A friend from Twitter (@kartheeque) has written a nice detailed post about the inward turn in Muslim politics in India and its various consequences. It is well worth a read. The full text is available at Substack as “The Inward turn..” (he goes by Viduracounsel), I am posting some portions here…

Muslim political movements in the Indian subcontinent – from the first reformist stirrings after the Mughal collapse to the institutional politics of today – have been overwhelmingly characterized by an inward orientation. Whether the mode was militant restorationism, separatist nationalism, or the quieter but equally consequential demand for communal legal autonomy, the dominant tendency has been to organize as Muslims first, often in opposition to the larger society, rather than as citizens of a shared polity.

This is not to say that individual Muslims have not been patriots, secularists, and integrationists – many have, heroically. Nor is it to pretend that the subcontinent’s communal history has been one-sided. Hindu-Muslim violence has always run in both directions, and any honest account must hold that truth. But intellectual honesty also requires acknowledging that the structural failures of mainstream Muslim political organizations to embrace genuine secular citizenship are real, longstanding, and consequential – independent of whatever provocations have existed.

What follows is an attempt to trace the full arc of that inward turn – its origins in the trauma of civilizational decline, its crystallization in the demand for Pakistan, its post-partition continuation in the form of protected communal autonomy in India, and its mirror image in the steady Islamization of Pakistan and Bangladesh, with catastrophic consequences for their Hindu minorities. It ends with a pointed question: why, even today, do mainstream Muslim political organizations in India react with reflexive hostility to perfectly normal expressions of Hindu cultural and national pride – expressions that should threaten no one who is genuinely committed to shared citizenship?

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Part I: Decline and the Politics of Loss (1707–1857)

To understand Muslim political psychology in the subcontinent, you must begin with a fact that has no real parallel in modern Indian Hindu experience: Muslims experienced political catastrophe from a position of power. The Mughal Empire, at its height under Aurangzeb in the late seventeenth century, was the world’s largest economy and one of history’s most impressive administrative achievements. Within fifty years of Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, it had begun an irreversible collapse.

This was not a gradual economic slide. It was a civilizational fall experienced in real time – military defeats to the Marathas, Sikh expansion into Punjab, Afghan invasions, and finally the decisive encroachment of the British East India Company. By 1757, when Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey, the writing was legible to any honest observer. By 1803, Delhi itself had passed under effective British control. The last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was a pensioner of the British Crown, permitted to occupy the Red Fort as a courtesy…

… This diagnostic framework – Muslim decline as consequence of internal religious failure, remedy as religious purification – is perhaps the single most consequential intellectual legacy in subcontinent Muslim politics. Notice what it does not contain: any serious engagement with the political, economic, or technological reasons for Muslim decline; any recognition that Hindu or Sikh or British neighbors might have legitimate claims; any framework for shared citizenship with non-Muslims. The problem was framed as internal to the Muslim community, and the solution was therefore entirely internal.

.. retained much of Waliullah’s theological framework. Deoband’s founders saw the British defeat of the 1857 uprising as confirming the futility of direct confrontation. Instead, they would preserve Islamic civilization through a vast network of seminaries, training a generation of scholars to sustain Muslim religious identity through whatever political storms might come. This was a defensive, preservationist project – brilliant on its own terms, but again inward: focused entirely on maintaining the integrity of Muslim religious identity, not on building bridges to the Hindu majority or engaging with the possibilities of a shared Indian political life.

The exception to this inward turn in the nineteenth century was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Aligarh movement, which at least engaged with modernity – Western science, English education, rational engagement with colonial power. Sir Syed genuinely believed that Muslims could survive and flourish by embracing education and strategic cooperation with the British. But even here, notice the structure: Sir Syed was explicitly building Muslim modernism, for Muslim advancement, in explicit contrast to and competition with the Hindu majority. His famous 1888 speech asked whether Hindus and Muslims could share power after British withdrawal, and answered: no. This was not yet the two-nation theory, but it was the seed of it.

.. The critical transformation came over the 1930s and reached its culmination under Jinnah in 1940. The Lahore Resolution demanded separate states for Muslims in the northwest and east of the subcontinent – what became Pakistan. Jinnah’s argument, eventually crystallized as the Two-Nation Theory, was that Hindus and Muslims were not merely different religious communities but different nations – with different histories, epics, heroes, gods, social customs, and moral frameworks – and that therefore coexistence in a single democratic state was impossible without Muslims being permanently subordinated to the Hindu majority.

