Circle Within Circles

The caste question in Muslims.

- Tanvir Aeijaz

THE political processes in India, particularly since Independence, have uncannily pushed Indian Muslims to the margins. The push, quite evident since the 1990s, is largely the result of three interrelated conceited-imageries in Indian politics. One, the burden of partition is ominously placed onto the Muslims, even to those who stayed back in India, either by choice or necessity, and inferably were stereotyped as traitors, anti-national and untrustworthy. Since partition days, India as an ‘imagined community’, or perhaps as a ‘spectacle democracy’, reproduces its collective ethical identity, where we find, at times, the corrosion of secularism, and, at times, the near-complete exclusion of Muslims. The past, of course, has been undeniably rocked by communalism, violence and persecution of Muslims. Two, Islamophobia emerged as the dominant mode of prejudice against Muslims, leading to widespread exclusion, hate crimes and disparagements. The Hindutva project, tracing its roots to the iterations of Veer Savarkar that Muslims are enemies of the Indian nation, has fuelled an even more extreme demonisation of Muslims and has exacerbated the climate of fear and violence feeding into the rising Islamophobia. And third, the neo-liberal project, with its in-built proclivities to exclude vulnerable groups from the market distribution of resources, and more precisely from the labour market, has taken a toll on Muslims.