New India, Hindutva Constitutionalism, and Muslim Political Attitudes

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082833
Published date01 June 2022
Date01 June 2022
Subject MatterSpecial Section: India @75: Religion and Citizenship in IndiaArticles
New India, Hindutva
Constitutionalism, and
Muslim Political Attitudes
Hilal Ahmed1
Abstract
Thisarticle explores Muslim political attitudes in contemporary India. It contextualizes the political
responses of Muslim communities in the backdrop of two crucial legal-constitutional changes intro-
duced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government: the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution
and the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. These changes, I suggest, stem from the official doctrine
of New India and its operative mechanism, Hindutva constitutionalism. Analysing the nature of Muslim
participation in the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests and Muslim electoral responses
in two subsequent elections (Delhi Assembly Election, 2020 and the Bihar Assembly Election, 2020), I
argue that political engagement of Muslims could be interpreted as an ever-evolving discourse, which
not merely responds to Hindutva politics but also asserts its relative autonomy.
Keywords
New India, constitutionalism, Hindutva, Muslims, citizenship, protests
Introduction
This article makes an attempt to understand Muslim political attitudes in contemporary India. It
contextualizes the political responses of Muslim communities against the backdrop of two crucial legal-
constitutional changes introduced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government: the abrogation of
Article 370 of the Constitution and the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. These structural changes, the
article shows, underline a new form of politics. I describe this phenomenon as Hindutva constitutionalism
and explore its intrinsic relationship with the official doctrine of New India. The article looks at the
nature of Muslim participation in the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests and the Muslim
electoral responses in two subsequent elections (Delhi Assembly Election, 2020 and the Bihar Assembly
Election, 2020) to figure out the possible linkages between Hindutva constitutionalism and Muslim
political attitudes.
Article
1 CSDS, New Delhi, India.
Corresponding author:
Hilal Ahmed, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, New Delhi 110054, India.
E-mail: ahmed.hilal@csds.in
Studies in Indian Politics
10(1) 62–78, 2022
© 2022 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/23210230221082833
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Ahmed 63
The article, more broadly, responds to the recent intellectual debates on the survival, decline and even
the deaths of democracies.2 Exploring Muslim political attitudes as a serious point of reference, it tries
to map out the Muslims’ imaginations of Indian democracy. This exploration is useful to evaluate the
dominant media-driven claim that radical Hindutva majoritarianism has forced Muslims—the most
vulnerable minority—to give up politics of all kind (Menon, 2019). I find this position empirically
wrong and analytically misleading. The article suggests that Hindutva politics has not yet succeeded in
determining the Muslim engagements with politics at various levels. Active Muslim participation,
especially in the realm of Hindutva dominating electoral politics, encourages us to pay serious attention
to the everyday meanings of democracy in India.3
Terms like ‘political participation’ and ‘electoral behaviour’ are often used interchangeably to explain
different formulations about Muslim political attitudes. Muslim participation as a positive feature is
evoked to celebrate India’s adherence to plurality, inclusiveness, and democratic constitutionalism. It is
argued that active involvement of Muslims in democratic processes—mainly in electoral politics—
demonstrate that India’s minorities do not feel isolated and marginalized.4 However, there is a negative
imagination of Muslim political participation. Muslims are seen as a politically conscious community,
which is supposed to be fully aware of its communal interests. Hence, they participate in politics to
bargain with the state for the protection of their collective, communal and eventually separatist interests.5
These two conflicting interpretations of Muslims’ engagement with politics, interestingly, rely on a
strong assumption that Muslim political attitudes have been homogeneous, consistent, and static and–
precisely for this reason—it should always be analysed in relation to larger questions of Indian politics
such as the success of democracy6 and/or the threat of separatism/communalism.7 As a result, Muslim
2 The literature on democracy and populism is very relevant in this regard (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018; Chatterjee, 2019; Müller,
2016).
3 The recent scholarship on Muslim engagements with politics are also very relevant to underline this point. Emmerich (2020),
Ahmad (2009), Bajpai and Farooqui (2018), Santhosh and Paleri (2021) demonstrate various facets of contemporary Muslim poli-
tics. These studies show that Muslim political organizations and elite are actively involved in carving out a space for themselves
in the Hindutva dominated political sphere. The scope of this article, however, is slightly different. I make a crucial distinction
between the politics of Muslim elites and the political enthusiasm of Muslim communities. This distinction, in my view, might help
us to make sense of the diversity of Muslim political responses.
4 This line of argument is not entirely new. The serious commentators of Indian democracy often invoke the crucial political pres-
ence of Muslims in India to measure the success of Indian democracy. One of the most noticeable explanations comes from Arend
Lijphart, who describes Indian democracy as a consociational democracy. According to Lijphart, Indian case fulls four basic
features of consociational democracy are as follows: (1) grand coalition governments that include representatives of all major lin-
guistic and religious groups, (2) cultural autonomy for these groups, (3) proportionality in political representation and civil service
appointments and (4) a minority veto with regard to vital minority rights and autonomy. He argues that ‘newly independent India
embraced power sharing and has maintained it ever since is not even very surprising…. After the late 1960s, as a result of greater
mass mobilization and activation, power sharing became less strong and pervasive, evidenced by the centralization of the Congress
Party and the federal system, the decline of the Congress Party’s electoral strength, the attack on minority rights, and the rise of
the BJP. As consociational theory would have predicted, Indian democracy has remained basically stable, but the weakening of
power sharing has been accompanied by an increase in intergroup hostility and violence. Concern about these trends is reected in
the consociational thrust of the major proposals for political and constitutional change by reform-minded Indians’ (Lijphart, 1996,
p. 266). Interestingly, Muslim political participation is seen as a given and uncomplicated element in this analytical framework.
It appears that Lijphart does not look at the discursive making of Muslim identities and their political manifestations. Steven
Wilkinson’s critique of consociational explanation is also very relevant here. Wilkinson argues that identities are not always xed
and therefore, power sharing needs to be examined in relation to changing dynamics of electoral competition (Wilkinson, 2004,
pp. 134–136).
5 For a critical evaluation of this position (Ahmed, 2016, pp. 348–374).
6 For an excellent critique of the celebrationist view of Indian democracy (Das, 2015, pp 1–28).
7 Mohan Bhagwat’s comment that Hindutva without Muslims is meaningless is very relevant here (Ahmed, 2019).

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