India’s Muslims May Remain, But Is Muslimness Being Erased?

There is a difference between the presence of Muslims and the presence of Muslim civilisation.

Muslims are people. Muslimness is something larger: centuries of language, literature, architecture, poetry, cuisine, political thought, scholarship, music and social memory woven deeply into the history of India.

That distinction matters because the political project associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, does not necessarily require removing India’s more than 200 million Muslims.

A more achievable objective is to reduce their political influence, weaken their institutional presence and gradually detach Muslim history from the story India tells about itself.

Muslims would remain.

Muslimness would matter less.

The softer face of Hindutva

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat recently declared in New York that any Hindu who believes there should be no Muslims in India could not truly be Hindu.

Taken alone, the statement sounds unusually inclusive.

But it raises a more important question: does the Hindu nationalist vision of India merely tolerate Muslims as citizens, or does it accept Muslim civilisation as part of India itself?

The distinction becomes clearer when rhetoric is compared with political reality.

Muslims make up more than 14% of India’s population, yet hold only a small fraction of seats in the Lok Sabha. No Muslim currently represents the ruling National Democratic Alliance in Parliament, and Muslims have largely disappeared from the highest levels of central government.

Their underrepresentation extends into major state institutions.

The 2006 Sachar Committee, established by the Indian government to examine the social and economic position of Muslims, found extremely low Muslim representation in elite administrative, policing and security institutions.

Nearly two decades later, political marginalisation remains pronounced.

So the question is no longer whether Muslims are formally permitted to live in India.

The deeper question is whether they are still considered participants in defining India.

Rewriting the past

Perhaps nowhere is this shift more visible than in the treatment of history.

Muslim dynasties ruled large parts of the subcontinent for centuries. The Delhi Sultanate and Mughal period produced major developments in architecture, administration, literature, language, commerce and urban life.

Yet increasingly, this history is framed primarily through the language of invasion and foreign occupation.

School curricula have reduced or removed material relating to Muslim rulers, while political discourse frequently treats centuries of Muslim rule as something external to Indian civilisation.

The contradiction is difficult to ignore.

Indian nationalist narratives often describe pre-colonial India as enormously prosperous before British domination.

Yet much of that prosperity existed during the very Muslim-ruled periods now portrayed as alien interruptions.

The same history cannot easily be celebrated as evidence of India’s former greatness while simultaneously being dismissed as foreign to India.

Once Muslim history is recategorised as something that merely happened to India, rather than something that became part of India, Muslim identity itself becomes easier to portray as culturally foreign.

The slow disappearance of Urdu

Urdu offers another example.

The language developed in the Indian subcontinent and became one of the great vehicles of South Asian poetry, literature, music and political expression.

Even “Inqilab Zindabad”, one of the most famous slogans of India’s anti-colonial movement, emerged from Urdu.

Yet after Partition, the language increasingly became associated with Pakistan and with Muslims.

Urdu did not disappear.

It survived in poetry, cinema and popular culture.

But its script and institutional position steadily weakened.

This demonstrates how cultural erasure often works.

A language does not need to be formally banned.

It merely needs to stop offering educational, professional and social advantages.

Once that happens, families stop teaching it.

Within a generation or two, what was once a living civilizational tradition becomes something encountered mainly in museums, songs and translated quotations.

Muslims can remain while Muslimness disappears

This is what makes contemporary Hindu nationalism more consequential than simple prejudice against Muslims.

The long-term issue is cultural ownership.

Can Muslims claim the Mughal period as Indian history?

Can Urdu be treated as an Indian language rather than a Muslim or Pakistani one?

Can Islamic architecture be understood as part of India’s national inheritance?

Can Muslim thinkers, rulers, poets and reformers belong fully to India’s historical memory?

Or must they increasingly be treated as outsiders whose descendants happen to hold Indian citizenship?

That is the more sophisticated form of exclusion.

It does not require mass expulsion.

It requires redefining the nation.

Homogenisation eventually turns inward

The danger of this project does not stop with Muslims.

Once a state or political movement begins narrowing the boundaries of acceptable national identity, intellectual diversity itself becomes vulnerable.

Recent controversies over school reading material, including works by Malala Yousafzai and Anne Frank, have demonstrated how cultural policing can expand beyond questions of Islam and begin shaping what students are allowed to read, discuss