THE POLITICAL ERASURE OF INDIAN MUSLIMS
Harsh Mander
More Muslims live in India than in any other country in the world barring Indonesia and Pakistan. Yet, for the first time since India’s independence, its Muslims have been rendered electorally dispensable and therefore politically irrelevant. The Hindu Right has dispossessed India’s Muslims of meaningful political participation and fair representation while altering electoral politics to cast Muslims as a political liability.
Yet in 2023, the country’s ruling party – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), controlling a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament and governing, either alone or in coalition, in 15 of the country’s 36 states and Union Territories – had an almost complete absence of Muslim representation, to an extent never seen since India’s first general election as an independent nation in 1952. The party had no elected Muslim member in either chamber of the parliament, or in all but one state legislative assembly. Its only elected Muslim legislator was in Tripura, the sole exception among the party’s 1657 legislators across all states, and in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the parliament, it counted only a single Muslim representative, in a nominated seat. And, for the first time since India won its freedom, there was not a single Muslim minister in the national cabinet.
With this exclusion, the country’s elected leadership sent out a stark and unambiguous message to the 200 million Muslim citizens of what is now the world’s most populous country: we don’t need your votes to hold political power. Ideologues of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s organisational parent, have since the time of its formation nearly a hundred years ago favoured the remoulding of pluralist India into a Hindu nation in which Muslims (and Christians) are “allowed” to live only as second-class citizens. The absolute absence of Muslims from any elected office in the BJP’s control portended their descent into lesser substantive citizenship.
This was a victory for the RSS and BJP’s Hindu majoritarian politics, advancing India closer than ever before to their goal of the expulsion of Muslims from participation in the governance of the country of which they are constitutionally equal citizens. It marked a sombre milestone in the journey of the Indian republic. Indian Muslims have been rendered electorally dispensable and therefore politically irrelevant; some might even go further and regard them a political liability.
THIS POLITICAL MARGINALISATION of India’s Muslims is not sudden, although the pace of their downgrading has greatly accelerated since 2014, when the BJP’s Narendra Modi assumed national power.
India’s Partition in 1947 saw the breaking away of two large land masses on its eastern and western flanks that were home to sizable Muslim majorities. The Muslims who chose to remain in India were populous but geographically dispersed. As it drafted the country’s constitution, India’s constituent assembly reflected extensively on ways to secure adequate representation for three vulnerable and disadvantaged communities: the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and Muslims. The idea of separate electorates for separate communities was firmly rejected, but the constituent assembly considered the reservation of some constituencies for particular communities to ensure that disadvantaged groups were represented in the parliament and state legislatures in proportion to their populations. Early drafts of the constitution contained provisions for reservations for religious minorities in electoral constituencies, government jobs and even the cabinet, but in the final draft Muslims were excluded from all political safeguards. Reservations were approved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but not for Muslims.
The political scientist Shefali Jha has reflected on how the members of the constituent assembly committed to religious freedom for religious minorities, but were stout in their opposition to special political rights for them greater than for the majority Hindu community. In the shadow of Partition, some members feared that reservations for the Muslim minority in government jobs would potentially be divisive.
B R Ambedkar, who led the drafting of the constitution, was remarkably perspicacious in his insight that a majority is not a political but rather a communal entity in India. In Britain, he observed, a majority is “made” by issues and policies; in India, the majority – that is, the Hindu majority – is “born”, and is therefore communal, inherently hostile to caste, tribal and religious minorities. The fact of Ambedkar’s insight makes it all the more remarkable that the final version of the constitution included political safeguards for caste and tribal minorities but withheld them from religious minorities.
It was a considerable challenge to secure, without reservations, fair Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha – the lower house of the Indian parliament, to which members are elected by universal adult franchise in a first-past-the-post system. This was because Muslims, although they constituted nearly 10 percent of the Indian population even at Independence, had very few constituencies in which they alone could determine electoral outcomes – even if all the Muslims in an area voted for the same candidate.
