling for pro-active efforts to erase it.

The Indian premier has underlined the urgent need to counter the sense of alienation among the Muslim minority and championed a pro-active policy to ensure that the whole minority would not pay for the actions of a few extremists.

Indian Muslims have complained of increased harassment since the Mumbai attacks.

At least 37 Indian Muslims were killed and nearly 300 injured after three bombs exploded outside a mosque on September 9.