Darab Farooqui@darab_farooqui
The Shackles Indian Muslims can't Break.
The Indian Constitution is secular. Indian politics never was.
From the first decade of independence, political power in India operated on a majoritarian logic because partition played its part.
Congress gave it ideology. The RSS challenged it. The Jan Sangh gave that challenge electoral form. The socialists gave it caste arithmetic. The communists gave it class language. But underneath all of it, the majoritarian logic was the same. Hindu political dominance was so normalized it became invisible, which is precisely what gave it flexibility.
It could be progressive or conservative, reformist or reactionary, and still remain Hindu politics at its core. That invisibility was its greatest structural advantage.
Muslim politics never had that luxury. And what began as a rational response to a real disadvantage has, over decades, become a prison of its own making.
After Partition, the logic of Muslim political consolidation in a conservative bracket made sense, because the attack was partially on Islam. Afterall, Islam was held responsible for the partition of British India.
The community was vulnerable, the state was unreliable, and communal violence was not a memory but a recurring present.
After that, riots punctuated every decade. Jabalpur. Ahmedabad. Moradabad. A steady drumbeat of othering that no constitutional guarantee could silence.
The 1965 and 1971 wars made it worse in a different way, not through violence but through suspicion. Indian Muslims found themselves having to prove a loyalty that no Hindu was ever asked to demonstrate.
The secular consensus offered citizenship but not belonging. Then Shah Bano exposed how quickly even that citizenship could be traded for electoral arithmetic. Babri Masjid confirmed that the constitutional promise and the street-level reality were two different countries. Gujarat 2002 made defensiveness feel like the only sane position because Muslims knew by then, no help is in sight.
So, Muslim politics contracted. It turned even more inward. It organized around the majlis, the muhalla, the personal law board, and at times the masjid, the one question that felt urgent enough to answer. Are we safe?
That was not cowardice. That was a community reading its situation accurately.
The only exception has been Anti CAA/NRC movement led by Muslim women, supported by Hindu progressives and moderates, fueled by Muslim masses.
But the end result has been the same. The rise of an even stronger right wing in Muslims. The ossification deepened. The community turned further inward, not outward.
Because the movement had no political home of its own. It was consumed from two directions simultaneously. Secular parties arrived to harvest its energy at the ballot box without building anything lasting from it.
And AIMIM moved in from the other side, converting the anger and fear into deeper communal consolidation. It offered Muslims a louder voice inside the bracket instead of a way out of it.
The movement that had briefly escaped the bracket was pulled back into it from both ends.
For a long time, the reading was functional. Congress and the secular parties needed the Muslim vote. The bargain was unspoken but understood. Muslims stayed in their lane, kept their politics within the bracket of communal identity, and in return Congress provided a degree of protection.
It was undignified. It was a tenancy arrangement dressed up as an alliance. But it worked well enough to survive on. The defensive crouch, organized around religious institutions, delivered just enough to justify itself.
That bargain is now dead.
The Congress system that made defensive Muslim politics viable has collapsed. What replaced it is not a neutral state open to negotiation. It is a government that uses the full apparatus of the state, courts, police, investigative agencies, legislation and bulldozers, as instruments of majoritarian pressure. Against that, defensive consolidation around religious identity does not produce protection. It produces a target. The old strategy assumed a protector was available. The protector is no longer there.
And yet Muslim politics has not updated its logic. It remains where it was. Organized around the majlis, anchored to religious identity, speaking only the language of communal grievance, waiting for a protection that is not coming.
The reason this has not changed is structural. Religious institutions in India have never restricted themselves to religious matters. They have functioned as the default political unit of Muslim public life, setting the boundaries of what can be said, what can be contested, and who can speak.
The maulana and the madrasa answered the question of survival when survival was genuinely at stake. They are not equipped to answer the questions that governance asks.
Today, governance in India is 95 percent secular in nature. It lives in budget allocations, urban planning commissions, public health policy, judicial appointments, financial regulation and labor law. It determines whether your child gets a good school, whether your neighborhood has a drain, whether a young man finds a job or loses one. It has nothing to do with religion.
Muslim political voice is absent from almost all of it.
You will not find Muslim political formations with serious positions on agrarian distress, on GST's impact on small traders, on the crisis in public education, on housing policy in expanding cities. The issues that determine the material conditions of Muslim life, and of everyone else's life, go unaddressed by Muslim politics, because Muslim politics has decided these are not Muslim issues.