Of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies today, in as few as 15 do Muslims comprise more than 50 percent of the electorate. The sobering reality is that Muslims are in the minority in 97 percent of India’s parliamentary constituencies. What is more, they form the majority in only two Union Territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Lakshadweep – and in none of the country’s states. (Jammu and Kashmir, earlier India’s only Muslim-majority state, was made a Union Territory in 2019 and placed under the direct rule of the union government in New Delhi.) They have a significant presence, though still far short of a majority, in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, and less significant but still substantial populations in Assam, Kerala and Telangana. This means, as the political scientist Adnan Farooqui has explained, not only that Muslims in India are a dispersed minority but also that they are greatly outnumbered by other religious communities.
Therefore, today just as at Independence, even if Muslims voted as a bloc – and much research confirms that they do not – they could define electoral outcomes by themselves only in a tiny handful of constituencies. This, however, did not in itself erase the possibility of significant political participation by Muslims in the newly independent and democratic India. It did mean that Muslim voters would need to build meaningful and effective alliances with non-Muslim parties that were not ideologically hostile to them, and also with non-Muslim voters.
This implied first that there was no future for Muslim-identity national parties – ones that would call upon Muslims to vote as Muslims, assuming shared interests of religious identity that overcame the massive diversity among Indian Muslims of language, culture, gender, caste and class. As a result, India today has no national Muslim parties like the Muslim League, which was a major political force before Partition. The few predominantly Muslim parties that exist have influence restricted only to a few geographical pockets: the two Indian Union Muslim Leagues in Kerala, the All-India United Democratic Front in Assam and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen in Telangana. These have garnered negligible electoral support when they nominate candidates beyond their local bases.
The second implication is that Muslims would be called upon most often to vote for non-Muslim candidates, in partnership with voters of other communities, based on their assessment of which political party and candidate could best protect and advance their interests.
This brings to mind an iconic film, M S Sathyu’s Garm Hawa. Released in 1974, it depicts the poignant predicament of a Muslim patriarch in Agra determined not to migrate to Pakistan, until sustained suspicion and discrimination compel him in the end to opt to go. In the film’s final sequence, as the protagonist is riding to the railway station on a horse-drawn tanga to catch a train to Pakistan, he sees a procession of protestors waving, significantly, a red flag, not a green one. He alights from the tanga and asks the driver to return to his home, while he himself joins the procession. In this way, the film affirms that the Indian Muslim has a political future in India, not enclosed in the separate identity of a follower of Islam but instead as an Indian citizen walking shoulder to shoulder with other Indians in collective struggles for justice and equality.
It is important also to underline that both Indian Muslims and Indians of other identities learnt, in the decades after Independence, that the person they elect may be of any particular religion, caste or gender identity, but once elected she represents not just people of her identity but also of every identity in her constituency.
In these ways, Indian Muslims learnt to participate effectually and energetically in electoral politics even without affirmative reservations of the kind that other historically disadvantaged communities were awarded, and without high concentrations of population in sufficient numbers of constituencies to significantly influence overall electoral outcomes.
On these premises, India’s political parties – with the notable exception of the RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Jana Sangh, later to become the BJP – ensured, however imperfectly and incompletely, the inclusion of Muslim citizens in electoral democracy through the early decades after Independence; and Muslim citizens participated in the heat and dust, the rough and tumble of the Indian people’s grand democratic adventure.
HOWEVER, this has changed. The evolving numbers of Muslims elected to the parliament and state assemblies tell their own story.
Farooqi has detailed how, on average, Muslims constituted around 5 percent of the directly elected Lok Sabha members from India’s first general election in 1952 to the general election of 2019. Muslims formed over 9 percent of the Indian population at Independence, and 14 percent as of India’s 2011 census – the last one conducted to date. Therefore, the Muslim presence in the Lok Sabha has historically been proportionate, in rough terms, to between half and a third of the Muslim population.
Farooqui identifies four phases in democratic India’s political history. The first ran from 1952 and the inaugural general election to 1971, and was marked by a single dominant political pole: the Indian National Congress. The second phase, from 1977 to 1989, was when the Congress declined and then rose again. The third phase, from 1989 to 2014, was marked by the decline of secular electoral support for the Congress, the steady rise of the BJP with its more communal support base, and the vacuum left by the Congress’s decline being filled by numerous smaller parties with disadvantaged-caste or regional support bases. And the fourth, from 2014 onwards, has been characterised by the rise again of a single dominant pole of electoral politics: this time, the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP.
