Umm Urdu has always been Arabised and Persianised. I know because one side of my family has had only Urdu education and I taught myself from the gazillion books lying around the house. I did not realise how much of Arabic and Farsi it contained until I traveleled to the ME and taught myself Arabic. In many cases, when I could not remember the exact Arabic word, an Urdu word would do in a pinch.
Catch a Muslim writing a letter in other than Urdu? Try, most of us in India. We get educated in the same schools as non-Muslims! Its only a tiny percentage of us [mostly the poorer sections] who are educated in madrassas or orphanages run by Urdu speakers.
I don't "blame" the saffron brigade for the decline of Urdu in India. Like you said and I have seen over the years, it is the non-Muslims who have kept Urdu tehzeeb alive and vibrant in India. It is in this population group that Urdu has become Islamicised and even more astoundingly, made foreign, primarily post partition. It has somehow become more "nationalistic" to speak "pure" Hindi rather than Urdu. Even today, it is the efforts of singers like Jagjit Singh and writers like Gulzar with their heavy contributions to the vast literature and poetry of Urdu [Jagjit through his choices in singing the works of so many little known poets and Gulzar through his own works] who keep Urdu poetry alive. Farsi is a different animal altogether. After Assadullah Khan "Ghalib", I don't know anyone who has written extensively in Farsi as an Indian.
But I still recall that when I very young and we attended mushairas there would be a healthy contribution from Urdu poets in the mix. The gathering would contain good Hindi poets and it was always a pleasure to listen to Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala' on the one hand and Kaifi Azmi on the other. I used to go gaga over poetry sessions because I am fluent in both Hindi and Urdu and because of a very excellent teacher in Hindi, who also loved Urdu [thank you, Mr Singh] I have an abiding love for both languages.
Today if you asked me, I would have to grope through memory very hard to come up with Urdu poets in the present generation who are not Muslims and less than 60 years old. Thats how bad it has become.
We used to get Shama, Kehkashan, Jasoosi Duniya - all kinds of Urdu magazines - poring over poetry [shairi], jokes [lateefa] and embroidery designs in the former and tales of Captain Farid in the latter. My grandmother read Inquilab from cover to cover daily without fail [we are a family of fanatic newspaper readers]. Now, we cannot get these magazines in the local stands and the books are long consigned to the dust of history. The local newsstands who kept these books no longer do so. Hindi magazines have replaced them everywhere and Hindi is the new Urdu.
Even the radio. Listening to Ameen Sayani during the Binaca Geetmala, with his fluent rendition of Urdu, listening to Santojan ki Mehfil with their Urdu lateefas, Hawa Mahalall history. Now Vividh Bharati [All India Radios national channel] is the domain of Hindi speakers, Urdu no longer the lingua franca of the air waves.
So yes, when I say Urdu is in a decline in my immediate vicinity, I speak from personal experience
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