Muslims comprise the largest minority in India, and have been an integral part of India’s canvas for centuries. In this wide-angled long read, our penultimate post to mark the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, Faisal Devji reflects on the fate of Muslim politics from the time of India’s independence to recent times, and considers ways forward at a time of intensified identity politics.
Despite India’s size and diversity, its governments have been obsessed with a unitary vision of the nation, modelled on the small new states that emerged from the First World War in continental Europe. While they may not have been able to instantiate this vision in practice, Indian governments enshrined it in the Constitution and policy-making by treating as exceptions all the elements of autonomy and federalism they were forced to retain from its colonial past. All the non-unitary parts of India’s constitutional structure were therefore meant to be temporary, from Reservations and the special status of Kashmir to Personal Law and the absence of a national language. And Muslims, more than the princes, castes, and tribes who also represented a non-unitary constitutional order in colonial times, have been identified with its suspect autonomy to prevent it from serving as a precedent for others.
The All-India Muslim League’s political and constitutional inheritance was dangerous because it set precedents for group rights, and provincial autonomy more generally. This was always the Congress’ fear and explains why the low-caste leader Ambedkar, for instance, was so keen to claim hitherto Muslim forms of autonomy like separate electorates for his own constituency. To eliminate the League’s political inheritance was thus to diminish the rights and autonomy of all Indians, since it had historically championed federalism more effectively than any other party. However good or bad its own intentions, in other words, the League stood for a non-unitary state and had even laid its constitutional foundation. It was this foundation, for instance, that permitted Kashmir’s special status upon its accession to India, whose revocation in 2019 puts state rights in danger everywhere else.
The Muslim League’s forcible dissolution after independence also made India a one-party state for decades, trading democracy for political stability until the 1970s, when Hindu nationalism finally emerged as a rival ready to take power by the 1990s. Pakistan, by contrast, retained a Hindu-dominated Congress in opposition until the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 which took most of its Hindu citizens with it. There, the Muslim League had lost power soon after independence in a multi-party democracy that succumbed to military rule in 1958, during the Cold War. The army promised stability at the expense of democracy. Though it had been founded as a non-unitary state in two wings, Pakistan’s fear of India impelled it to centralise power in the army when it could not do so through a ruling party. But its political structure could not withstand this unitary urge which finally destroyed the state.
If India under Congress rule defined national unity from above by way of law and policy, Hindu nationalists claim to champion a unitary nation from below by majoritarianism. And they have done so more successfully than Pakistani efforts to make Islam a source of such social unity because Hinduism — in this vision — is both open and lacking a theological element. Unlike Islam, which has become a source of theological division rather than unification in Pakistan, Hinduism in all its forms is accepted as a form of national culture and does not even require religious belief. Hindu nationalism has thus shifted the basis of political stability from the state to society. Otherwise, it possesses the same unitary logic as its predecessor, which is why the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has achieved its aims without altering the Constitution.
Doing without Politics
In the wake of the Partition of 1947, Muslims in India found themselves stripped of their politics. For the first time they were unable even to make any constitutional claims about their cause representing the needs of minority or caste groups more generally. Reduced to a purely self-interested group, they came to focus on issues limited to defending their religion and protecting its Personal Law. These included several famous controversies: the Hazratbal incident of 1963 when a relic’s disappearance from a Kashmiri shrine gave rise to mass protests; the Shahbano case of 1985 when a court’s decision to grant alimony to a Muslim divorcee was seen as interfering in Muslim Personal Law; and the Babri Masjid dispute which rose to national prominence in 1990 when Hindu nationalists laid claim to a mosque allegedly built on the ruins of a temple.
These dramatic events occurred against the background of demands for the protection of Muslim lives and properties in communal riots, government support for their cultural and educational institutions, and calls for greater representation in the services. They were not helped by wars with Pakistan in 1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999, which led to greater suspicion of Muslim loyalties, as well as an insurgency in Kashmir beginning in the 1990s and followed by terrorist attacks in different parts of India. Whether voiced through Muslim mobilisation or in arguments and petitions, in other words, such demands adopted a largely defensive posture and were justified by invoking the principle of secularism. This was their only reference to larger constitutional issues, though to the document’s grudging and half-hearted logic of exceptionality and time-boundedness.
The post-independence history of Muslim mobilisation culminated in country-wide protests over the destruction by Hindu nationalists of the Babri Masjid in 1992. For nearly 30 years after the event, which was followed by riots in different parts of the country, Muslims seem to have lost the capacity to mobilise themselves. This has coincided with the fragmentation of national politics, since the Congress and the BJP were only able to form governments at the head of large coalitions of regional parties. Occurring simultaneously with the liberalisation of the Indian economy after the Cold War, this fragmentation signalled a larger — even global — shift from state-centred to society-centric modes of defining the nation. It ensured the triumph of the BJP with its base in non-governmental organisations and groups like the commercial castes who gained from liberalisation.
