After 78 years, India’s Muslims are being written out of citizenship

Every August, the paired anniversaries of India and Pakistan’s independence days invite a reckoning, a chance to reflect on the “promise” of India for the 35 million Muslims who chose to stay back during the carnage of Partition, when the new republic held out a vision of equal citizenship and socio-cultural freedoms. 

That community is now 200 million-strong, outnumbered only by Muslims in Pakistan and Indonesia, and is on course to be the largest Muslim population in the world by 2060.

Yet their numbers alone do not explain why the Muslim League’s warnings in the 1940s, that a “Hindu Congress” party’s rule would politically marginalise Indian Muslims, subject them to socio-economic discrimination, cultural erosion, and targeted violence, feel so prescient today.

A secular democracy and equality before the law for all citizens were at the heart of India’s founding promise, a deliberate rejection of Hindu nationalists’ vision of Partition as the creation of a Muslim state of Pakistan and a Hindu state of India, the ideological seed of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’.

In fact, until December 2019, democratic India did not have a religious test of Indianness. That founding principle was upended only with the Citizenship Amendment Act, which introduced a religion-based criterion for belonging.

Subsequent events, including the post-Pahalgam terror attack crackdown on so-called unauthorised Bangladeshi immigrants, have only intensified this trend, highlighting the state’s growing determination to enforce exclusion along religious lines.

In Gujarat, Maharashtra, New Delhi, and elsewhere, police have rounded up Bengali-speaking Muslims—most of them poor labourers—branding them “illegal” and, in many cases, doing so without even the formality of a brief hearing before a judge.

The law permits authorities to disenfranchise Indian Muslims who lack documentary evidence of being bonafide Indian citizens, a crippling threat in a country where millions of the poorest and most marginalised lack such papers. Undocumented non-Muslims, however, would remain entitled to citizenship under the law. 

The machinery of marginalisation

This is a breathtaking departure from a founding principle. It is a betrayal of an explicit promise—moral, legal, and constitutional—to Indian Muslims. It turns socio-political and historical fissures between the majority Hindus and the largest minority into an instrument of state policy.

Communal polarisation can no longer draw censure from election officials or the courts—the BJP in the run-up to the Jharkhand state assembly election in 2024 promised to undertake a drive to ferret out “illegal Bangladeshis” on the lines of the newly elected BJP government in Odisha’s announcement of such a survey. 

Both were precursors to the current round of detentions of Muslims. Many of those detained possessed ample documentary evidence, it was widely reported, but that did not deter authorities from keeping them in custody for days, or from being forcibly ‘pushed back’ at the West Bengal border—a euphemism for the deportation process that does not follow Indian or international law on the rights of immigrants.

The Election Commission of India’s revision of electoral rolls in Bihar follows the same script—80 million voters’ papers will be re-verified before November 2025, with officials signalling that large numbers of “illegal immigrants” will be deleted from the lists. 

All these measures amount to a layered betrayal of that original promise to Muslims in 1947. 

Those who viewed Partition not as the co-creation of an Islamic state and a Hindu state, but as a tragic disintegration of India’s historical heterogeneity, would now be forced to re-assess current developments by the rubric Jinnah presented.  

“A united India means slavery for Muslims and complete domination of the imperialistic caste Hinduraj throughout this subcontinent,” Jinnah said in a December 1945 statement, “and this is what the Hindu Congress seeks to attain…”  

The evidence is not confined to desperately poor Muslim workers.

Bollywood, India’s biggest cultural export and a formidable shaper of public imagination, is silent as a jury announced two national cinema awards for The Kerala Story (2023), a film built on widely debunked claims about Muslim women from the southern state of Kerala trafficked to serve ISIS but still disingenuously championed by Hindutva leaders.

Meanwhile, battered by a financial downturn, the industry continues to churn out villains in the usual mould: the Islamic terrorist, the cruel Muslim emperor, the drug lord named Zubair—complete with skull cap and soorma-lined eyes—in a trope that never tires.

In the southern state of Karnataka, a Hindutva group’s leaders were arrested in connection with the poisoning of a government school’s water tank, allegedly to discredit and remove its Muslim headmaster.   

Anyone who has used gig workers’ services knows of the hidden bigotry of their clientele. A salon professional told me she was nervous about visiting a particular housing society in the financial capital, Mumbai, where guards and residents demand that she remove her niqaab, an account that matches documented tales from cab drivers and delivery partners made to chant religious slogans or face other forms of discrimination.  

Official projections forecast that gig work will balloon to 23.5 million workers by 2029-30, and in these accounts of systemic bias, the message is unmistakable: the engines of India’s economic future are being built with the doors half-shut to millions of its citizens. India’s new economy is not just uneven — it is being wired to leave some citizens behind.

Everyday bigotry

These incidents reflect only the casual violence of everyday Indian bigotry, to which we must add the violence of policy over the past several years. 

The ban on beef; the persistent, murderous attacks on Muslim meat traders accused of transporting or storing it; the selective demolition of homes and properties of Muslims accused in cases of communal violence; the abysmal proportion of Muslims in Parliament and state assemblies; and the jeering and chanting by mobs of Hindu youth outside mosques during Hindu festivals—all point to the fabrication of an ‘Indianness’ that has little tolerance for difference.

Nation-building is, admittedly, an ongoing project, and the divisive currents we see today have, without doubt, antecedents in earlier decades.      

As early as 1952, the Urdu Regional Conference convened by the Anjuman-Taraqqi-i-Urdu cited during its discussions several instances of Urdu having been abolished in primary schools in Uttar Pradesh.

Jawaharlal Nehru, in one of the nearly 400 letters he wrote to chief ministers during his prime ministership, expressed annoyance at efforts in the northern state to push out a language which “has enriched Indian culture and thought”. 

In the same letter, dated 16 July 1953, Nehru said Indians tend to overlook their failings, which then “come and overwhelm us”. 

“There is something inherently disintegrating in our social outlook,” he wrote, about his preoccupation with addressing communalism. “Perhaps this is due to long years of functioning under the caste system, which separates us into innumerable compartments. Whatever it may be due to, it is clear that we tend to disintegrate and to work in small groups at every provocation.”

The defining difference between 1953 and 2025 could be the state’s response to divisive tendencies and parochialisms.

At an election rally in 2024, Prime Minister Modi referred to Muslims as “infiltrators”, claiming the Congress would seek to make Muslims the primary beneficiary of state resources; that the Hindu majority’s hard-earned wealth would be snatched by the Congress, including the women’s mangalsutras, in a bid to redistribute wealth to those who “have more children”.

The BJP lost the seat where this rally was held, also embarrassingly losing the Faizabad-Ayodhya Parliamentary seat where Modi had inaugurated the Ram temple a few months earlier.

It all circles back to the weary Indian Muslim, holding on—sometimes tenuously—to the idea of belonging. 

The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that without active participation in the life of the polity, citizens lose not just their voice but their freedom.

For millions of Indians, especially Muslims, that warning is no longer theoretical. Stripped of agency, shut out of decision-making, and recast as outsiders in their land, the rights once announced as being inalienable to every Indian are being quietly redefined and, for all practical purposes, steadily erased. 

Source: TRT World