Ordinary Abduls and the Unravelling of India’s Pluralist Promise {Opinion piece on 'Islamophobia' in India}

A couple of days back few Muslim youths in Varanasi were arrested and taken into custody because they dared to break their fast and eat their own food on a boat in the holy river Ganga flowing through that sacred city. The other day, a Muslim man was beaten to death; in another incident, a Muslim young boy, invited by his friends to a birthday celebration, was shot dead at point-blank range by the same friend. Remarkably, a sitting Chief Minister used a media conclave to describe plans that appeared to encourage the deliberate creation of conditions forcing Muslims out of the state.

These are not random acts—they are symptoms of a longer, more painful reality for Muslims in India. The past twelve years have been long and painful for ordinary Abduls in India. Hardly a day passes without someone calling for the genocide of Muslims, without reports of lynching, arrests, or other forms of violence—and yet justice is rarely, if ever, delivered.

In fact, since the arrival of the British and the establishment of their rule—coinciding with the gradual decline of various Indian powers such as the Mughals, Marathas, Sikhs, and others—identity politics rooted primarily in religion began to creep into India’s social and political fabric. However, it was the competing communal politics of the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, accelerated by the colonial rulers and culminating in the creation of Pakistan, that truly triggered mass communal politics.

The Muslims who remained in India after Partition—choosing not to migrate to Pakistan, a country created in the name of Muslims—gradually became objects of ridicule, slur, lynching, and, increasingly, the outright denial of justice.

Hindu communalists, operating under various names and identities, have often left no opportunity go by to foment Hindu–Muslim riots and violence—whether small-scale or large—targeting Muslim lives and livelihoods. These actions have kept raw passions simmering within both communities.

The last twelve years have been especially painful. The regime has been unrelenting in targeting the livelihoods of ordinary Muslims—whether through the closure of small business i.e. meat shops, restricting Muslims from doing business in certain areas, or issuing almost daily calls for an economic boycott of Muslims. This has also included mandates requiring Muslim business owners to display their business names in ways that explicitly associate them with their faith.

The regime has further worked overtime to purge and sanitise the names and nomenclature of cities and towns that sound Muslim or Islamic, while simultaneously slashing budgetary allocations to the Ministry of Minority Welfare and diverting funds away from government policies meant to uplift minorities, including Muslims.

A popular democracy rests on universal franchise, enabling citizens to have a say in the election of their representatives. Much to the dismay of many, the current dispensation has ensured not only the absence of Muslim representation from its political platform, but also the deletion of Muslim names from electoral rolls. We have also witnessed the passage of the CAA and NRC—from bills into law—creating a pathway to citizenship for non-Muslim refugees and undocumented migrants, while denying the same to Muslim refugees. By repeatedly outlining a ‘chronology’ in which the CAA would precede a nationwide NRC, Amit Shah articulated a policy sequence that critics argued would disproportionately imperil Muslims—an interpretation he has denied. That denial carries little to no weight, given this regime’s well-documented reliance on dog-whistling and doublespeak.

A dominant section of Hindus appears to have sleepwalked into a radical Hindutva ideology, deriving pleasure from persecuting and harassing ordinary Muslims across much of North India. One cannot help but feel a grim irony in the way a section now chooses to celebrate religious festivals—not within homes or temples, but by dancing to filthy and racist songs in front of masjids and other places of Muslim religious significance. So pervasive has this menace become that Muslims increasingly drape their mosques in tarpaulin to protect them from mob vandalism.

In a thriving democracy, political parties represent and advance their vision of a good life by incorporating the aspirations of the entire populace—from the most privileged to the most deprived. Disappointingly, competing communal politics and the cold calculus of electoral victory have hollowed out almost all political parties. Few now dare to even name Muslims; instead, they are subsumed under the vague category of “minorities,” stripped of name and distinct identity—so much for the promise of sab ka saath, sab ka vikaas!

This is among the most worrisome and far-reaching consequences of communal politics: an entire community has been rendered faceless and nameless. There is no way of knowing how long this will continue, or how this deprivation will manifest itself in the years to come.

If any Abdul dares to speak out—whether on the street or in Parliament—he is routinely told to go to Pakistan or Iran, and subjected to slurs about his identity, including references to circumcision, often without any consequence for the aggressors. It has long been an irksome yet tolerated reality for Muslims when congregational prayers spill onto the roads; suddenly, this is deemed a crime.

