The results of India’s 2024 Lok Sabha election have brought a measure of relief to India’s Muslims, the vast, variegated demographic whose “othering”, in many cases by the most brutal of means, forms a core element of Project Hindutva.
Confronting its new minority status, and the attendant need for concessions, compromises, and coalition-mindedness, the Narendra Modi regime in its third incarnation now finds itself inhabiting a political landscape that is hedged about with irksome constraints and pressures towards accommodation. Whether or not this outcome constitutes a sustainable victory for Indian pluralism, it offers some respite—and an opportunity for drawing breath, taking stock, and looking to the future.
Shikwa-e-Hind: The political future of Indian Muslims
Simon & Schuster India
Pages: 365
Price: Rs.999
Although written before the election, Mujibur Rehman’s thoughtful and data-rich new study is a timely and useful contribution to the possibilities of this moment. In the book, the author, who teaches politics at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, offers an extended, evidence-rich, and calmly argued rebuff to monolithic, reified characterisations of India’s 200 million or so Muslims either by faith or culture or both. He reminds us of the complexity, richness, and variety of the country’s largest religious minority and the intricate ways in which what he calls its “historically dense identity” is woven into India’s history and material reality. This sensibility encourages a back-and-forth movement between the past and the present, an interrogation of the current challenges confronting the community that constantly strives to take account of historical context, to summon echoes from the past.
Dimensions of the Indian Muslim experience
The book is organised into six chapters, each focussed on a specific dimension of the Indian Muslim experience. The opening chapter invokes Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the right to have rights” as the starting point for an exploration of the ways in which ascendant Hindu majoritarianism has eroded Muslims’ constitutionally defined minority rights. In Chapter 2, the reader’s attention is directed south, to the cultural and political specificities of Muslim communities, many of ancient origin, that animate and enrich India’s southern States.
The discussion then turns, in Chapter 3, to the extreme forms of violence—the lynchings, riots, and bulldozer “justice”—that, as Rehman puts it, “constitute the triangle that represents the modern structure of violence against Indian Muslims”. There follows, in Chapter 4, a nuanced engagement with issues central to the lives of Muslim women in India—divorce and dress in particular, and the ways in which the Hindu Right has sought to weaponise these.
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The dynamism, spiritedness, and organising capabilities of Muslim women across India are reinvoked in Chapter 5, which takes the Shaheen Bagh protest camp as the entry point for an exploration of the Modi regime’s assault on Muslim citizenship. Finally, in Chapter 6, the author enters what he calls “the unending debate on Muslim backwardness”. After revisiting the findings of the 2006 Sachar Report, which exposed shockingly high levels of destitution among the minority population, he turns to subsequent research that points to a continuing worsening of Muslims’ conditions of life, economic as well as political.
That India’s Muslims are ensnared in a politically fuelled downward spiral is amply supported by the book’s numerous tables and the detailed footnotes that accompany each chapter. Nearly eight decades after Independence, India’s largest religious minority—the descendants of Muslims who chose to repudiate the imperialism-driven “two-nation solution” imposed on India in the dying days of empire—continues to battle discrimination in all areas of life, from employment to housing, from education and health to political representation. In a report published earlier this year, the US-based Council on Foreign Relations described India’s Muslims as “an increasingly marginalised population”, many of whose members “encounter barriers to achieving political power and wealth, and lack access to health care and basic services. Moreover, they often struggle to secure justice after suffering discrimination, despite constitutional protections.”
Historical framework for marginalisation
For Rehman, this marginalisation needs to be understood within a specific historical framework: one that recognises three key “political moments” that have shaped Indian Muslim experience over the course of the past 200 years. The first he identifies is the successful suppression of the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, and the consequences that flowed from this for the defeated Muslim insurgents and their communities. The author argues that Muslim efforts to establish new methods of negotiation with the imperial power generated two broad responses: one favouring a degree of Westernisation, particularly on the educational front, and the other a turn inwards, towards the pursuit of religious traditions and rituals free of state patronage and imperial interference. This moment is also identified as the starting point of a process Rehman calls “minoritisation ”, defined as “the simplification of vastly diverse Muslim communities into a singular entity”.
Although written before the election, Mujibur Rehman’s thoughtful and data-rich new study is a timely and useful contribution to the possibilities of this moment. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
The second of Rehman’s key moments, the year 1947, symbolises the historic choice made by the majority of pre-Partition Indian Muslims to hold fast to their native land and reject a future in Pakistan. “For Indian Muslims,” Rehman notes, “this moment was defined by the promise that they would enjoy all the benefits: political, economic, cultural and social in their fullest sense like Hindus in secular India, or even more than what the Muslim League could promise in Pakistan.” The subsequent formalisation of this pledge in core sections of the 1950 Indian Constitution appeared to endorse the soundness of this choice.
By the early 1980s, however, Rehman sees Indian Muslims confronting a third political moment, one steeped in apprehension, insecurity, and fear: “During this period, the supposed relationship of equality between Hindus and Muslims as scripted in the Constitution is increasingly replaced by the domineering tendencies of a Hindu majority—and the promised fraternity between these two communities is coloured by hostility and violence, giving it a systemic form under a majoritarian state.”
There is, arguably, a certain arbitrariness to Rehman’s “three moment” analytical framework. If 1857 and 1947 can be said to constitute turning points in the recent history of Indian Muslims, so too can the 1905 Partition of Bengal, the cross-religious solidarity created by the Khilafat movement between 1919 and 1922, and the founding of the RSS in 1925. Also problematic is the author’s use of the term “moment” in relation to developments in the 1980s. Emerging out of 30 years of a negative (for Muslims) post-Independence experience, the events of that decade, Rajiv Gandhi’s fateful decision to authorise the unlocking of the Babri Masjid’s gates in particular, might more aptly be described as the next stage in a process of retreat from constitutionally enshrined principles, a pattern of opportunistic concessions to the Hindu far right by a sequence of soi-disant secular governments.