It is instructive to see how Muslim representation in the parliament evolved in each of these phases. Farooqui calculates that Lok Sabha representatives of Muslim identity formed an average of 5 percent of the house in the first phase – proportional to nearly half the Muslim share of the population, which stood at 11 percent. Their presence peaked in the second phase, from 1977 to 1989, in which the Congress was first defeated and then rose to its best electoral performance ever, in 1984. Muslim representatives now comprised 8 percent of the house, close to proportionate to their population share, which remained at 11 percent. In the third phase, dominated by coalitions of regional parties and the steady rise of the BJP, from 1989 to 2014, Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha fell to 6 percent, proportionate to around half the Muslim share of the population, which now stood at 12 percent. In 2014, the share of Muslim Lok Sabha representatives plunged to its lowest mark; and in 2019, as Modi’s BJP secured reelection, there was only a marginal improvement. Now Muslims formed around 4 percent of the house, against a population share of around 14 percent.
As the social scientist Iqbal A Ansari explains, the Congress contributed 71 percent of Muslim Lok Sabha representatives in the first phase, during its indisputable dominance; then 58 percent and 33 percent in the next two phases. In these latter phases, the numbers of Muslim representatives from rising regional parties counteracted a further decline in the Congress’s Muslim representation. But in 2014, as the Congress fell to its lowest tally ever in the Lok Sabha, securing just 8 percent of the seats in the house, the regional parties also recorded lower representation of Muslim representatives. Even in Uttar Pradesh, with the highest Muslim population of any Indian state, not a single Muslim MP was elected.
Incidentally, among Indian states with Muslims forming over 15 percent of the population, Kerala, Assam, West Bengal, Bihar and (before it was stripped of statehood) Jammu and Kashmir have generally sent higher numbers of Muslim representatives to the Lok Sabha. Among other states with high proportions of Muslims, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand have emerged as negative outliers. The proportion of Muslims among Uttar Pradesh’s representatives peaked in the early 1980s, at 18 percent, but in 2014 the state elected not a single Muslim candidate. Jharkhand has sent only one Muslim to the Lok Sabha across all five general elections since the state’s creation in 2000. And then there are many states with high Muslim populations that have maintained, from the start, a kind of political untouchability regarding Muslim representatives. Muslims form 14 percent of the population in Uttarakhand, 9 percent in Tripura, and 8 percent in Manipur and Goa – yet all these states have no history of Muslim representatives. Gujarat, with 9 percent of its population being Muslim, has just one Muslim legislator in its state assembly, and has not elected a single Muslim to the Lok Sabha since 1984.
However, Farooqui and the political scientist Eswaran Sridharan have also pointed to how, right up to 2018, non-BJP political parties used their presence in the Rajya Sabha, whose membership is largely determined through indirect elections by members of the state legislatures – to compensate for the under-representation of Muslims in the Lok Sabha. The scholar Hilal Ahmed evaluates the comparatively higher Muslim presence in the Rajya Sabha in three ways: “(a) It marks a symbolic representation of Muslim as a social category, without evoking the notion of religion-based reservation; (b) it enhances and ensures a deliberative democracy and (c) it helps in articulating those ideas and claims that have not yet become full-fledged electoral issues.”
From 1952 to 1977, of a total of 1381 elected Rajya Sabha members, 137 were Muslims. This meant that Muslims formed roughly 10 percent of the house – a figure just below their 11-percent share of the population. From 1977 to 1989, of a total of 451 elected members, 40 were Muslim; Muslims again accounted for 10 percent of the upper house, while they formed 12 percent of the population. This was sustained and even bettered between 1990 and 2018, when the share of Muslim Rajya Sabha representatives matched the Muslim share of the population, at 13 percent. In this period, out of 869 elected members, 112 were Muslims. Yet it is noteworthy that the Congress, which earlier had accounted for the majority of Muslim Rajya Sabha representatives, in this last phase had a much smaller number of them than was once usual. In 2018, among 233 elected Rajya Sabha members, there were just five Muslim representatives from the Congress, three from the Samajwadi Party, two from the BJP, and eight more from other parties.
When the terms of the two Muslim BJP representatives ended, the party chose to replace them with non-Muslims, expunging even this token Muslim representation from its parliamentary contingent across both houses.