What Muslim political culture has instead is a concept. “Maslihat”. Prudence. The idea that a Muslim who comments on secular affairs, on farm policy, on the judiciary, on the economy, even on societal morality, is being reckless, inviting attention, disturbing a peace that is better left undisturbed.
This Maslihat is passed down as wisdom. It is enforced inside the community against those who want to step outside the bracket. The religious institutions that enforce it are not acting out of malice. They are operating from the same siege logic that made sense in 1950 and in 1985 and in 2002. But siege logic applied to a changed situation does not produce protection. It produces paralysis.
A Muslim middle class has quietly emerged through all of this, particularly through the economic expansion of the 2000s. Muslim professionals, economists, journalists, urban planners, civil servants and academics now participate in secular public life in ways that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago.
But they did not arrive there through Muslim political culture. They arrived despite it, through secular institutional pathways that Muslim political leadership neither built nor celebrated nor claimed.
They did not build alternative political formations either, not because they lacked the will, but because they lacked the ground. Any Muslim professional who stepped into secular political space without the blessing of religious authority was immediately suspect, accused of abandoning the community, of playing into the hands of the other side.
The cost of dissent was exclusion from the only political home available. So, they made a private peace. They participate in secular life as individuals, not as a constituency. Muslim political culture has no use for them and largely no pride in them.
Thus, a moderate Muslim, a progressive Muslim, a Muslim who cares about public education or economic policy, has nowhere to go within Muslim political formations.
They find their representation in Congress, in SP, in RJD, parties that accommodate them without being accountable to them. They will never lead these parties. They will never shape their ideology. They will never sit in the think tanks that determine policy positions. They are voters, occasionally candidates, never architects. That is not representation. That is tenancy.
And the landlord is getting weaker by the election.
The world will not wait.
What Muslims regarded for decades as self-preservation politics, staying within the bracket, organizing around religious identity, keeping secular matters to others, was always costly. It is now dangerous.
The state is no longer an unreliable protector. It is an active adversary. Defensive consolidation against an adversary that controls courts, police, legislation and public narrative is not a strategy. It is a slow surrender dressed up as patience.
The only exit from this is also the exit that Muslim politics has resisted for seventy years. Diversification. Entry into secular discourse not as supplicants seeking protection but as citizens with positions, arguments and alliances. The kind of political presence that cannot be easily dismissed, isolated or targeted, because it is woven into the fabric of issues that affect everyone.
Look at what Hindu politics did over a century. It diversified. It produced Congress nationalists and liberals, RSS ideologues, socialist redistributors and communist organizers, reformers and reactionaries, modernists and revivalists. It fought internally, bitterly, over the soul of the nation. That internal diversity, that argument within, is precisely what gave Hindu politics its reach, its resilience and ultimately its dominance.
Muslim politics needs its own version of that diversification. Its own socialists. Its own secular progressives. Its own people who show up to argue about agrarian policy and urban housing and public health, not as Muslims seeking Muslim outcomes, but as citizens with a political position. Alliances built on ideology rather than vote bank arithmetic. Coalitions that cut across community lines because the issues cut across community lines.
But none of this is possible until the prior question is settled.
Politicians for politics. Religious institutions for religion.
But what we have instead, Muslim activists for Muslim politicians. Muslim Religious leaders for Muslim political thinkers.
That division of labor, which Hindu political culture achieved imperfectly but sufficiently over decades, has never happened in Muslim public life. Until it does, the space for a diverse, secular, ideologically grounded Muslim politics cannot open up.
For those who argue that weakening religious institutional authority means weakening Muslim solidarity, the answer is already visible on the ground. That authority is being systematically managed, incentivized and intimidated by the same state it was supposed to resist.
A handful of religious leaders, through a combination of inducement and pressure, have already been brought to heel. Centralized religious authority is not a shield. It is a handle, and the current government knows exactly how to grip it.
Distributed civic presence across secular issues, across coalitions, across ideological lines, is structurally far harder to capture than a few institutions whose centrality makes them high value targets.
This separation will not come from outside. No party, no government, no well-meaning outsider can negotiate it. It can only come from within Muslim society, from Muslims willing to have an argument their own political culture has long forbidden.
The trap is visible. The old protector is gone. The adversary has learned that the fastest way to silence a community is to control its leaders rather than confront its people.
The only defense against that is to stop having so few leaders to control.
Recognition has to come first, of the problem. Everything else follows from that.
And that, just that, is where it has to begin.