..But the Two-Nation Theory required something intellectually troubling: it required that the identities of 400+ million people be reduced to two monolithic blocs. It erased the enormous internal diversity within both “Hindu” and “Muslim” India. It made religious identity the primary and sufficient category of political life. And it created a logical problem that was never resolved: what about the 30–40% of Indian Muslims who would remain in India even after partition? If the Two-Nation Theory was correct, they were members of a separate nation marooned in the wrong country.

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Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was the other great symbol of this tradition. Born in Mecca into a family of Islamic scholars, the young Azad was in fact a pan-Islamist and a theorist of trans-national jihad during the First World War period – historian Ayesha Jalal’s scholarship establishes him as perhaps the most celebrated theorist of that tradition during that decade. His journal Al-Hilal preached both Islamic revivalism and anti-British resistance. He joined the Muslim League in 1913. The evolution from this phase to his later Congress nationalism was real and documented – the Khilafat movement’s failure, his encounter with Gandhi, and his eventual theological conclusion that Islam was compatible with plural Indian nationhood shaped a genuine intellectual transformation. By 1940, he was delivering his famous Ramgarh address: “I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice and without me this splendid structure is incomplete.”

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier Gandhi,” took a third path – not through theological argument but through a practical commitment to non-violent resistance against British rule that he saw as inseparable from his Muslim faith. He built the Khudai Khidmatgar movement among Pashtuns entirely on the principle of composite Indian nationhood, and he spent years in Pakistani prisons for his refusal to accept the two-nation logic – a suffering that gives his nationalism a credibility untainted by strategic calculation.

.. The great Iqbal-Madani debate crystallizes this precisely. Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher whose vision eventually inspired Pakistan, and Madani disagreed not about whether Islam should be the governing framework of political life, but only about what the first step should be. For Iqbal, it was creating a Muslim-majority territory where Islamic civilization could consolidate itself. For Madani, it was first gaining freedom from Britain, after which Muslims would be far better positioned demographically, organizationally, and religiously across the entire subcontinent. Both were thinking in terms of Muslim civilizational strategy. Neither was reasoning from secular equal citizenship as an intrinsic value.

.. Azad’s case is more genuinely complex. His theological work, the Tarjuman al-Quran, attempted to construct an Islam hospitable to other forms of monotheism, including Hinduism, placing emphasis on commonly held rules of righteous conduct – a genuinely liberal theological project that went further than Madani’s tactical calculations. His post-independence career as India’s first Education Minister, focused on building institutions accessible to all Indians regardless of religion, showed a real commitment to the secular project in practice. Yet even his composite nationalism, as the historian S. Irfan Habib observes, was “never simply secular nationalism” – it was always grounded in the theological claim that Islam permitted composite nationhood, not that religion was irrelevant to political identity. Azad always needed an Islamic justification for living alongside Hindus as equals; the equality itself was not his starting point.

.. Arif Mohammad Khan (born 1951) represents perhaps the most striking instance of genuine Muslim secular political courage in modern Indian history. As a Congress minister under Rajiv Gandhi, he publicly and passionately defended the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgment on the floor of Parliament – arguing that Muslim women deserved equal constitutional rights regardless of personal law. When Gandhi reversed course and pushed the 1986 Act to nullify the judgment, Khan resigned from the Cabinet and quit the Congress entirely rather than participate in what he described as a capitulation to orthodoxy. Few acts of political principle in post-independence India can match this one. He subsequently served as Governor of Kerala from 2019 to 2024, continuing to publicly challenge AIMPLB positions and advocate for Muslim reform from within the constitutional establishment.

..But the Congress never invested in building this secular Muslim political culture as a genuine political base. It was always easier and electorally more efficient to manage the clerical establishment and deliver personal law protection than to build a secular Muslim constituency from the ground up. The result was that figures like Arif Mohammad Khan remained isolated exceptions – celebrated by secularists, ignored by Muslim political organizations, and ultimately unable to shift the institutional direction of Muslim politics. The Congress treated secular Muslims as symbols of its secularism rather than as the foundation of a genuinely reformed Muslim politics, and in doing so ensured that the secular strand remained decorative rather than transformative.

