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

Has the world’s largest democracy failed the world’s largest minority – its nearly 200 million Muslims? That question is at the heart of a polarising debate currently under way in India.

The debate started with Sharjeel Imam, a 38-year-old Muslim scholar, who gave a lengthy interview to an Indian news website on September 29 from his prison cell in New Delhi.

Imam covered a wide range of issues and raised uncomfortable questions about the place of the country’s Muslim minority, which forms roughly 14 percent of India’s 1.4 billion population.

“There are around 210 million Muslims in India – one of the biggest Muslim groups in the world, with practically zero say in this democracy,” Imam told the Indian news outlet, The Quint.

He criticised the Indian constitution for its “enshrined centralisation” of power and called its brand of secularism “particularly Islamophobic and parochial”, adding that democracy was a tool to deny Muslims their political representation and rights.

Who is Sharjeel Imam?

Hailing from Jahanabad district of Bihar, India’s poorest state, Imam graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in computer science and worked as a software engineer before returning to academics. As a doctoral student at the Centre for Historical Studies at New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), his primary research area was the political history of India’s Muslims.

In 2019, months after winning a second term in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government passed a controversial 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 passage of the law ignited nationwide anti-CAA protests. Led by Muslims, mostly women, a weeks-long demonstration near Shaheen Bagh, a densely-populated Muslim ghetto on the southeastern edge of New Delhi, became the epicentre of those protests.

Imam was one of the chief organisers of the Shaheen Bagh sit-in. He was arrested in January 2020 for inciting violence through speeches made at the protests.

But there had been no violence until his arrest. It came the next month in northeast New Delhi where anti-CAA sit-ins organised in Muslim neighbourhoods were attacked by mobs, incited by hate speech from leaders from the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Despite him being already behind bars when the violence broke out, Imam was charged with rioting, murder, attempted murder, sedition, and “promoting enmity on grounds of religion” under several laws, including a stringent anti-terror law.

He was not the only one. Nearly a dozen Muslim students and activists, including another JNU scholar Umar Khalid, were arrested and imprisoned for being the alleged conspirators in the 2020 riots. They remain in jail without trial and repeatedly denied bail, with rights groups calling their continued incarceration a “gross abuse of power” and a glaring example of judicial oversight, in which the accused are “guilty until proven innocent”.

According to Imam, such an alleged abuse of power – especially targeting Muslims – is systemic and goes back to the very ideas behind the founding of India as a Hindu-majority country.

In his interview with The Quint, he called India’s independence icon Mahatma Gandhi a “fascist” for making Congress – the party that led India’s freedom struggle and currently in the opposition – an “essentially Hindu party” and for allegedly endorsing certain ideas and practices now pushed by Modi’s BJP and its ideological parent, the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Founded in 1925 along the lines of the fascist parties in Europe, the RSS aims to turn a constitutionally secular India into an ethnic Hindu state.

Imam also accused independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of “falsehood and mythmaking” for projecting India as an ancient, “uniquely tolerant” civilisation in his book, The Discovery of India.

But Imam reserved his most scathing attack for India’s pro-secular liberals, arguing that there is no difference between them and the supporters of the BJP and the RSS.

“In short, both secular and Hindutva frameworks share the same core ideas – the myth of uniformity, centralisation and denial of sharing of power,” he said. Hindutva refers to the Hindu supremacist movement championed by the RSS and the BJP in order to turn a constitutionally secular India into an ethnic Hindu state.

In a rebuttal in The Quint, legal scholar Mohd Zeeshan Ahmad said Imam “raises serious historical and ideological questions that cannot be evaded merely because he is facing prosecution,” but that his “equation of secularism with Hindutva is unpersuasive”.

“Imam’s language risks projecting Muslims as a homogeneous political bloc, obscuring disagreements of class, caste, gender, region and ideology,” Ahmad wrote.

“Where are the Pasmanda [less privileged castes] Muslims in this political imagination? Where is the question of gender justice, including the rights of women within Muslim communities? Who gets to speak for the ‘Qaum’ [community], and whose experiences are rendered invisible when a singular political voice claims to represent it?”

But Irfan Ahmad, professor of anthropology and sociology at Ibn Khaldun University in Istanbul, Turkiye, and author of several acclaimed books on the Muslim question in South Asia, told Al Jazeera that Imam is right in questioning whether there is a difference between the Congress and the BJP when it comes to secularism.

“Indian nationalism rests on a false division between ‘secular’ nationalism of the Congress, especially through its figures like Nehru and Gandhi, on the one hand, and ‘communal’ right-wing forces on the other,” he said.

“The fact is that from the beginning, the Congress had within what it depicted as its outside: ethno-racist-Hindu nationalists. The flow of leaders between the Congress and overtly Hindu parties was smooth,” he added, citing Lala Lajpat Rai, K M Munshi, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, and Madan Mohan Malviya as examples.

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

Ahmad, the professor, said the difference between the Congress and the BJP is “of the same nature as the one between Republicans and Democrats in the United States where both converge to advance ‘American interests’ and wage wars outside”.

“If a democracy routinely makes a community, Muslims in this case, invisible in terms of representation in legislatures, then there is something fundamentally wrong with this democracy. Declining ratio of Muslims in parliament testifies to the silencing of Muslims.”

Ahmad says the “question worth asking is: how correct is the view of a secular India?”