At the same time, Hindus remain free to celebrate in front of mosques, occupy roads for the Kanwar Yatra, Jagran, and various other festivals, without similar scrutiny or restraint. Recently, some Muslims have been arrested for offering prayers within the boundaries of their own homes. In another instance, a senior police officer—Circle Officer Kuldeep Kumar—reportedly told Muslim elders at a peace committee meeting in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, “If you are so concerned about Iran, go there and fight,” warning them against protesting or raising slogans. He also cautioned that prayers would be permitted only inside mosques and not on roads, threatening severe police action against anyone who defied the order.

At the same time, sections of radical Hindus remain free to conduct havan and other religious rituals in support of Israel. The list of such brazen and blatant acts of injustice and discrimination is endless. A closer scrutiny reveals a disturbing pattern in law enforcement: a Muslim is often persecuted harshly, his home demolished at the slightest accusation, while similar actions involving Hindus rarely invite the same response.

A complicit judiciary, communal and supine politicians, and a partisan bureaucracy together form a recipe for disaster. Sections of the Indian judiciary have been called out for Islamophobia—most notably when a judge in Kerala coined the term “Love Jihad,” which was later appropriated by the Hindutva brigade to justify vigilantism, resulting in numerous deaths. These groups often operate outside any legal framework, taking the law into their own hands to harass and persecute Muslims.

The significance of the idea of “Love Jihad” lies not so much in the reality of inter-faith marriages, but in its ability to convince gullible Hindus of an imagined Muslim conspiracy. This sinister campaign has multi-faceted and far-reaching effects: first, it portrays ordinary Muslims as cunning and conspiratorial, supposedly intent on destroying the social fabric of otherwise unsuspecting and peaceful Hindu communities.

This is, in fact, a clever device to mask the heterogeneity and internal differences within the larger Hindu society—and, more broadly, within Indian society itself. Complex hierarchies, inequalities, and injustices are flattened into a binary, where all distinctions are reduced to just two identities: Hindu and Muslim.

The Hindutva brigade, enjoying the benediction of the present ruling dispensation, leaves no opportunity unused to polarise Hindus and Muslims—be it over the hijab, halal food, the Uniform Civil Code vis-à-vis Muslim personal law, historical places of worship and structures, figures such as Tipu Sultan, Aurangzeb, and Shivaji, or even language and institutions like Urdu and madrasas. Even the most basic freedom of expression—such as Muslims reacting to events in other Muslim countries or territories—is viewed with suspicion.

Any form of protest, or even the expression of sorrow or happiness, is swiftly called out and their allegiance questioned. At the same time, radicalised Hindus remain free to openly project figures like Trump and Netanyahu as their heroes. Multiple studies have found that India is among the major global sources of fake news and Islamophobic content.

For every such incident, our fellow Indian Muslim liberals and their secular cohorts prescribe that the aggrieved should be “more Indian,” without ever explaining what that “more Indian” actually means. Muslims, spread across the length and breadth of India, form a deeply diverse community. There is no single unifying feature among them except their faith—interpreted in varied and differing ways, as with any other religion or belief system. They speak the same languages as their Hindu, Sikh, and Christian counterparts; they eat the same food and dress like everyone else. Yet there is scarcely a moment when they are not told what to do, what not to eat, how to dress, and even how to practice their faith.

It is often believed that liberal Indian Muslims—typically ensconced in well-paid jobs or businesses and enjoying proximity to the ruling dispensation—have rarely been seen contributing meaningfully to improving the conditions of ordinary Abduls beyond armchair pronouncements. This is the same segment that, in the past, collaborated with the British and advocated for a separate country for Muslims. In truth, this group has displayed scant sustained concern for the everyday hardships of ordinary Muslims, choosing instead to prioritise self-interest and deploy its access and resources for limited, parochial ends.

In my view, this segment of Indian Muslims—both in the past and in the present—has remained focused on self-preservation rather than collective wellbeing. How else does one justify its persistent tendency to demean and denigrate Muslim faith as lived by ordinary people, along with their interpretations, customs, traditions, languages, and modes of dress? Having said that, I do not condone conservatism, nor do I defend the absence of analytical thinking among Muslims in general. Conservatism is widespread across other Indic faiths as well. In fact, we are witnessing a broader resurgence of conservatism across most major religions and belief systems. Muslims, however, find themselves particularly at the receiving end—both because of their visible presence and conspicuous religious practices, and because certain strands of conservatism within the community verge on obscurantism.

One struggles to find even a mild criticism from this segment of Indian Muslims directed at the perpetrators or facilitators of atrocities against Muslims, or even a principled condemnation of aggression when it is committed by non-Muslims. Their sermons and admonitions, it seems, are reserved almost exclusively for ordinary Abduls.