The situation is not much better in the state legislatures. In the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly, the closest Muslim representation has ever gotten to matching the Muslim population share was in 2012: 17 percent representation against a population share of roughly 19 percent. Relative high points – in 1977, 1985 and 2007 – saw representation ranging from 11 to 14 percent at best, while low points – in 1967, 1991 and 2017 – saw representation of 6 percent or lower. The state’s 2022 assembly election brought representation up to 8.7 percent, but that was against a Muslim population share of 19.5 percent.
Another example is Assam, which has the highest proportion of Muslims of any Indian state. (That title belonged to Jammu and Kashmir until it was demoted from a state to a Union Territory.) Its legislative assembly saw peak Muslim representation in 1983, when the figure matched Muslims’ 26-percent population share in the state. The record low came in 1962, with representation at 12.4 percent, proportionate to roughly half the population. Roughly a quarter of the current state assembly is Muslim, against a population share of 38 percent. Tellingly, not a single one of the present Muslim representatives is from the BJP, which is by far the largest party in the chamber. All the Muslims legislators are from the Indian National Congress and the All India United Democratic Front – the latter party widely perceived to represent Assamese Muslims of Bengali origin.
A CAVEAT: as Ahmed reminds us, even if Muslims were elected to the parliament and state legislatures in proportions equal to their population shares, this would not in itself guarantee adequate representation of their interests. To take just one example, there were as many as 69 Muslim legislators in the Uttar Pradesh government led by Akhilesh Yadav and his Samajwadi Party from 2012 to 2017, 45 of them from the ruling party – yet the 2013 anti-Muslim riots in Muzaffarnagar transpired on this government’s watch, with the state administration failing shamefully on preventing the violence, ensuring justice or providing the victims with relief and rehabilitation. It is also essential to remember that Indian Muslims are a highly diverse socio-religious community, no different in this respect from Hindus, Christians and Sikhs. Higher Muslim representation is in itself no guarantee of greater democratisation.
The historian Harbans Mukhia notes how, in popular but often even in scholarly discourse, when we speak of the “Hindu community” we do not take long to highlight the innumerable divisions within it, especially those of caste (and gender); but Muslims are generally assumed to have just one homogenised identity, never mind the numerous differences and stratifications among them. Between Indian Muslims, there are vast differences of income, wealth, employment, housing, social standing and access to political power; and also of sect, ethnicity, language, gender and – what is peculiar to the practice of Islam in Southasia – caste.
The writer and social activist Asghar Ali Engineer, in a scathing article from all the way back in 1978 titled ‘What Have the Muslim Leaders Done?’, observes that “the most important problem of the Indian Muslims is economic; in fact all the other problems revolve around this inescapable fact of massive Muslim poverty.” He adds that the “problem is not merely of jobs … but also of the livelihood of the poorest of the Muslims.” But “the role of the Muslim leadership has been most disappointing” in addressing this problem.
The failure is not just in the political representation of impoverished Muslims. In more recent decades, the rise of movements for the equality of Muslim women and Pasmanda Muslims – that is, Muslims of disadvantaged castes – have reminded us of the massive deprivations among people of Muslim identity involving not just class but also caste and gender. In light of this, simple tallies of Muslim representatives are profoundly inadequate as barometers of egalitarian Muslim representation and participation in Indian democratic and political life.
Take the large diversity of caste among Muslims. “Pasmanda” is Persian for those who are left behind. The vast majority of Indian Muslims are Pasmanda, or converts from disadvantaged castes. But the overwhelming majority of Muslim political leaders are from the upper echelons of the Muslim caste hierarchy – the Ashraf. The sociologist Khalid Anis Ansari argues that if one could disaggregate data along caste lines, it would be clear that only disadvantaged-caste Muslims are underrepresented in the parliament and state assemblies, not dominant-caste Muslims.
And then, most Muslim representatives are men – and few are from working-class backgrounds. Even if Muslims are elected to office in large numbers, if their representatives are elitist, casteist and patriarchal, the large mass of Indian Muslims will remain unrepresented.