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The Muslims who stayed in India – roughly one-third of the pre-partition Muslim population – faced an immediate legitimacy crisis. Their co-religionists had just created a new country on the grounds that Muslims and Hindus could not live together as equal citizens. The Indian state, under Nehru and the Congress, insisted on secular citizenship and treated India’s Muslims as full citizens. But the suspicion was always there, among Hindus, that Muslim loyalty to India was provisional.

This suspicion created a defensive psychology within Muslim politics. The question “whose side are you on?” was implicitly present in every political interaction. Muslim leaders responded by insisting loudly on their patriotism while simultaneously protecting every possible mark of Muslim distinctiveness – partly as genuine cultural-religious commitment, partly as political identity assertion, and partly because the clerisy found community distinctiveness essential to its own authority.

.. This pattern has repeated itself across every major reform issue for forty years since. Polygamy remains permitted under Muslim Personal Law, despite Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and dozens of other Muslim-majority countries having already banned it, and despite actual Muslim polygamy rates being only marginally higher than Hindu ones. The AIMPLB has explicitly opposed the Child Marriage Restraint Act, arguing marriage age should be governed by puberty – effectively defending child marriage in the name of religious freedom, a position that would draw immediate condemnation if held by any Hindu organization. The AIMPLB opposed the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act as an infringement on the madrasa system, even as data consistently showed madrasa-educated children having significantly worse economic outcomes than those in mainstream schools. And when the Modi government pushed for transparency and accountability in the Waqf boards – institutions managing billions of rupees in property, characterized even by Muslim reformers as opaque and captured by Ashraf elites – every Muslim organization opposed it wholesale as an attack on Muslim identity.

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In post-independence India, the pattern of bidirectional violence continued. Several major riots – Bhiwandi 1970, Moradabad 1980, Bhagalpur 1989 – involved significant Muslim aggression as trigger events, even when Hindu retaliation was disproportionate. The 1992 Bombay riots following the Babri demolition involved organized Muslim attacks on Hindus and Hindu property in the first phase, before the violence became generalized.

There are, however, cases of clear state-directed or state-tolerated violence against Muslims that deserve to be named without equivocation. The 1983 Nellie massacre in Assam – in which between 2,000 and 3,000 Bengali Muslim settlers were killed by Tiwa tribal communities, with state forces arriving too late – represents a genuine communal atrocity with elements of administrative failure. The 1984 Delhi anti-Sikh riots, while targeting Sikhs rather than Muslims, are the clearest example in Indian history of Congress-organized state-backed communal massacre – important precisely because it demonstrates that state complicity in communal violence is not the exclusive property of any one party.

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Looking across the full ecosystem of Hindu concerns – love jihad, economic jihad, land jihad, population jihad – a consistent pattern emerges. Some concerns rest on solid factual ground and deserve serious engagement: the identity deception pattern in certain interfaith relationships; the structural exclusion of Khatik butchers from halal certification; the Sikh religious infringement; the Muslim fertility differential; Waqf governance failures. Others have partial factual grounding that has been inflated into conspiratorial frameworks: demographic concentration in certain districts; halal scope expansion into non-food products. Others function primarily as political mobilization tools with little factual basis: organized institutional love jihad; deliberate population conquest planning; systematic Muslim land seizure. The appropriate response to this spectrum is differentiated – taking seriously what has factual grounding, debunking what does not, and refusing the conflation that treats all such concerns as equivalent Islamophobia. Muslim political organizations have done none of this. The blanket dismissal of every Hindu concern has left legitimate grievances festering and handed the entire discourse to Hindutva political entrepreneurs, foreclosing the honest community self-examination that might actually address the underlying real problems.

The Spectrum of Hindutva – A Distinction That Must Be Made

With this fuller picture of bidirectional violence, terrorism, love jihad, and the broader ecosystem of Hindu concerns in view, the critical question that Muslim political organizations consistently refuse to engage is: is all Hindutva equivalent?

The honest answer is no, and the refusal to make this distinction is itself a serious political failure.

