Has India’s democracy failed its Muslims? Jailed scholar triggers debate

Has the world’s largest ideology failed the world’s largest number – its astir 200 cardinal Muslims? That question is astatine the bosom of a polarising statement presently nether mode successful India.

The statement started with Sharjeel Imam, a 38-year-old Muslim scholar, who gave a lengthy interrogation to an Indian quality website connected September 29 from his situation compartment successful New Delhi.

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Imam covered a wide scope of issues and raised uncomfortable questions astir the spot of the country’s Muslim minority, which forms astir 14 percent of India’s 1.4 cardinal population.

“There are astir 210 cardinal Muslims successful India – 1 of the biggest Muslim groups successful the world, with practically zero accidental successful this democracy,” Imam told the Indian quality outlet, The Quint.

He criticised the Indian constitution for its “enshrined centralisation” of powerfulness and called its marque of secularism “particularly Islamophobic and parochial”, adding that ideology was a instrumentality to contradict Muslims their governmental practice and rights.

Who is Sharjeel Imam?

Hailing from Jahanabad territory of Bihar, India’s poorest state, Imam graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay successful machine subject and worked arsenic a bundle technologist earlier returning to academics. As a doctoral pupil astatine the Centre for Historical Studies astatine New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), his superior probe country was the governmental past of India’s Muslims.

In 2019, months aft winning a 2nd word successful office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist authorities passed a arguable citizenship law, which granted an expedited pathway to Indian citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from India’s neighbouring countries. The United Nations called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) “fundamentally discriminatory” against Muslims.

The transition of the instrumentality ignited nationwide anti-CAA protests. Led by Muslims, mostly women, a weeks-long objection adjacent Shaheen Bagh, a densely-populated Muslim ghetto connected the southeastern borderline of New Delhi, became the epicentre of those protests.

Women protesters perceive to a talker successful New Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh successful December, 2019 [File: Altaf Qadri/AP]

Imam was 1 of the main organisers of the Shaheen Bagh sit-in. He was arrested successful January 2020 for inciting unit done speeches made astatine the protests.

But determination had been nary unit until his arrest. It came the adjacent period successful northeast New Delhi wherever anti-CAA sit-ins organised successful Muslim neighbourhoods were attacked by mobs, incited by hatred code from leaders from the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Despite him being already down bars erstwhile the unit broke out, Imam was charged with rioting, murder, attempted murder, sedition, and “promoting enmity connected grounds of religion” nether respective laws, including a stringent anti-terror law.

He was not the lone one. Nearly a twelve Muslim students and activists, including different JNU student Umar Khalid, were arrested and imprisoned for being the alleged conspirators successful the 2020 riots. They stay successful jailhouse without proceedings and repeatedly denied bail, with rights groups calling their continued incarceration a “gross maltreatment of power” and a glaring illustration of judicial oversight, successful which the accused are “guilty until proven innocent”.

According to Imam, specified an alleged maltreatment of powerfulness – particularly targeting Muslims – is systemic and goes backmost to the precise ideas down the founding of India arsenic a Hindu-majority country.

In his interrogation with The Quint, helium called India’s independency icon Mahatma Gandhi a “fascist” for making Congress – the enactment that led India’s state conflict and presently successful the absorption – an “essentially Hindu party” and for allegedly endorsing definite ideas and practices present pushed by Modi’s BJP and its ideological parent, the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Founded successful 1925 on the lines of the fascist parties successful Europe, the RSS aims to crook a constitutionally secular India into an taste Hindu state.

Imam besides accused autarkic India’s archetypal Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of “falsehood and mythmaking” for projecting India arsenic an ancient, “uniquely tolerant” civilisation successful his book, The Discovery of India.

But Imam reserved his astir scathing onslaught for India’s pro-secular liberals, arguing that determination is nary quality betwixt them and the supporters of the BJP and the RSS.

“In short, some secular and Hindutva frameworks stock the aforesaid halfway ideas – the story of uniformity, centralisation and denial of sharing of power,” helium said. Hindutva refers to the Hindu supremacist question championed by the RSS and the BJP successful bid to crook a constitutionally secular India into an taste Hindu state.

In a rebuttal successful The Quint, ineligible student Mohd Zeeshan Ahmad said Imam “raises superior humanities and ideological questions that cannot beryllium evaded simply due to the fact that helium is facing prosecution,” but that his “equation of secularism with Hindutva is unpersuasive”.

“Imam’s connection risks projecting Muslims arsenic a homogeneous governmental bloc, obscuring disagreements of class, caste, gender, portion and ideology,” Ahmad wrote.