Ahmed affirms that the dominant faces of Indian Muslim political leadership have indeed been upper-class and dominant-caste men. Their paramount political agendas have been the protection of Urdu, Muslim personal law, the minority character of Aligarh Muslim University and waqf properties. Mukhia recalls the historic lost opportunity of the Shah Bano moment in the mid-1980s, when a Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi could have recognised Muslim voices from beyond the clergy and Muslim aspirations beyond those articulated by clerics. It chose not to, and the country paid dearly.
At the same time, to advocate for the interests of Muslim women as well as disadvantaged-caste and working-class Muslims, one does not necessarily have to be Muslim. In the bloody aftermath of Partition, when Muslims faced their gravest existential crisis as Indian citizens, the interests of Indian Muslims were defended heroically by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who gave his life for their equal citizenship, as well as by Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel – all non-Muslims. They worked hand in hand with Maulana Azad, who, along with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was the greatest Muslim leader of India’s struggle for freedom.
However, the issue of numbers is still significant. In a country as diverse as India, until the advent of the BJP as the single new pole of Indian politics, pluralism was acknowledged to be “the bedrock of India’s democracy”, as the political scientist Zoya Hasan describes. Pluralism, Hasan writes, “was a way of demonstrating that India’s democracy represented everyone and this gradually became the cornerstone of Indian political practice.” The erosion of this core political principle in the decade after 2014 has “eroded the secular and pluralist basis of the nation.”
Even Ansari, an advocate of the reservation of constituencies for Muslims who insisted that “the persistent pattern of under-representation of a large religious community has to be removed”, writes that “the wider issue of empowerment of minorities … cannot be achieved merely by having numerically adequate representation of each group. It will require much more.” Sufficient numbers of Muslims in the parliament and state legislatures, as well as the national and state cabinets, are necessary but admittedly not sufficient to ensure that the interests of India’s Muslims – especially those of disadvantaged caste, class and gender – are protected.
THE LOW REPRESENTATION of Muslims in the Lok Sabha is the result also of a reluctance right from India’s first general election, conducted in the aftermath of Partition, to select large numbers of Muslims as electoral candidates on the part of all the national political parties. This was for fear of alienating sections of Hindu voters, who were assumed to be averse to Muslim candidates. Up to 1977, only 4 percent of the candidates of India’s major political parties were Muslims. From then until 2014, this percentage doubled, with many Muslim candidates coming from parties other than the Congress and the BJP. Interestingly, the party that has fielded the smallest share of Muslim candidates except the BJP is the Congress: just 7 percent of its Lok Sabha candidates from 1952 to 2019 were Muslims.
What is also significant is that right up to the 14th general election in 2004 Muslim candidates won mostly from constituencies in which Muslims formed a minority. This means that candidates’ Muslim identity was not a barrier to voter support from large numbers of non-Muslim voters.
However, this changed significantly from the 2009 election onwards. This phase marked the political ghettoisation of the Indian Muslim. Now Muslim candidates for the Lok Sabha were mostly elected from constituencies in which Muslims formed 40 percent or more of the population. Significantly, this phase also marked the triumphal rise of the BJP as the central force in Indian politics. Before this, Muslims were acceptable candidates to represent non-Muslims in many constituencies. Since 2009, Muslim representatives have depended mainly on Muslim voters for support.
The story of Muslim representation in the 2024 general election is particularly instructive. The BJP nominated only one Muslim candidate across all of India, in a constituency in Kerala, and this candidate lost. But the parties of the opposition, grouped into the INDIA alliance, also nominated a historically low number of Muslim candidates – just 35 all put together. The Congress fielded only 19, the Trinamool Congress six, the Samajwadi Party four, and the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference and the Kerala-based Indian Union Muslim League three each. Even from such a small number of Muslim candidates, however, 21 were elected. The total number of Muslim representatives in the present Lok Sabha is 24, including two independents from Jammu and Kashmir and one representative from the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. This means that while the INDIA parties nominated a historically low number of Muslims, their success rate was high enough to ensure that this Lok Sabha has around the same number of Muslim representatives as in the two last Lok Sabhas.
Despite this, in effect, the Indian Muslim has been thrust into a political ghetto. And from the ghetto the journey to the margins and then to oblivion is not very long.