The rise of regional politics, however, also included the emergence of low-caste parties and projects, with Muslims turning to them for the kind of protection they had once sought from ruling parties at the Centre. Perennially unable to scale their politics up to the national level, low-caste movements enjoyed huge success during this period of regionalisation to produce new parties and leaders of their own. This was also true of Muslims in those parts of north India where such caste politics had emerged. They did not form their own parties, however, but allied with others on the basis of their own status in the caste hierarchy. For the first time, then, low-caste Muslims were not making claims on the basis of Islam, but by demanding rights to representation within the system of Reservations as castes.
Yet caste politics has remained resolutely regional, with the absence of Muslim politics at the centre explaining the rise of self-consciously national forms of Muslim militancy in this period. But it was short-lived and not particularly successful, unlike the regionally-defined militancy of Kashmir. Domestic terrorist attacks by groups like the Indian Mujahideen in the post-9/11 period followed mass violence against Muslims and represented, if anything, the emptying out of their political lives. They were distinct from Pakistan-based terrorist strikes, whose causes were not domestic but international, while those Muslims who ended up joining global militant outfits like Al-Qaeda or ISIS tended not to be interested in India at all. Militancy is by its nature individualised and does not involve any mass mobilisation despite efforts to create it through violence and polarisation.
Departures and Returns
Muslims seemed to have been cowed by the violence they faced under the BJP, whose principal instances followed upon the Babri Masjid’s demolition in 1992 and an attack on Hindu pilgrims in Godhra in 2002. Even major decisions taken by the government or its courts, such as the banning of divorce by repudiation under Muslim Personal Law or awarding the land on which the Babri Masjid had stood to a Hindu temple, gave rise to little or no protest; neither did newly-routinised acts of violence like lynching Muslims over their alleged seduction of Hindu girls or transport of cows for slaughter. We had to wait until their protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2020 to see the return of such mobilisation countrywide. Not accidentally, it coincided with the return of single-party dominance at the Centre and the consequent loss of power by regional parties.
Yet to call this a ‘return’ would be a mistake, since Muslim mobilisation at the national level had, for the first time since independence, taken on a political and indeed constitutional rather than cultural or religious character. What is more, Muslims adopted the Constitution’s own unitary ideal instead of asking for a separate accommodation for themselves. On this occasion, it was the Hindu nationalists who were calling for the differential treatment of citizens. The CAA sought to offer immigration, and eventually citizenship rights, to non-Muslim religious minorities persecuted in the Muslim-majority countries surrounding India. It was often paired with the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which seeks to determine the nationality of all those resident in India, having been tried out in the border state of Assam to exclude Muslims understood as having come illegally from Bangladesh.
On the one hand, objections to the CAA had to do with universalisation as a constitutional ideal, which refused to exclude a single community from the rights bestowed on others. Protesters often mentioned, for example, the case of Muslims persecuted in Burma and Sri Lanka, or specific Muslim groups like the Shias or Ahmadis who might be persecuted in Pakistan and Afghanistan. On the other hand, some feared that the Act would serve to disenfranchise Indian Muslims through the NRC by rendering them ineligible for citizenship once they were deemed to be non-nationals. But this was a supplementary argument, and it was the claim to universality that defined the protests, for which copies of the Constitution were central together with portraits of Gandhi and Ambedkar in his role as one of the framers of the document.
Perhaps because it possessed no religious or cultural cause, the protest did not attract traditional Muslim leaders. Clerics and seminaries were both absent from and largely silent about them, as were politicians from most national and even regional parties. Students, however, were much in evidence, along with an array of ordinary people from different classes and a variety of religious as well as non-religious dispositions. And they were joined by large numbers of Hindus and other non-Muslims all over the country, until the Covid-19 pandemic allowed the government to shutter the movement and jail many of its activists (even bulldozing their houses in the state of Uttar Pradesh). During the period in which they occurred, however, these protests represented the most widespread demonstrations in the country since its independence. What has been their upshot?
After the Fall
The destruction of the Babri Masjid spelt the destruction of Muslim politics as it had been practised since independence. Muslim élites continued to mediate grievances about religious and cultural identity at the Centre, while clerics continued to privilege theological issues in the provinces. But they were no longer particularly successful in accomplishing either task, to say nothing of protecting their constituencies from threats against life and property. With the slow collapse of this clientelist politics based on defending largely upper-caste Muslim identities and interests, there emerged another from the fragmentation in the 1990s. Setting aside the resort to insurgency and terrorism, which only accentuated the failure of the clientelist model, we can discern a new political genealogy starting with caste and moving on to constitutionalism.
Low-caste politics among Muslims in north India remains a regional issue, its national importance having to do with the fact that it has broken the Urdu-speaking élite’s monopoly to speak for all their co-religionists. The interregnum during which regional politics dominated the country not only allowed for the rise of such politics in the north, but perhaps more importantly, permitted the emergence of Muslim élites in other parts of the country. The spell cast by north India’s massive Muslim population and its Urdu-speaking élite was thus broken internally by caste, and externally by ethnicity. Its monopoly can be seen in the fact that all the post-Partition mobilisations I describe earlier in this post were for north Indian causes and voiced in Urdu, with Muslims in other parts of the country being held hostage by these issues. This is no longer the case.
