India’s Largest Minority Deserves Better Politics

Yogendra Yadav

“Republican Party doesn’t care for the Blacks as they won’t vote for it. Democratic Party doesn’t care either, as Blacks must vote for it.” This quip about American politics pretty much sums up the plight of Muslims in contemporary India.

While every other social group can choose to vote on bijali, sadak, pani or on padhai, dawai, kamai and what have you, Muslims are condemned to vote for survival, to escape lynching, bulldozers and riots. The party they cannot vote for treats them with antipathy and the party they cannot but vote for treats them with indifference, if not contempt.

This hostage-like situation is not of their own making. The rise of the BJP riding on vicious anti-Muslim vitriolic, cannot but push India’s largest religious minority into a corner. At the same time, it must be remembered that Muslim political leadership and the politics of “secular” parties contributed in no small measure to this fate. After all, the politics of keeping Muslims insecure and vulnerable, so as to pocket their en bloc votes, did not begin with the rise of the BJP.

This manifests itself in an intellectual trap. Very often, the responses of the “secular” camp on Muslim issues are no more than a mirror image of the “communal” Hindu majoritarian politics it opposes. The RSS-BJP set the agenda, we just invert whatever they say. BJP trolls would like to paint Muslims as one unified community of villains; we present Muslims as a homogenous group of victims. Both sides share the image of Muslims as a unified political bloc.

As the BJP moves ahead with its project of reducing every Hindu voter to his or her religious identity, we too collaborate by reducing every Muslim to his or her religion. The RSS-BJP insinuate that secularism is nothing but pro-Muslim posturing; we often confirm their suspicions by failing to distinguish a Muslim and a secular point of view. Secular guilt often leads to a competition to be more Muslim than Muslims.

This makes for weak understanding and poor politics, leaving no coherent agenda or effective agency for Muslims in today’s India, barring exceptional moments like the equal citizenship movement against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. They have three options — resentful submission to the logic of their marginality, shamefaced collusion with the regime or angry victimhood that leads to alienation. None of these is a dignified option. None of these offers any agency.

As the Shaheen Bagh movement showed, Muslim society has no dearth of leadership, creative ideas and energy. But this has no connect with mainstream politics. Forging a coherent and effective politics for a Muslim is among the most pressing and difficult political projects of our time.

My former colleague at CSDS and a dear friend, Hilal Ahmed, has written consistently, and of late furiously, to address this question. The publication of his latest book A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (completed before but published after 2024 elections), following his Hindi book Allah Naam Ki Siyaasat, is a consolidated and updated statement of the position he has taken in his popular and academic writings, both in Hindi and English, keeping his gaze firmly on the Muslim question, its past, present and future. This book concentrates on Muslims in “New India” since 2014.

Ahmed has carved out a unique location to address this question. I first noticed it in the odd trinity of photographs in his office at the CSDS: The Holy Kaaba, Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara. These represent the three radically different ideological perspectives that he seeks to integrate. He is a devout Muslim who says five prayers a day and keeps all the rojas during the Holy Ramzan. At the same time, he is a revolutionary, inspired by Marxism and committed to the ideas of equality and social justice in all realms of life. And if this combination was not enough, he believes in the Gandhian idea of sarv dharma sambhav and his brand of non-violent politics of satyagraha.

It is not easy to weave these strands and his attempt at this ideological integration is still a work in progress. But this has yielded a distinct view point: “I do not want to give up my identity as a Muslim; yet, at the same time, I do not want to speak only as a Muslim”. He invites us to think of a politics of “more than a Muslim”, the most compelling perspective on the Muslim question.

Incidentally, this may be a good standpoint for secular politics in general — one leg planted inside the community and its traditions and the other firmly placed outside it. Ahmed is deeply concerned about the everyday physical and symbolic assault on Muslims, but he does not allow his anxiety to get the better of his judgement. He is willing to register a nuance without losing sight of the big picture. He does not give in to the dark trope of shikwa that dominates writings on and by Indian Muslims that leaves the victim without any responsibility or agency.

At the same time, he leaves us wondering what this “more than Muslim” politics would look like. One thing is clear. The idea of one unified Muslim political bloc is unachievable, undesirable and counterproductive. A healthy politics of Indian Muslims will be a politics of many Muslim communities, each of which has more than one political option to choose from. In this he follows the pathbreaking work of political sociologist Imtiaz Ahmed.

There is no one Muslim community in India, just as there is no one Hindu community. There are innumerable communities that follow Islam, each with distinct ethnicities, languages, sociology-economic locations and, indeed, different religious practices. This goes against the project of a unified nation-wide Muslim political community that Muslim fundamentalists, some Muslim leaders and a section of clerics have worked for. The idea of a homogenised Muslim minority bloc can feed off and in turn contribute to the project of a homogenous Hindu political bloc that the BJP dreams of.

This is not about “dividing” Muslims. This is also about uniting local Muslim communities with non-Muslim communities with whom they share social and economic location. Following Ali Anwar’s pioneering work in Masawat ki Jung, Ahmed also foregrounds the pasmanda issue, that of backward and Dalit Muslim communities, that the Muslim elite wishes to elide.

This connects Muslim politics with Dalit, Adivasi and Bahujan politics. And in the footsteps of Asghar Ali Engineer, he visualises solidarity with other oppressed classes. Muslims are farmers, weavers, artisans, organised-sector workers, unemployed and so on. A principle energy of “more than Muslim” politics has to be on forging unity with others from all these categories, Muslims or non-Muslim.

That still leaves many, bigger, questions that the quest for “more than Muslim” politics faces: Does the hegemonic control of the BJP leave any space for these issues to be foregrounded? Should we expect mainstream non-BJP parties to take up this agenda? If not them, who? Which policy issues must this kind of politics raise first? Ahmed does not offer good answers to these difficult questions. Nor does anyone else.