On political empowerment of India’s Muslims

In his interview with The Quint, Imam suggested that India should have “constitutional republicanism” that guarantees decentralisation of power and more community rights. He argued that the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent – which gave birth to Muslim-majority Pakistan – “was forced by the Congress”.

He regarded Pakistan’s founding leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah as “a great, democratic leader” and poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal as his political inspiration. Calling for a faith-based separation of power, Imam underlined Iqbal’s call for the “creation of a Muslim India within India” and demanded proportional representation as opposed to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system in Indian elections.

“As Iqbal and Jinnah rightly foresaw, FPTP with no safeguards will lead to permanent marginalisation of Muslims who were, even before partition, the hated minority, the hated ‘other’ of the emerging nationalist discourse,” he said. “History has proved them right.”

Responding to Imam, a columnist who goes by the pseudonym Ibn-e-Khaldun Bharati, wrote in The Print news website that Imam represents an “Islamist agenda” which “demands the status of a nation – a Pakistan within the borders of India”.

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

“A nation needs a state, whereas a minority needs constitutional guarantees. Neither in theory nor in practice can one be both at the same time,” he wrote. “But such has been the ingenuity of Muslim leaders that they have managed to be both simultaneously. They carved a country for themselves and also secured special privileges as a minority – a classic example of having one’s cake and eating it too.”

Questioning Bharati’s submission, political analyst Asim Ali pointed out “the Kafkaesque nature of the whole affair”.

“This is a man who has now been behind bars for six years ostensibly for a speech advocating a ‘chakka jam’ [road blockade] without any call for violence alongside the even more absurd charge of conspiring to incite the Delhi riots that took place a month after he was already in jail,” Ali wrote in a column for The Telegraph newspaper.

“The space of experience for Muslims like Imam includes not only their personal experiences of discrimination but also of what they have learned about the history of recurrent communal pogroms, the framing of Muslim men in terror cases, the brutalities by policemen and so on,” Ali wrote, citing several examples of police atrocities in the past decades.

While Ali argued that Imam’s depiction of Gandhi and Jinnah is “grossly distorted” and his reading of the pre-independence and partition history as “warped”, he conceded that there is “space for a person like Imam in a radical democratic project that strives for equality and liberty for everyone” in India.

“Imam envisages a role as the head of an intellectual pressure group of middle-class Muslim activists displacing the clerical establishment as the principal voice articulating a ‘positive’ agenda of ‘Muslim demands’,” Ali wrote.

Sharjeel Imam v Umar Khalid: The ‘model’ Muslim

When it comes to the question of future intellectual Muslim leadership, comparisons are often made between Imam and Khalid. Both of them are often accused of being the “masterminds” of the 2020 New Delhi riots and are currently in the same jail in the Indian capital.

But that is where their similarities end.

Khalid, 39, is a left-wing activist who does not reject the Indian constitution – or its version of democracy or secularism – as explicitly as Imam does. He has also frequently cited Gandhi and his message of non-violent resistance in his speeches and writings.

Khalid is hailed by India’s Marxists and liberals as a “model Muslim” who is being punished by an anti-Muslim government for his campaign against the BJP’s hate politics. Global figures and rights groups frequently call for Khalid’s release.

Among them is New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani, who, while delivering the inaugural keynote address at the Nelson Mandela Global Leadership Forum in July this year, questioned Khalid’s imprisonment.

“Why must we wait as Umar Khalid enters his sixth year of captivity in Delhi – a political prisoner jailed under the same manufactured charges of terrorism levelled against Madiba,” he said, using the name for Mandela commonly used by South Africans.

It was the second time Mamdani, who has Indian roots, had talked about Khalid since being elected as mayor. In January, he met his parents and left the following handwritten note for him: “Dear Umar, I think of your words on bitterness often, and the importance of not letting it consume one’s self. It was a pleasure to meet your parents. We are all thinking of you.”

Last month, Ireland-based human rights organisation Front Line Defenders in Dublin announced Khalid as the winner of the 2026 Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk.

Imam does not evoke such global solidarities, which are mainly limited to India’s Muslim community.

“Take the example of Zohran Mamdani,” says Ahmad, the professor. “While Mamdani spoke about Umar Khalid, what prevents him from even mentioning – let alone pleading for – names like Sharjeel Imam?”

He says figures like Mamdani or left-wing liberals in India “find it convenient to speak for Umar Khalid because he is ‘secular’, in that he doesn’t posit himself as a Muslim nor uses the vocabulary of Islam to articulate his politics”.

“But these figures maintain an eerie silence about Imam, who conducts his politics in an Islamic vocabulary … The eloquence of liberals about Khalid and their silence about Imam is a sign of intellectual confusion, if not moral cowardice.”

When asked if he foresees Imam playing a role in an intellectual project of Muslim empowerment, Ahmad said while he had “no secret key to unlock the future”, he did fear that the “current regime is set to suppress such voices”.

“In some ways, the treatment of Imam by the regime resonates with the imprisonment of Italy’s Antonio Gramsci in 1926. At Gramsci’s trial, the prosecutor said: ‘For 20 years, we must stop this brain from functioning.’ Imam has already been unjustly languishing in jail for nearly seven years.”

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

“’The true place for a just man’ in an unjust order ‘is also a prison’,” he said.