WHAT CHANGED so drastically in India’s political landscape with the rise of Hindu nationalism in Indian politics? The Hindu Right has never hidden its hostility to the Indian Muslim. It never sought or depended on Muslim votes to come to power. But the run-up to the 2014 general election marked a new stridency and shrillness in the BJP’s anti-Muslim politics.
The political common sense until this decisive rightward turn in India’s electoral politics was that no party could hope to come to national power on a belligerently anti-Muslim platform. This was because Muslims were considered too populous a minority to be completely alienated. It is true, as we already observed, that they constitute a majority in very few constituencies. But in a first-past-the-post electoral democracy, victories are often won by small margins, and therefore the Muslim vote was thought to be potentially critical in a large number of constituencies.
Moreover, the reasoning went until 2014, the BJP could not realistically expect to come to power on its own, and many of the political parties it could hope to draw into an alliance would be dependent on Muslim votes. The BJP’s pre-2014 approach to attaining national power was the alliance model orchestrated by the party stalwart Atal Behari Vajpayee in his time as prime minister between 1998 and 2004, with power shared with numerous parties that drew political support from Muslim voters. The anti-Muslim rhetoric and practice of the Vajpayee government was therefore relatively muted.
But the political juggernaut of the Narendra Modi-led BJP stormed and dismantled this political common sense. The BJP fired its arsenal of anti-Muslim rhetoric in its 2014 election campaign, and did more of the same in the state assembly elections that followed. This became even more raucous in the 2019 general election, and achieved a climax in the 2024 general election campaign, led from the front by the prime minister himself. The BJP made clear that it neither solicited Muslim votes nor would depend on alliances with political parties that were ideologically opposed to its hostility to Muslims.
This aversion to the Muslim vote, which was inextricably tied to an aversion to the Muslim voter, was articulated by BJP political leaders through increasingly explicit dog-whistle rhetoric. Days ahead of the 2019 vote, K S Eshwarappa, then the deputy chief minister of a BJP-led government in Karnataka, declared that his party would not give electoral tickets to Muslims as they did not believe in the BJP. He also said that Muslims who voted for the Congress were killers, while those who voted for the BJP were “good”. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath, went further when he described his state’s 2022 assembly election as a contest between the 80 percent and the 20 percent. Muslims constitute roughly 20 percent of the Uttar Pradesh population, and Muslims were repeatedly tarred by Adityanath and his party as being criminals and supporters of mafias.
As Assam went to the polls in 2021, the state’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, was explicit that he would not campaign in Bengali Muslim-majority areas because he knew the community does not vote for the BJP. Besides, he alleged, they were the source of many problems in Assam with their land encroachment and rejection of indigenous Assamese culture. Sarma even asked that voters support his party to ensure that Assam does not one day have a Muslim chief minister.
Incidentally, it is telling that the last Muslim chief minister of any Indian state outside Jammu and Kashmir was A R Antulay, who ruled Maharashtra from 1980 to 1982. Today, the possibility of a Muslim chief minister anywhere, from any political party, except in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir, looks remote. Contrast this with how London elected Sadiq Khan, the son of a Pakistani immigrant bus driver, to be its mayor in 2016. Or with the 2023 election that made Humza Yousaf, another son of Pakistani immigrants, the First Minister of Scotland.
Amit Shah, India’s home minister, has been equally strident. In the Delhi state assembly election in 2021, he called upon voters to press the BJP button on electronic voting machines with such anger that the current would be felt in Shaheen Bagh – a dog-whistle reference to Muslim women protesters then holding an extended sit-in against the Modi government’s discriminatory changes to India’s citizenship laws.
Modi himself, in his last speech before the 2024 general election, delivered from Delhi’s historic Red Fort on Independence Day, listed what he regarded as the three greatest evils that beset India: corruption, dynasty and appeasement. Each of these words, in Modi’s usage, are coded with an ideological sub-text. “Appeasement” means affirmative action for India’s religious minorities, most importantly Muslims. Despite irrefutable evidence from the Justice Sachar Committee, appointed by the Congress-led government that preceded Modi, that Muslims suffer from socio-economic development deficits compared to India’s other two historically most deprived communities – Dalits and Adivasis – the prime minister signalled a priority to reject and dismantle policies for the uplift of Muslims. This was also effectively a rejection of Indian Muslims’ calls for state-led efforts to secure more equal participation for them in India’s political society.
