SILENCED MINORITY?

POLITICAL MARGINALISATION HAS COMPOUNDED THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC DISADVANTAGES AND CHRONIC DISCRIMINATION THAT STIFLE INDIA’S MUSLIMS

- KAI FRIESE

Six religious communities are designated as ‘minorities’ in India but it often seems that the term is just another euphemism for ‘a certain community’. Muslims are the emblematic minority in India, partly because they are by far the largest of the six notified groups— the only one with a double digit percentage share of the national population (14.2 per cent in Census 2011)—but also because of the (not unrelated) fact that they have become the quintessential ‘other’ in the prevailing cultural and political imagination of the Hindu majority. This is of course a historic dynamic sharpened by the violent communal rupture of Partition 75 years ago. However, the ascendance of majoritarian Hindutva since Narendra Modi first came to power in 2014 is arguably a new turning point in the downward fortunes of India’s Muslims, compounding the socio-economic misfortune, arguably born of chronic neglect by the state, with a new sense of deliberate political marginalisation and active persecution.