The spectrum runs from syncretic cultural nationalism – Vivekananda’s vision of a Hinduism that encompasses all of India’s religious traditions, Mohan Bhagwat’s repeated assertion that Hindus and Muslims share common ancestors and common civilizational roots –

through constitutional Hindu assertiveness and majoritarian political assertion to communal aggression and hard supremacism. These are genuinely different things. The Bajrang Dal activist who attacks a Muslim boy for talking to a Hindu girl is not the same as the RSS chief visiting a mosque and a madrasa, as Bhagwat did in 2022. The love jihad law that criminalizes interfaith marriage between consenting adults is not the same as teaching Hindu history and culture in schools. The politician who describes Muslims as infiltrators is not the same as one who says India is a civilization rooted in Hindu thought in which Muslims have been a formative presence for a thousand years.

Muslim organizations in India treat all of these as equivalent

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Some of this sensitivity is understandable. The post-2014 spike in vigilante attacks on Muslims, the inflammatory rhetoric from certain BJP politicians, and years of genuine discrimination in employment and housing have created a legitimate hair-trigger. When co-religionists are being lynched for carrying beef, it is psychologically difficult to maintain fine distinctions between the Hindu cultural pride that produced Vivekananda and the Hindu communalism that produces lynch mobs.

Some of it is cynical: the clerical establishment and Muslim politicians have strong incentives to maintain a siege mentality within the community. Fear of the Hindu other has been the most reliable mechanism for maintaining Muslim political cohesion – and for ensuring that ordinary Muslims do not question the clerical establishment’s authority or the political leadership’s record.

And some of it is a failure of political imagination – the inability to conceive of a framework in which India can be acknowledged as a civilization rooted in Hindu thought and culture, and fully equal in its secular citizenship for all religious communities including Muslims.

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Muslim political movements in the subcontinent have systematically prioritized the maintenance of a separate, protected Muslim political and legal identity over genuine integration into shared citizenship. This tendency has not been universal – there have always been genuine secular integrationists, genuine composite nationalists, genuine reformers. But they have been consistently outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and in some cases physically threatened by those who treat communal distinctiveness as the non-negotiable core of Muslim political identity.

The specific manifestations differ by context. In pre-partition India: armed jihadism seeking Islamic rule, educational separatism building Muslim institutions in competition with shared ones, and eventually political separatism demanding a Muslim homeland. In post-partition India: personal law separatism preventing reform and maintaining a parallel legal system, systematic resistance to every reform proposed by the state, reflexive rejection of Hindu cultural expression as threatening. In Pakistan: the logical extreme – a state where Islamic identity became the criterion of full citizenship, with catastrophic consequences for every non-Islamic minority and eventually for heterodox Muslims too. In Bangladesh: the erosion of secular Bengali nationalism under pressure from Islamist forces, with the Hindu minority bearing the cost in an ongoing demographic catastrophe.

The victims of this pattern are not only Hindus and other non-Muslims. Muslim women have been consistently denied the equality that secular law would provide because the clerical establishment successfully frames women’s rights as an attack on Islam. Pasmanda Muslims – 85% of India’s Muslim population – have had their interests poorly represented by an Ashraf-dominated establishment more concerned with symbolic religious autonomy than economic uplift. And ordinary Indian Muslims themselves, whose political potential has been consistently captured by a leadership more interested in communal power than community welfare.

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Conclusion: The Path Not Taken

Three hundred years after Shah Waliullah wrote his first diagnosis of Muslim decline, the same basic intellectual framework persists in Muslim political thought: the problem is internal to the Muslim community; the solution is religious purification or protection of religious distinctiveness; engagement with the larger society is primarily defensive or adversarial.

The path of genuine secular integrationism – of accepting equal citizenship fully and reforming Muslim civil life accordingly – has existed at every turn. It was available in the 1880s, when Sir Syed could have built Muslim modernism toward integration rather than separation. It was available in the 1940s, when Azad’s composite nationalism offered a real alternative to Jinnah’s Two-Nation Theory. It was available in 1986, when Congress could have held its ground on Shah Bano and the AIMPLB could have accepted that Muslim women possess the same right to maintenance as every other Indian woman. It was available after the 2000s bombings, when Muslim political organizations could have led a serious community-level reckoning with radicalization rather than defaulting to defensive denial. It was available in 2019, when Muslim organizations could have supported the triple talaq ban while demanding it not be weaponized politically.

At each of these junctures, the path of communal separatism and clerical authority was chosen over the path of shared citizenship and internal reform.