Dominant-caste character of the Hindutva project
More persuasive is Rehman’s exploration of the dominant-caste character of the Hindutva project and the implications this has for Indian Muslims. As he notes in the book’s introduction: “Directly or indirectly, it is the dominant castes that govern this country, even if they are rather small in number… India’s majoritarian project thus is run by a minority and that is the dominant caste group…. If today the Hindu Right has acquired so much muscle, it is because it enjoys the support of India’s dominant caste groups as never before.”
This reality, one which savvy Sangh Parivar leaders have consistently sought to conceal behind stirring assertions of indissoluble “Hindu unity”, forms the core of Jean Drèze’s paper “The Revolt of the Upper Castes”, published in 2020. Here, Hindutva is characterised as, at root, an upper-caste insurgency against insipient egalitarian tendencies, “a kind of lifeboat for the upper castes, as their supremacy came under threat after India’s independence”. As Drèze underlines, part of this fightback has involved fierce resistance to affirmative action as an equality-promoting instrument.
A man being beaten up over suspicion of eating beef, in Charkhi Dadri district in Haryana on August 31. Five people, who are part of a cow vigilante group, have been arrested for allegedly beating a migrant worker from West Bengal to death. | Photo Credit: PTI
The howls of dominant-caste indignation triggered by the publication, in 1990, of the Mandal Commission report on reservation for Other Backward Classes issued from deep wells of entitlement, from centuries of ruling the roost free of contestation and challenge. Drèze draws a temporal connection between the V.P. Singh government’s pledge to implement the commission’s recommendations and the revival of the BJP’s political fortunes, a linkage that suggests that Mandal and its reception might constitute another fateful “political moment” for India’s Muslims.
Muslim lives in Dravidian India
Rehman goes deeper into the caste dimension as he ventures south to explore the lives of Muslims resident in Dravidian India. In his gentle probing of the nexus between caste, political movements, and the treatment of minorities, he finds himself impressed by the “deep connections between groups of Muslims and certain Hindu castes” in Tamil Nadu, noting the ways in which low-caste converts to Islam have been able to preserve long-standing linguistic and cultural ties with the larger Tamil population. For him, the “Dravidian model”, particularly as pursued in Tamil Nadu, reveals the possibilities of a vision of social justice backed by affirmative action and broad-based mobilisations against dominant-caste hegemony. The future of Muslims in south India, he suggests, hinges on “the ability of a new political class to preserve the rich legacy of Periyar”.
If caste forms a crucial axis for analysing the current status and political future of India’s Muslims, so too does Islamophobia, a form of racism that is on the rise across much of the Western world in the context of the imperialist wars, mass migration, and accelerating climate catastrophe of late-stage capitalism. That the targeting of Muslims now constitutes the cutting edge of racism is evident across Europe as well as in the US and Canada; in France, where I live, the political weaponisation of issues relating to Muslim culture and way of life, from food preferences to female dress, has played a crucial role in the recrudescence of the country’s neo-fascist far right.
While Rehman rightly emphasises the longevity and indigenous roots of anti-Muslim prejudice in India, his analysis might have benefited from a greater focus on Islamophobia’s rising global profile and the ways in which this may be impacting the lives of Indian Muslims. Thanks to a continually expanding Indian diaspora, subcontinental institutions such as caste have taken root in a variety of overseas settings, from Canada to the UK. The close ties non-resident Indians maintain with “home” appear to be stimulating some degree of internationalisation of Hindutva, extending to pro-BJP political mobilisation and fund-raising; in the run-up to this year’s general election, pro-Modi rallies were organised in 16 cities across the US.
In the UK, recent tensions in the city of Leicester, which has a substantial Muslim population, point to a growing current of far right Hindu provocation, a leeching of the toxic atmosphere of Modi’s India into hitherto harmonious multicultural communities. On top of this, there is the indefatigable digital activism of Modi’s keyboard warriors, bent over their screens and tapping out their venom in India and many other corners of the world.
Even before October 2023, some of this was being redirected towards virulently Islamophobic support for Israel, reinforcing the tendency of Project Hindutva to spread its tentacles to fresh arenas of global tension and devastation.
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As Islamophobia becomes globalised, so too does the struggle against it. Israel’s Gaza genocide, which was launched as Rehman’s book was under preparation, has generated a surge of solidarity with Palestine, a giant swell of anger, outrage, and determined, persevering resistance. Thanks to a movement that has embraced multiple forms of protest, from mass demonstrations to college encampments, millions of people across the world have developed a heightened awareness of Islamophobia and its role in sustaining the current global order. For Indian Muslims, this is likely to strengthen the impetus towards fresh forms of organisation and action.
Towards the end of his book, Rehman conjures up the heady, optimistic atmosphere that, for a few weeks before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, prevailed at the Shaheen Bagh protest camp in Delhi. Reflecting on what he witnessed during his several visits there, he salutes a movement that, as he puts it, “unleashed fresh air in a country that was feeling acutely suffocated… that spawned multiple protests with signature slogans and united goals all over India… and has left behind an enduring legacy of a protest movement that challenged stereotypes regarding Muslim women, and [expressed] aspirations for equal citizenship”.
“Learn from Shaheen Bagh!” This call to action, this recognition that, for Indian Muslims, the way ahead involves broad-based mobilisations that cut through old lines of division to draw people together, runs through this contemplative, at times lyrical, book—one whose scholarship is permeated by a sense of political urgency and by the author’s quiet determination to be in the thick of it all.
Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.
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