The Indian subcontinent is not new to Islam or Muslims. It is, in fact, one of the regions where Muslims settled in the very early days of Islam. Islam was introduced primarily through traders in southern India, and through invasion and conversion in the northern, western, and eastern parts of the country. As with all religions, the arrival of a new faith and new converts led to a process of symbiosis, resulting in practices that differed slightly from the original forms. Local converts, while embracing a new idea of God, also infused their cultural practices into the faith, giving it a distinct identity. While retaining elements of their past, they adopted new customs, rituals, and practices of their new religion. It is precisely this novelty that is often exploited by bigots, especially within modern systems of populist politics.

Slowly, it appears that the India I grew up in is drifting away from its pluralist, secular foundations toward a majoritarian vision of democracy—echoing trajectories seen in countries like Israel and Pakistan, where formal democratic institutions coexist with systemic inequalities that leave minorities legally protected yet mmubstantively disadvantaged.

tsk tsk. From the article: " The Muslims who remained in India after Partition—choosing not to migrate to Pakistan, a country created in the name of Muslims—gradually became objects of ridicule, slur, lynching, and, increasingly, the outright denial of justice.

The regime has been unrelenting in targeting the livelihoods of ordinary Muslims—whether through the closure of small business i.e. meat shops, restricting Muslims from doing business in certain areas, or issuing almost daily calls for an economic boycott of Muslims. This has also included mandates requiring Muslim business owners to display their business names in ways that explicitly associate them with their faith.

The regime has further worked overtime to purge and sanitise the names and nomenclature of cities and towns that sound Muslim or Islamic

In another instance, a senior police officer—Circle Officer Kuldeep Kumar—reportedly told Muslim elders at a peace committee meeting in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, “If you are so concerned about Iran, go there and fight,” warning them against protesting or raising slogans

tsk tsk

India in the past 14 years has changed the names of cities with Islamic names:

Allah-abad to Prayagraj (restoring the ancient name of the place which is a Hindu pilgramage site)

Faizabad to Ayodhya (restoring the name of an ancient city and birthplace of one of the Hindu Gods)

Aurangabad to Sambhajinagar (changing the name from that of a fundamentalist muslim Mughal emperor to that of a Hindu king who fought against him)

Osmanabad to Dharahiv (restoring the name to that of the ancient temple site nearby)

Ahmed-nagar to Ahilya-nagar (changed to that of a Hindu queen)

Congratulations to Poland and the nice run it had to include the great Polish-Lithuanian Federation. I'm sorry that the once-beautiful city of Poland got absolutely destroyed in WW2. Now get used to women voting and the threat it presents to your civilization. The invaders are already here and the work gets hard again (like in the past).

I moved out of Warsaw 5 years ago, but yes, it is very beautiful even now.

especially Nowy Świat or Cytadela area or krakowskie Przedmieście.

But there are still plenty of beautiful cities around - Krakow, Gdansk, Lodz etc.

i’ve read numbers that it was over 100 million over the centuries from the 10th century (first invasion) to 1800 and the defeat of Tipu sultan.

the sad part is that these indian mohammedans as well as the Mohammedans in pakistan and Bangladesh are nearly 100% descendants of the conquered people, not the conquerors

They don’t seem too popular and we’re bringing their problems here. Is the answer 5,000 or so ethnic entities throughout the world based on self determination? Migration boundaries will continual to evolve fit the new realities. In that case the US would disappear. Creating Israel-did it help?

The news stories I have seen over the past few years that describe attacks on trains and other violence against Moslems by Hindus were retaliations for Moslem massacres of Manuy Hindus are not passive victims like Europeans and preTrump Americans. You burn our village and we waylay your trains. Buddhists in Burma uncharacteristically finally reacted to the Moslem Rohinga invasion from Bangla Desh and subsequent massacres of Burmese villages by tit for tat retaliation that has forced most of the surviving Moslems back into Bangla Desh. Europe and America need to wake up and emulate Ferdinand and Isabella. Moslems must be expelled totally or forcibly converted to Christianity with enforced weekly attendance. Yes, Christianity. It is the religion of the West and any other or atheism is not sufficient. The forced generation will not actually convert in their hearts and minds but their progeny will gradually become members of the society into which they are born.

Not surprising, even at this late stage, as Islam entered India not by missionaries and voluntary conversions, but by primarily by war. It began peaceful enough via Arab traders on the coasts of India but within a century that became a minor influence as it was replaced by war

Muslim conquests in India were
a series of campaigns spanning from the 7th century to the 16th century, starting with Arab advancements into Sindh and culminating in the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate (1206) and the Mughal Empire (1526). These conflicts, led by figures like Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni, and Babur, established centuries of Muslim rule in northern India.

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