“Where are the Pasmanda [less privileged castes] Muslims successful this governmental imagination? Where is the question of sex justice, including the rights of women wrong Muslim communities? Who gets to talk for the ‘Qaum’ [community], and whose experiences are rendered invisible erstwhile a singular governmental dependable claims to correspond it?”

But Irfan Ahmad, prof of anthropology and sociology astatine Ibn Khaldun University successful Istanbul, Turkiye, and writer of respective acclaimed books connected the Muslim question successful South Asia, told Al Jazeera that Imam is close successful questioning whether determination is simply a quality betwixt the Congress and the BJP erstwhile it comes to secularism.

“Indian nationalism rests connected a mendacious part betwixt ‘secular’ nationalism of the Congress, particularly done its figures similar Nehru and Gandhi, connected the 1 hand, and ‘communal’ right-wing forces connected the other,” helium said.

“The information is that from the beginning, the Congress had wrong what it depicted arsenic its outside: ethno-racist-Hindu nationalists. The travel of leaders betwixt the Congress and overtly Hindu parties was smooth,” helium added, citing Lala Lajpat Rai, K M Munshi, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, and Madan Mohan Malviya arsenic examples.

“K B Hedgewar, the RSS founder, was himself earlier successful the Congress.”

Gandhi was assassinated successful 1948 by a Hindu extremist believed to beryllium a subordinate of RSS [File: James A Mills/AP]

Ahmad, the professor, said the quality betwixt the Congress and the BJP is “of the aforesaid quality arsenic the 1 betwixt Republicans and Democrats successful the United States wherever some converge to beforehand ‘American interests’ and wage wars outside”.

“The occupation Indian Muslims look is not of enactment authorities but the precise Indian/Hindu nationalism which each governmental parties, including the Left, subscribe to, albeit not identically,” helium told Al Jazeera.

“If a ideology routinely makes a community, Muslims successful this case, invisible successful presumption of practice successful legislatures, past determination is thing fundamentally incorrect with this democracy. Declining ratio of Muslims successful parliament testifies to the silencing of Muslims.”

Ahmad says the “question worthy asking is: however close is the presumption of a secular India?”

On governmental empowerment of India’s Muslims

In his interrogation with The Quint, Imam suggested that India should person “constitutional republicanism” that guarantees decentralisation of powerfulness and much assemblage rights. He argued that the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent – which gave commencement to Muslim-majority Pakistan – “was forced by the Congress”.

He regarded Pakistan’s founding person Muhammad Ali Jinnah arsenic “a great, antiauthoritarian leader” and poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal arsenic his governmental inspiration. Calling for a faith-based separation of power, Imam underlined Iqbal’s telephone for the “creation of a Muslim India wrong India” and demanded proportional practice arsenic opposed to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) strategy successful Indian elections.

“As Iqbal and Jinnah rightly foresaw, FPTP with nary safeguards volition pb to imperishable marginalisation of Muslims who were, adjacent earlier partition, the hated minority, the hated ‘other’ of the emerging nationalist discourse,” helium said. “History has proved them right.”

A young lad displays his country’s nationalist emblem depicting portraits of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, left, and writer Allama Iqbal successful Karachi, Pakistan, August 12, 2004 [File: Aamir Qureshi/AFP]

Responding to Imam, a columnist who goes by the pseudonym Ibn-e-Khaldun Bharati, wrote successful The Print quality website that Imam represents an “Islamist agenda” which “demands the presumption of a federation – a Pakistan wrong the borders of India”.

Calling him “unapologetically anti-liberal, anti-secular, anti-democracy, anti-constitution – successful a word, anti-national,” Bharati claims Imam feels “an entitlement to the rulership of India, which has kept their thought-leaders confused astir whether they are a federation oregon a minority”.

“A federation needs a state, whereas a number needs law guarantees. Neither successful mentation nor successful signifier tin 1 beryllium some astatine the aforesaid time,” helium wrote. “But specified has been the ingenuity of Muslim leaders that they person managed to beryllium some simultaneously. They carved a state for themselves and besides secured peculiar privileges arsenic a number – a classical illustration of having one’s barroom and eating it too.”

Questioning Bharati’s submission, governmental expert Asim Ali pointed retired “the Kafkaesque quality of the full affair”.

“This is simply a antheral who has present been down bars for six years ostensibly for a code advocating a ‘chakka jam’ [road blockade] without immoderate telephone for unit alongside the adjacent much absurd complaint of conspiring to incite the Delhi riots that took spot a period aft helium was already successful jail,” Ali wrote successful a file for The Telegraph newspaper.

