AhlulBayt News Agency: The conscience of Indian Muslims has long been governed not by their own collective agency but by the dictates of majoritarian politics. First under Congress and now more aggressively under the BJP. Congress relied on tokenistic representation while suppressing independent Muslim voices, often reducing Muslim identity to communal appeasement. The Babri Masjid episode revealed the hollowness of its secularism: Rajiv Gandhi enabled the unlocking of the mosque gates and idol placement, while Narasimha Rao’s inaction during the 1992 demolition marked a grave assault on Muslims. These acts paved the way for today’s BJP, which openly advances Hindutva and portrays Muslims as outsiders.
This is precisely what Sharjeel Imam, anti-CAA activist and researcher who currently languishes in jail under draconian UAPA, sought to interrogate in his speeches and writings: Who decides what constitutes the nation’s conscience? His challenge was aimed at the politics of majoritarianism that monopolises this decision. His stance reminds one of the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), who in his moral philosophy asserted that the highest virtue lies in the “absolute renunciation of personal advantage for the sake of advancing the happiness of others.” This principle finds living expression in Sharjeel’s own political reality; his incarceration under the machinery of the state has become emblematic of sacrificial resistance.
Framed against a majoritarian political order, Sharjeel enacts what James C. Scott terms a “moral economy of resistance,” where the willingness to endure suffering becomes both a strategic and ethical act aimed at protecting the collective dignity of a community. His refusal to compromise, whether by rejecting plea bargains or refusing to abandon his convictions, transforms personal suffering into public defiance. In the Gramscian sense of the “organic intellectual,” Sharjeel’s resistance is not merely juridical but counter-hegemonic. It challenges a nationalist narrative that renders his identity incompatible with the political body of the state.
Sharjeel and the politics of the Self
I am a pessimist because of my intelligence and an optimist because of my faith.
Sharjeel’s politics of the self rests squarely on his faith, i.e., Islam, which is rooted in ideals of emancipation and social justice. It is important to distinguish this from pan-Islamism. Sharjeel’s orientation belongs to the tradition of Islamic modernism. He positions himself as a student of Jamaluddin Afghani (1838–1897), adopting Afghani’s model of connecting the global with the local, not by wholesale imitation but as a strategic, context-sensitive approach. This sharply contrasts with Indian secularism, imported without adequate contextual adaptation.
The Muslim Self in contemporary India draws its identity both from faith and from the lived political and socio-economic experience of being Muslim in India. This intertwining is politically significant, especially in a climate where Muslims are defined as much by systemic exclusion as by their religious beliefs.
The political salience of the Muslim Self, grounded in faith, recalls the Karachi trial of Mohamed Ali, documented by R.V. Thadani in The Historic State Trial. Mohamed Ali articulated a Muslim duty not just to uphold personal belief but to exhort others to do good and avoid evil, insisting that one’s salvation is tied to the moral conduct of the community. This ethic resonates with Sharjeel’s insistence that Muslim political participation is a collective responsibility.
Political intersectionality and Muslim representation
The deprivation of Muslim representation in India stems from two interlinked processes. First, there is the explicit exclusion of Muslim candidates by mainstream political parties, either through denial of tickets or by framing Muslim candidacy as communal or as a stain on secular politics. Second, the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system structurally disadvantages minorities whose voting power is dispersed.
This creates what I call a political intersectionality for Indian Muslims. Discrimination operates both at the level of majoritarian party gatekeeping and at the systemic level of electoral design. As political scientist Dr. Mujibur Rehman notes, this has rendered Indian Muslims a “political untouchable class.”
Adnan Farooqui, in his chapter “Muslim Representation” in the Handbook of Indian Politics, observes that while democracies often deploy constitutional safeguards, such as legislative quotas, to ensure the representation of marginalised groups, India deliberately avoided political quotas for religious minorities after Independence. While separate electorates for Muslims were accepted before 1947, post-independence leaders linked such arrangements to colonial “divide and rule” policies. As a result, the Constitution offers only cultural accommodation to religious minorities while reserving political quotas exclusively for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. Consequently, Muslim representation now depends on alliances with other communities.
When we consider independent Muslim political agency or the Muslim Self, it cannot be reduced to individualism. It is a collective orientation towards political action for the broader good of society. Yet this agency has been systematically curtailed by both Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Whenever an independent Muslim political agency is asserted, it is reframed as communalism or as an affront to secularism.
Sharjeel’s dissent and the reclamation of Muslim Selfhood
Sharjeel’s dissent is an act of reclamation. He redefines the political Muslim-self not as assimilation or tokenism, but as embodied moral and political sovereignty. This recalls the colonial-era ulama who asserted Muslim difference through ritual and moral clarity.
Here, SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies dedicated to Sharjeel Imam, offers a relevant lens. Tareen’s concept of “sacred entanglement” reimagines intercommunal relations not as assimilation but as ethical relationality that preserves difference. By dedicating his work to Sharjeel, Tareen situates Imam’s politics as a modern reactivation of ethico-ritual sovereignty: a refusal to subsume Muslim distinctiveness into secular homogeneity and a deliberate marshalling of the Muslim Self as both moral posture and political agency.
The notion of the “outsider”
In the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections, Sharjeel Imam has been labelled an “outsider” by sections of the political establishment and media. This is not a neutral descriptor but a politically charged label aimed at delegitimising his candidacy. Far from being an objective assessment of his origins, the term operates as a weapon against those who challenge dominant power structures.
Srirupa Roy, in her work The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism, demonstrates that the “outsider” label is strategically deployed to exclude minorities from meaningful political participation. In a country as diverse as India, outsider-ism is rarely about geography alone, it is about deciding who is entitled to belong and participate in democracy.
In Sharjeel’s case, his background, identity, and political ideology are weaponised under this label to create an artificial divide between “real” locals and those deemed unfit to represent them.
Sharjeel as an intersectional outsider
Drawing on Kanchan Chandra’s theory of ethnic head-count politics, Sharjeel’s candidacy in Bahadurganj exemplifies the intersectional outsider. He is marginalised both as a regional non-local and as someone outside the dominant caste bloc. Majoritarian politics deliberately manipulates these intersecting outsider statuses, i.e., regional nativism protects entrenched local elites, while caste exclusion upholds hierarchical dominance. Together, they serve to suppress assertive Muslim selfhood by portraying independent Muslim candidates as unrepresentative or divisive.
Conscience, freedom, and the Muslim question
True freedom for Indian Muslims requires dismantling these structural barriers—electoral, social, and ideological—that perpetuate exclusion. Until then, the Muslim political conscience will remain captive, defined not by Muslims themselves but by the majoritarian forces that claim the authority to determine it. In this context, Sharjeel Imam’s politics acquires particular significance: his insistence on reclaiming an independent Muslim selfhood resists both Congress’s paternalistic appeasement and the BJP’s vilification.
As Anne Norton argues in her book On the Muslim Question, the “Muslim question” in modern politics is never really about Muslims alone but about the limits of liberal democracy itself, about who counts as a citizen and who is marked as an outsider to democratic freedom. Applying her insight to India reveals how both Congress and BJP have framed Muslims as the “problem” around which the boundaries of national belonging are drawn.
Sharjeel Imam’s dissent exposes how the Indian polity manages Muslim identity as a problem rather than a partner. His incarceration thus stands as a stark reminder of how urgently the Muslim Question must be rethought in contemporary India.
By: Mohd Alfaz Ali is a Doctoral Fellow at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi.
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