The international advocacy group Human Rights Watch examined all of Modi’s 173 campaign speeches for the 2024 campaign after the Indian Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct came into force in the run-up to the vote. This code explicitly prohibits invoking communal sentiments to secure votes. In at least 110 speeches, Modi made Islamophobic statements that appeared aimed at discrediting the political opposition – for instance, accusing them of advocating exclusively for Muslim rights – while simultaneously fostering fear within the majority Hindu community through misinformation. The Election Commission chose to take no action whatsoever against Modi for any of these instances of hate speech. Instead, departing from standard practice, it issued a mildly worded directive to the BJP party chief that scrupulously avoided so much as mentioning Modi. In an act of what the political scientist Sumit Ganguly aptly describes as “false even-handedness”, the Election Commission simultaneously sent a notice to the chief of the Congress over speeches by the party’s leader, Rahul Gandhi, that did not qualify as hate speech.
HOW DID MODI and the party he has thrice led to national power take apart the political common sense that had prevailed until his rise, which held that high-pitched antagonism to Muslims would block the road to political power and national office?
This was done by first constructing the notion of Indian Muslims as a monolithic community, erasing their wide diversity of language, culture, caste, class and gender. The second strategy was to stoke and exponentially amplify the public’s hate and prejudice against Muslims, painting them as being temple-breakers, implacably violent, supporters of terrorism, disloyal to India, sexual predators, cow-killers, “land jihadis”, aggressive reproducers with large families, and much more. For this, Modi and his party deployed political platforms, religious leaders and grassroots mobilisation via the RSS’s extensive network of affiliated organisations, as well as social media, a compliant mainstream media, and even hate-filled anti-Muslim music videos – part of the emergent genre of Hindutva pop. And the third strategy, after successfully projecting the Indian Muslim as a dangerous and toxic “enemy within”, was to unite non-Muslims across castes and religious communities against this adversary.
The extraordinary success of this political strategy is reflected in voting patterns, especially from the 2019 general election, which reveal an unprecedented consolidation of the Hindu vote behind the BJP. Voter surveys by the research group Lokniti reveal a record 44 percent of Hindu voters backed the BJP that year, and 51 percent of Hindus voted for the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. Significantly, the share of Hindu votes for the BJP was even higher, at 55 percent, in the 29 Lok Sabha constituencies with Muslim population shares of 40 percent or more. This went to underline just how polarising Muslims’ presence had been made.
Even Dalit voters, who have no reason to expect greater social equality under the BJP – a party historically and presently serving primarily the dominant castes – are being persuaded in growing numbers to abandon political camps like the Congress and the Left, and even parties built outright on ideologies of social justice for subaltern castes, to line up instead behind the BJP. More than 40 percent of Dalits voted for the BJP and its allies in 2019, before that figure decreased to 26 percent in 2024 as the Congress revived its Dalit support to almost match that for the BJP and its camp. The political analyst Ajay Gudavarthy aptly describes this as a crisis in Dalit-Bahujan politics.
And although the BJP and RSS are ideologically hostile also to India’s Christian minority, the BJP has succeeded even in drawing Christian voters into its anti-Muslim social and political alliance. Without them, it would not have been possible for the party to gain power in numerous states of India’s Northeast, including Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram, and it would have been difficult for it to win electoral support in coastal Karnataka and Kerala.
The growing public aversion to voting for Muslims is also revealed in the finding that the chances of a Muslim candidate from a major political party winning an election after 2002 is just 17 percent – a long way behind the strike rate of non-Muslim candidates, which stands at 29 percent.
In addition to this, scholars including Ansari have traced how the delimitation of the boundaries of parliamentary and state legislative constituencies has, even in the past, on occasion further damaged Muslim political representation. This has been done by either distributing Muslim concentrations across two or more constituencies, or by reserving constituencies with large Muslim populations for candidates from the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. There is evidence that fresh delimitation efforts are presently being weaponised in territories with high Muslim concentrations, like Assam and Jammu and Kashmir, to further reduce Muslims’ power to influence electoral outcomes. Earlier, it was estimated that Muslim citizens in Assam had a decisive impact in 35 state assembly constituencies. Now, local legislators calculate, delimitation has brought this number down to just 22.
