I will only take the Sikhs as contrast as they are the only community in enough population force to be comparable to Muslims as a minority segment. Christians are essentially the product of missionaries and pre-Brits had much less of an impact on the shaping of India. Buddhists have simply ceased to exist in the number which would make them as relevant as the others.
The Sikhs too are(and I mean no offence here) a by-product of Muslim presence in India. Would sikhism(and the associated Punjabi nationalism) still have arisen had say Muslims never been there? too much hypothesis there. However, the Sikh movement was a very Indian creation; the perspective I choose for that is that the phenomenon has its identity based in the lands of the Punjab and so for them the land itself is sacred to them.
Come to muslims, the only sacred lands for them lie some thousands of km's west as does its origin. Islam(like Christianity) arrived in India and hence was adapted to the land and people by its preachers. To ensure that the essence of Islam remained separate from the aspects of culture taken up by the Indian Muslim there was an identity forged over centuries. That identity thrived more so because of the presence of Muslim rulers. Once they left, there was a subconscious sense of deprivation that somehow Muslims are constantly vulnerable(because no King or ruler was present) to the rest of the subcontinent. A lot of it had to do with the rise and fall of the clergy within the Muslim(urban) body who saw their once powerful role diminishing. This is where the ideals of isolation were taken up by certain centres of religious thought which fostered the whole first Arab than Indian ideal instead of forging around the Hindu-Muslim identity(which in my view was a grave mistake by these scholars/clergy/leadership). This never happened with the Sikhs as the religion was of the land and of the people of the land and the idea that they are converts was never preached to them nor were they ridiculed of it.
And that state ethos is what is effected by national ethos. Germany is a good reference to how a small smouldering right wing idea can grow on the basis of economic uplift to transform a nation into an intolerant one.