“The abstraction of acquisition for Muslims similar Imam includes not lone their idiosyncratic experiences of favoritism but besides of what they person learned astir the past of recurrent communal pogroms, the framing of Muslim men successful panic cases, the brutalities by policemen and truthful on,” Ali wrote, citing respective examples of constabulary atrocities successful the past decades.

While Ali argued that Imam’s depiction of Gandhi and Jinnah is “grossly distorted” and his speechmaking of the pre-independence and partition past arsenic “warped”, helium conceded that determination is “space for a idiosyncratic similar Imam successful a extremist antiauthoritarian task that strives for equality and liberty for everyone” successful India.

“Imam envisages a relation arsenic the caput of an intelligence unit radical of middle-class Muslim activists displacing the clerical constitution arsenic the main dependable articulating a ‘positive’ docket of ‘Muslim demands’,” Ali wrote.

Sharjeel Imam v Umar Khalid: The ‘model’ Muslim

When it comes to the question of aboriginal intelligence Muslim leadership, comparisons are often made betwixt Imam and Khalid. Both of them are often accused of being the “masterminds” of the 2020 New Delhi riots and are presently successful the aforesaid jailhouse successful the Indian capital.

But that is wherever their similarities end.

Khalid, 39, is simply a left-wing activistic who does not cull the Indian constitution – oregon its mentation of ideology oregon secularism – arsenic explicitly arsenic Imam does. He has besides often cited Gandhi and his connection of non-violent absorption successful his speeches and writings.

A protester successful New Delhi displaying a precocious published publication by Umar Khalid [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

Khalid is hailed by India’s Marxists and liberals arsenic a “model Muslim” who is being punished by an anti-Muslim authorities for his run against the BJP’s hatred politics. Global figures and rights groups often telephone for Khalid’s release.

Among them is New York City’s politician Zohran Mamdani, who, portion delivering the inaugural keynote code astatine the Nelson Mandela Global Leadership Forum successful July this year, questioned Khalid’s imprisonment.

“Why indispensable we hold arsenic Umar Khalid enters his sixth twelvemonth of captivity successful Delhi – a governmental captive jailed nether the aforesaid manufactured charges of coercion levelled against Madiba,” helium said, utilizing the sanction for Mandela commonly utilized by South Africans.

It was the 2nd clip Mamdani, who has Indian roots, had talked astir Khalid since being elected arsenic mayor. In January, helium met his parents and near the pursuing handwritten enactment for him: “Dear Umar, I deliberation of your words connected bitterness often, and the value of not letting it devour one’s self. It was a pleasance to conscionable your parents. We are each reasoning of you.”

Last month, Ireland-based quality rights organisation Front Line Defenders successful Dublin announced Khalid arsenic the victor of the 2026 Award for Human Rights Defenders astatine Risk.

Imam does not evoke specified planetary solidarities, which are chiefly constricted to India’s Muslim community.

“Take the illustration of Zohran Mamdani,” says Ahmad, the professor. “While Mamdani spoke astir Umar Khalid, what prevents him from adjacent mentioning – fto unsocial pleading for – names similar Sharjeel Imam?”

He says figures similar Mamdani oregon left-wing liberals successful India “find it convenient to talk for Umar Khalid due to the fact that helium is ‘secular’, successful that helium doesn’t posit himself arsenic a Muslim nor uses the vocabulary of Islam to articulate his politics”.

“But these figures support an eerie soundlessness astir Imam, who conducts his authorities successful an Islamic vocabulary … The eloquence of liberals astir Khalid and their soundlessness astir Imam is simply a motion of intelligence confusion, if not motivation cowardice.”

When asked if helium foresees Imam playing a relation successful an intelligence task of Muslim empowerment, Ahmad said portion helium had “no concealed cardinal to unlock the future”, helium did fearfulness that the “current authorities is acceptable to suppress specified voices”.

“In immoderate ways, the attraction of Imam by the authorities resonates with the imprisonment of Italy’s Antonio Gramsci successful 1926. At Gramsci’s trial, the authoritative said: ‘For 20 years, we indispensable halt this encephalon from functioning.’ Imam has already been unjustly languishing successful jailhouse for astir 7 years.”

Ahmad concluded by citing the 19th-century philosopher Henry David Thoreau to item the imprisonment of Imam, Khalid and different “prisoners of conscience” – some Muslims and non-Muslims.

“’The existent spot for a conscionable man’ successful an unjust bid ‘is besides a prison’,” helium said.