Who can speak for the “Muslim minority” of India?

Public debates on Indian Muslims often make one basic mistake: they collapse all minorities into a single category and then declare that “everyone is thriving because a few individuals have done well”. This flattens history, erases structure, and turns civilisational questions into census arithmetic.

1. Minorities Are Not Interchangeable

Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists offer no meaningful analogy to Indian Muslims.

• Jains were never politically central to the subcontinent.

• Sikhs built a regional power, not a pan-subcontinental order.

• Buddhists have been demographically marginal for a thousand years.

Indian Muslims were different. For centuries they formed the civilisational elite of North India; shaping courts, languages, music, etiquette, food, architecture, and the ways Indian states understood power. Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Hyderabad were not enclaves. They were the centre of the political and aesthetic world of the Indo-Gangetic plain. A fall from centrality is not comparable to never having been central at all.

2. Individual Success Is Not Structural Health

Pointing to Abdul Kalam, A.R. Rahman, Azim Premji, or film stars as proof that “Indian Muslims are doing fine” repeats a familiar majoritarian gesture:

“Look at these successful individuals. What problem remains?”

Every society does this. The United States used Barack Obama to deny structural racism. European states do it with their celebrities from immigrant backgrounds. Individual success never cancels civilisational loss, political vulnerability, or cultural retreat. A community that once defined the taste and grammar of a civilisation now negotiates its place defensively. That shift cannot be measured by listing famous exceptions.

3. Biography Is Not an Argument

Another common move is to say:

“You cannot comment unless you live in India.”

This evades the issue. If a community is “thriving”, its condition should be legible from inside and outside. Argument does not depend on pin code. Either the claim of well-being is true in general, or it is not.

4. Who Defines the Minority’s Experience?

The deepest problem in these debates is not hostility; it is appropriation of voice. The majority often decides:

• what counts as flourishing,

• which histories matter,

• and which members of the minority are “good” representatives.

This is not dialogue; it is gatekeeping. A minority is entitled to describe its own trajectory, including decline, displacement, or cultural loss, without being overruled by majority comfort.

For instance, Kabir’s remarks on Pakistani minorities often jar because they emerge from a position of relative security. That vantage point is not available to Hindus, Ahmadis, and, periodically, Christians and Shi‘a, for whom Pakistan remains an uncertain and hostile environment.

5. India, Pakistan, and the Confusion of Categories

Arguments about the Indo-Muslim past often mix up three distinct questions:

(a) Legal:

Who is the successor state to British India? → India.

(b) Territorial:

Who holds which cities, archives, monuments? → Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Lahore, Dhaka are now split across states.

(c) Civilisational:

Where do the languages, manners, and sensibilities of the Islamicate world still survive? → Across North India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and diasporic pockets.

These answers do not align neatly. Confusing them leads to needless polemics about who “owns” the Mughal past or the Urdu ethos.

6. India’s Saffron Age vs Pakistan’s compromised Islamicate Remnant

Present political projects shape how this shared past is viewed.

In India:

• The state holds the old capitals.

• Hindu civilisational revival is now central.

• The Indo-Muslim centuries are being recast as occupation or deviation.

The monuments remain; their builders become villains or footnotes.

In Pakistan:

• Material weakness contrasts with a strong symbolic attachment to Indo-Muslim high culture.

• Urdu, Delhi, Lucknow, Ghalib, and Mughal memory are treated as moral capital.

Both national narratives select what they can use. Neither fully captures the older, more complex Indo-Muslim world. The division of that world into two, and then three, successor states also shattered its cultural centre of gravity. As Omar noted, none of these states now has the scale to sustain Urdu as a civilisational language. Ironically, Urdu survives in India not because of state policy but because Hindi cinema keeps its idiom alive. In Pakistan, by contrast, Urdu has little protection against the rise of English, which has absorbed the elite.

Had the original Urdu-Muslim nationalists, Jinnah, Iqbal, the Aligarh generation, imagined a future within a united India, Urdu would have stood a better chance. In such a federation, language rather than religion might have become the organising principle, giving Urdu the demographic depth to resist being eclipsed.

7. The Narrow Corridor Where Indo-Muslim Culture Still Lives

The world in question is not generic Islam and not generic India. It is a distinctive hybrid:

• Persianate high culture

• Hindavi/Urdu language

• Turko-Afghan and Central Asian elements

• Local caste-regional continuities

This produced recognisable ways of speaking, hosting, composing, judging, and remembering. Today it survives in a shrinking corridor; too Islamicate for majoritarian nationalism, too entangled with Hindu rhythms for purist Islamism. This corridor still defines the emotional geography of many modern, liberal South Asians who inherit the Indo-Muslim sensibility without needing to defend any contemporary state.

In my own life, though, that sensibility has begun to recede. As I’ve moved from Urdu to Persian, and from a Muslim-inflected cultural frame toward a Hindu civilizational one, I’ve found myself stepping outside the Indo-Muslim groove entirely. In a way, this shift isn’t a departure but a return to the deeper foundations from which Urdu culture itself once drew; Perso-Indic, Sanskritic, civilizational rather than sectarian. And it has allowed me, finally, to flow cleanly within India: not by erasing anything, but by recognising what the cultural centre of gravity actually is, and aligning myself with it.

Perhaps Saif Ali Khan and a small circle can similarly separate the Islamicate from its religious frame; though even that sparked controversy when he named his sons after Timur and Jehangir. But this is not a realistic path for the 700 million South Asian Muslims whose culture, history, and theology are inseparably linked.

8. The Real Issue: Speaking From and Not About

The core dispute is simple:

• Speaking about a minority means classifying it, measuring it, reassuring the majority that everything is fine.

• Speaking from a minority means describing how a community understands its own trajectory; without asking permission, and without fitting itself into majority narratives.

A community that once sat at the centre of a civilisation is entitled to narrate its own fall from that centre. That is not grievance. That is historical clarity.

9. Why This Debate Matters

This is not about Pakistan’s identity crisis. Not about celebrity success stories. Not about census percentages. It is about:

• the rupture between past centrality and present marginality,

• the right of a community to name its own condition,

• and the tension between legal territory, lived culture, and political identity.

The Indo-Muslim world is neither dead nor intact. It is a fractured inheritance, unevenly distributed across three states and many diasporas. Understanding that inheritance requires listening to voices that speak from within it, not only from outside it.