Jailed Scholar Sharjeel Imam's Interview Sparks Debate in India Over Muslim Representation

A lengthy interview by India's jailed Muslim scholar Sharjeel Imam has sparked a heated debate in the country. In the interview given to the Indian news website The Quint on September 29 from a prison cell in New Delhi, he questioned foundational ideas of Indian nationalism.

The question at the heart of the debate is whether the world's largest democracy has failed the world's largest minority community, its nearly 200 million Muslims. Muslims form roughly 14 percent of India's 1.4 billion population.

Imam, 38, told The Quint that there are around 210 million Muslims in India, one of the biggest Muslim groups in the world, with practically zero say in this democracy.

He criticised India's constitution for its enshrined centralisation of power. He described the country's secularism as particularly Islamophobic and parochial, and said democracy was being used as a tool to deny Muslims their political representation and rights.

Hailing from Jahanabad district in Bihar, India's poorest state, Imam graduated in computer science from IIT Bombay and worked as a software engineer before returning to academics. As a doctoral student at the Centre for Historical Studies at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), his research area was the political history of India's Muslims.

In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government passed a controversial citizenship law that gave an expedited pathway to citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring countries. The United Nations called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) fundamentally discriminatory against Muslims.

The law ignited nationwide protests. A weeks-long sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, a densely populated Muslim neighbourhood on the southeastern edge of New Delhi, led by Muslims, mostly women, became the epicentre of those protests.

Imam was one of the chief organisers of the Shaheen Bagh sit-in. He was arrested in January 2020 for inciting violence through speeches made at the protests. The violence came the next month in northeast Delhi, when he was already behind bars. Despite that, he was charged with rioting, murder, attempted murder, sedition and promoting enmity on grounds of religion, including under a stringent anti-terror law.

Imam was not the only one. Nearly a dozen Muslim students and activists, including another JNU scholar, Umar Khalid, were arrested and imprisoned as alleged conspirators in the 2020 riots. They remain in jail without trial and have repeatedly been denied bail, with rights groups calling their continued incarceration a gross abuse of power.

In the interview, Imam called Mahatma Gandhi a fascist and accused independent India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, of falsehood and mythmaking in his book The Discovery of India for projecting India as an ancient, uniquely tolerant civilisation. But his most scathing attack was reserved for secular liberals. He said both secular and Hindutva frameworks share the same core ideas: the myth of uniformity, centralisation and the denial of sharing of power.

In a rebuttal in The Quint, legal scholar Mohd Zeeshan Ahmad wrote that Imam raises serious historical and ideological questions that cannot be evaded merely because he is facing prosecution, but that his equation of secularism with Hindutva is unpersuasive. Ahmad asked where Pasmanda Muslims, the less privileged castes, are in this political imagination, and where the question of gender justice, including the rights of women within Muslim communities, stands.

By contrast, Irfan Ahmad, professor of anthropology and sociology at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul, Turkiye, told Al Jazeera that Imam is right in questioning whether there is a difference between the Congress and the BJP when it comes to secularism. He said that if a democracy routinely makes a community such as Muslims invisible in terms of representation in legislatures, there is something fundamentally wrong with that democracy, and the declining ratio of Muslims in parliament testifies to that silencing.

In the interview, Imam suggested constitutional republicanism that guarantees decentralisation of power and more community rights. He argued that the 1947 partition of the subcontinent was forced by the Congress. He regarded Pakistan's founding leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a great, democratic leader and the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal as his political inspiration. Demanding proportional representation instead of the first-past-the-post system, he said Iqbal and Jinnah had rightly foreseen that FPTP with no safeguards would lead to the permanent marginalisation of Muslims.

Responding to Imam, a columnist writing under the pseudonym Ibn-e-Khaldun Bharati in The Print described him as representing an Islamist agenda demanding a Pakistan within the borders of India. Bharati argued that a nation needs a state, whereas a minority needs constitutional guarantees, and that no one can be both at the same time in theory or in practice.