INDIA IS HOME to 200 million Muslim people. More Muslims live here than in any other country in the world barring Indonesia and Pakistan.
Yet in 2023, the country’s ruling party – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), controlling a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament and governing, either alone or in coalition, in 15 of the country’s 36 states and Union Territories – had an almost complete absence of Muslim representation, to an extent never seen since India’s first general election as an independent nation in 1952. The party had no elected Muslim member in either chamber of the parliament, or in all but one state legislative assembly. Its only elected Muslim legislator was in Tripura, the sole exception among the party’s 1657 legislators across all states, and in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the parliament, it counted only a single Muslim representative, in a nominated seat. And, for the first time since India won its freedom, there was not a single Muslim minister in the national cabinet.
With this exclusion, the country’s elected leadership sent out a stark and unambiguous message to the 200 million Muslim citizens of what is now the world’s most populous country: we don’t need your votes to hold political power. Ideologues of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s organisational parent, have since the time of its formation nearly a hundred years ago favoured the remoulding of pluralist India into a Hindu nation in which Muslims (and Christians) are “allowed” to live only as second-class citizens. The absolute absence of Muslims from any elected office in the BJP’s control portended their descent into lesser substantive citizenship.
This was a victory for the RSS and BJP’s Hindu majoritarian politics, advancing India closer than ever before to their goal of the expulsion of Muslims from participation in the governance of the country of which they are constitutionally equal citizens. It marked a sombre milestone in the journey of the Indian republic. Indian Muslims have been rendered electorally dispensable and therefore politically irrelevant; some might even go further and regard them a political liability.