AS HASAN OBSERVES, the brazen majoritarian politics of the BJP alters the “very meaning of liberal democracy”, linking state power to the majority community while disregarding and excluding minorities. “In these circumstances,” she writes, “parties that depend on the support of minorities too end up making them invisible in order to compete on somewhat similar grounds to fit into the dominant template.” Hasan observes that this approach denies the “legitimacy of political majorities forged with the aid of minority support or votes.” This was evident in how Modi taunted Rahul Gandhi for contesting the 2019 general election from a Muslim-majority constituency – Wayanad, in Kerala – as though being elected with the aid of Muslim voters is somehow less legitimate than doing so without them.
The success of the BJP’s political project runs even deeper, with what Ahmed describes as “Muslim politicophobia” – rising anxiety around Muslims’ political assertion and representation, which is increasingly delegitimised as communal and anti-national. Ahmed underlines that while this is powered by Hindu nationalist politics, the trend is by no means restricted to the BJP. Even most “secular” parties are victims of this phobia to varying degrees, and there is a growing reluctance among them – the Congress included – to publicly articulate opposition to hate speech and hate attacks, including the lynchings that have become epidemic after 2014.
During his Bharat Jodo Yatra, a long political march that traversed the country in 2022 and 2023, Rahul Gandhi was bold in his attacks on the BJP-led national government’s failures in creating jobs, controlling prices, sustaining economic growth and curbing corruption. He pilloried Modi for his closeness to the billionaire Gautam Adani, and he attacked the hate politics of the RSS and the BJP. But, through the entire journey, he was scrupulous not to focus on the central crisis that is tearing India apart today: the virtual war being waged against the country’s Muslim citizens by the BJP government in New Delhi and many state governments.
The crisis of India’s Muslims is likewise absent from the discourse of most political leaders, with the notable exception of figures like Lalu Prasad Yadav and Manoj Kumar Jha of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). There is a conspicuous reluctance on the part of leaders of non-BJP parties to be seen on public platforms with Muslims – even when it comes to those outfits, like the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, that are critically dependent on the Muslim vote.
The strategic silence of non-BJP parties when it comes to the hate speech and hate-fuelled violence that Indian Muslims now routinely face – which threatens their equal citizenship and, consequently, the Indian constitution, which is built on the bedrock of equal citizenship – is deafening. It is further evidence of the BJP and RSS’s spectacular success in altering the rules of political engagement in India, in demonstrating that a project of open hostility against India’s 200 million-strong Muslim minority can win powerful political majorities.
We have already noted that, since 2009, Muslim representatives are increasingly being elected only from constituencies with significant Muslim populations – a striking departure from the experience of the past, right from 1952, when most Muslim representatives were elected to the Lok Sabha from constituencies in which Muslims were a minority. In other words, in the past, political parties appealed to non-Muslim voters to place their trust in Muslim representatives, and succeeded. That they are much less willing to do so today suggests an assumption that Hindu voters will reject any party that offers them a Muslim to represent their interests. This altered political common sense, too, must be acknowledged as another victory of the politics of the BJP and its ideological mentor, the RSS. Even some senior Muslim leaders now accept that these are the altered rules of Indian politics. I have heard them offer political leaders this counsel of despair: help us by ignoring us.
In these many ways, the BJP has succeeded not only in dispossessing Indian Muslims of meaningful political participation and fair representation but also in radically transforming the grammar of Indian electoral politics, pushing Muslims to the margins and increasingly recasting them as a political liability.
The foundational idea of the Indian republic and its constitution is equal citizenship for people of every faith, caste, language and gender. The toxic success of the BJP and the RSS in erasing the Indian Muslim from electoral politics marks a calamitous assault on this, the soul of the Indian nation.
With research support from Omair Khan and Badre Alam.
Harsh Mander is a peace and justice activist and a writer. He leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s initiative of solidarity and atonement working with survivors of lynchings and hate violence in India. He chairs the Centre for Equity Studies in Delhi, and is a visiting faculty member at Heidelberg University in Germany, the Vrije University Amsterdam, and the University of York in the United Kingdom.