The economic liberalisation to which regional politics was linked has also created aspiring new élites, not least in north India among the Other Backward Castes (OBC), whether Hindu or Muslim. We already see that the old Congress model of having upper-caste north Indian Muslims serve as mediators between state and society is no longer working. Muslim capital from Gujarat and Maharashtra now flows to support community institutions elsewhere in the country, while the educated sons and daughters of upwardly-mobile Keralan Muslims are increasingly taking these institutions over to comprise a new intellectual vanguard for the community. A good example of this new politics can be seen in the rise of the All-India Majlis-e Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) to national prominence.
One of the few Muslim political parties to survive Partition due to its location in south India (the more important one being the Indian Union Muslim League in Kerala), AIMIM started out as a kind or urban gang or protection racket in the old city of Hyderabad in the then state of Andhra Pradesh. Often working for and with larger parties at the regional, and eventually national, level, it was very much like the Shiv Sena in Bombay (as the city was then called). Both AIMIM and the Shiv Sena took advantage of India’s economic liberalisation and political fragmentation to expand their reach within and outside their respective states, though so far with limited success on the national stage. Both, in other words, have shifted in part or in whole from urban gangs to political parties, and achieved respectability along the way.
If Bal Thackeray and his nephew Raj represented the Shiv Sena’s old style of doing politics, his son Uddhavand grandson Aaditya stand for the new. For AIMIM, similarly, Akbaruddin Owaisi represents the old politics while his brother Asaduddin does the new. Like the Shiv Sena, AIMIM has expanded its base by bringing together different caste groups, with the latter forging an alliance between upper-caste Muslims and lower-caste Hindus particularly in Maharashtra. Both parties also stress their religious credentials while being open, with some notable exceptions like the Shiv Sena’s attacks on Muslims during the Bombay riots of 1992, to supporters from other communities. Yet AIMIM’s role in redefining Muslim politics goes well beyond such instructive comparisons in reaching back to the colonial past.
Like Jinnah a London-trained lawyer, Asaduddin Owaisi also resembles the All-India Muslim League’s last President in other ways. Apart from his obsessive insistence on secularism and constitutionalism in politics, Owaisi is the first Muslim leader since Jinnah who is able to criticise his community’s religious classes and their concerns without any risk to his own status. While immediately identifiable as a practicing Muslim, and in this way quite different from Jinnah, Owaisi’s fame depends upon his ability to represent his community without making theological arguments or even foregrounding religious issues. Like Jinnah, again, he represents Muslim capital and education in southern and western India, even if these are only manifested in aspirational terms for many of his supporters.
Future Imperfect
The Muslim League had represented the strongest vision of group rights and provincial autonomy in colonial India, however problematic some of its views might have been. Muslim politics after Independence, however, was reduced to a purely defensive practice of making claims in the name of culture and religion that had to be mediated at the national level by old élites. But this way of doing things itself came to an end with the destruction of the Babri Masjid. The nearly three subsequent decades of India’s economic liberalisation and political fragmentation allowed for the dissolution of Muslim politics as well. This meant breaking the monopoly of north India and its élites both internally, through low-caste politics, and externally by the emergence of new élites in other parts of the country.
While north India remains home to the nation’s largest Muslim population, as also the site of some of the most egregious violence and poverty it faces, the region can no longer define the future of politics in the community at large. From staking claim to the suspect federalism that remains part of the Constitution and tied them to the Muslim League’s colonial politics, Muslims have shifted to defending its unitary core. In this way they have accepted the same logic that animates both the Congress and the BJP, only seeking their more fulsome inclusion within it. But in doing so, they have paradoxically also managed to recover a political autonomy last seen in the salad days of the Muslim League.
As was the case with Jinnah’s own leadership of the League, the emergence of a new kind of Muslim politics today is tied to the rise of new social classes in the south and west of the country, but also to low-caste small and medium-sized entrepreneurship in the north. These groups are products of the same liberalisation that created caste politics in the provinces and Hindu nationalism at the Centre. But as India moves back to a statist politics under BJP rule, the attitudes and careers of such groups will also change. With the further fragmentation of low caste constituencies in north India and their absorption into Hindu nationalism, the space created for caste alliances across religious lines will likely shrink.
Regional autonomy, the other basis for a new Muslim politics, is also under threat but remains the most important site of resistance to a unitary state. In this sense it represents the last vestige of Indian federalism as a legacy of colonial-era Muslim politics. The irony of federalism as an antidote to communalism is that the more autonomy states get the less national integrity religious groups require. The period of political fragmentation and regionalisation India experienced starting in the 1990s, then, led both to the dissolution of a Muslim community at the national level and to its forcible reconstitution in a new and dispersed form in the face of Hindu nationalist consolidation. No longer able to set the precedent for others, Muslim politics must follow in their footsteps.
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