Omar Zaki
There is a sentence in Ibn Khaldun Bharati’s column in ThePrint, published on 17 October 2026 under the headline Sharjeel Imam’s Islamist manifesto will be forgotten. The silence of liberals will not, that betrays the whole piece more completely than any of its arguments could. The author scans the internet, he tells us, for a searing rebuttal from the leading lights of liberalism, and discovers only silence, which he reads as proof of the left’s abject inability to confront the Islamist agenda. He wants a rebuttal, and when none arrives he supplies the rebuttal himself, dressed as an indictment. This is the oldest manoeuvre in polemical writing: to compose the speech of your enemy and then convict him of having spoken it. A Muslim reader watches this performance with a particular weariness, because we have seen it many times, on many stages, and we know what it is for.
The Man the Column Never Really Meets
Let me begin with the man himself, because the column never really does. Sharjeel Imam studied computer engineering at IIT Bombay, worked in the software industry, and then did something the authors of such columns rarely do: he abandoned a comfortable career to study modern Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, writing a doctoral thesis on the history of Muslims in Bihar. He is the son of the late Akbar Imam, a Janata Dal (United) politician who contested assembly elections in Bihar, and he grew up in Kako village in Jehanabad, a district whose name evokes for older Indians the armed uprisings of the rural poor in the 1980s.
The Law and the Warning
When the Citizenship Amendment Act was passed in December 2019, explicitly fast-tracking citizenship for migrants of six religions but not Islam, Imam understood, before almost anyone else did, what the law meant when coupled with a nationwide National Register of Citizens. The Act relaxes the eligibility rules for illegal migrants on religious lines: Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who entered on or before 31 December 2014 are no longer treated as illegal migrants, and Muslims are pointedly left outside its ambit in a country where the first-ever nationwide NRC had been promised. Asaduddin Owaisi warned the Supreme Court of the law’s unholy nexus with the NRC, calling the two one seamless chain; the Congressional Research Service reported that in tandem with a planned NRC the law may affect the status of India’s large Muslim minority of roughly 200 million, and that for the first time in independent India’s history a religious criterion had been added to the naturalisation process. The exclusion clause was the point. Millions of Muslims, and many poor Hindus beside them, would be rendered suspect in their own country, and the burden of proving citizenship would fall on those least able to carry it: the undocumented, the literate in their own language only, the poor. Imam said so in student meetings at Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University in December 2019 and January 2020, in speeches that were at times rhetorical and always the speech of a citizen telling other citizens that a law was unconstitutional and had to be resisted.
Six Years, No Trial
For this, he has now spent more than six years in prison, and his trial has not begun. He was arrested on 28 January 2020, before the Delhi riots of that February, and was later taken into custody in the riots conspiracy case in August 2020, charged with conspiring in violence that took place months after his arrest. The Supreme Court in January 2026 declined him bail after more than five years of pre-trial detention, while granting bail to five co-accused and imposing the condition that he could apply again only after protected witnesses are examined or one year passes, whichever is earlier. A Delhi High Court had already granted him statutory bail in the sedition case in May 2024, holding that he had served more than half the maximum sentence under the UAPA charge and that the sedition provision itself stood suspended by the Supreme Court’s order in S.G. Vombatkere; he remained in jail anyway, under the riots case. In October 2026, the police moved to cancel even a seven-day interim bail granted for his cousin’s wedding, because a television reporter entered his house and his brother spoke to her; the court found a violation of the no-media condition but did not cancel the bail, which expired on schedule. A man charged for his words has now spent a year of that detention arguing about a word his brother said. If any reader wishes to know what the Indian state currently thinks a Muslim intellectual is for, this timetable is the answer.
What the Column Does, and Refuses to Do
Ibn Khaldun Bharati’s column pretends to be a summary of Imam’s views. It is in fact a substitute for engagement with them. The Quint had published, on 29 September 2026, a long interview with Imam, and the Polis Project and Critical Muslim Studies had published his prison letter; both are careful, closely argued texts in which Imam works through the Constituent Assembly debates, the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, the electoral data of the 1946 provincial elections, and the critiques of the Indian republic assembled by Perry Anderson in The Indian Ideology (as his interview confirms, and as his prison letter documents). One may disagree with all of this, and reasonable people do; K.B.S. Sidhu, a retired IAS officer, published a courteous disagreement in the same pages of ThePrint on 10 October 2026, noting as a Sikh that the League’s federalism protected one minority and forgot the next. That is what debate looks like.
The column, by contrast, does not quote a single sentence of Imam’s at length and test it. It performs three rhetorical operations instead. First, it translates: everything Imam says about structural exclusion becomes, in the column’s vocabulary, the Islamist agenda. When Imam says the Constitution entrenched centralisation and denied Muslims effective representation through first-past-the-post territorial constituencies, the column reports that he openly calls the Constitution fascist. When Imam argues, following Iqbal and Jinnah, that the two-nations formula of 1940s politics referred to religious communities dispersed across South Asia who needed constitutional guarantees, the column announces the dream of a Pakistan within India. Second, it pathologises: Imam’s evident debt to Ali Shariati is rendered as Islamo-Marxism, a phrase that does no analytical work and is applied to a man who was, in fact, a leading Iranian sociologist of religion, whose book was titled Marxism and Other Western Fallacies, though he did dialogue with Marxist categories as Frantz Fanon did. Third, it conspires: the silence of liberals is not silence but connivance, a left-liberal love affair with Global Islam, which the author claims is openly committed to destroying Western civilisation. No evidence is offered for this last claim, because none is needed in the genre; it is assumed the way the ground is assumed.
The Fear Wearing a Pen Name
A Muslim reading this column notices, before anything else, its fear. The author, whose earlier pieces include a call for a new Indian Islam that would begin by questioning the Muslimness of terrorists, writes throughout as a man anxious about the loyalty of his co-religionists, insisting that Indian Islam must be reformed into something legible to Indian nationalism before it can be admitted to the conversation. There is a pathos in this, and I do not mock it; every minority contains such figures, and their position is genuinely painful. But the intellectual failure is the same in every version: such writers can only imagine Muslim politics as a betrayal in progress. The possibility that a Muslim citizen might study his own constitutional history, find in it a record of promises made and broken, and argue for structural remedies within and against the state as it exists, is not available to their imagination. When another writer answered this author’s essay on Vande Mataram by insisting that Muslim objections to the song are about faith, not rejection of India, the author replied that such pluralism is simply Two-Nation theory by another name. Muslim speech is thus always already separatist: whatever a Muslim says, the category is pre-decided. It must be an imported agenda, a foreign contagion, a manifesto. The word does the work: a manifesto is what one writes before violence. An argument is what one makes before an election. The column decides in advance which one it is reading.
The Substance the Column Cannot Answer
Now to the argument itself, because Imam deserves to be answered and the column evades him. His position, as stated in the Quint interview, has several parts, and each has a serious scholarly pedigree. First, the historical claim: that the post-colonial Indian republic was constituted, in part, through the defeat of a Muslim constitutional programme that had mass democratic legitimacy. Imam cites the 1946 elections, in which the Muslim League won 453 of the 524 Muslim assembly seats, about 86 percent, on roughly 75 percent of the polled Muslim vote, on a platform whose core was provincial autonomy, group safeguards at the centre, and a federal arrangement, the Cabinet Mission Plan, that would have kept India united. The League’s slogan of Pakistan, as the constitutional historians have long argued, functioned as a bargaining counter within a federal negotiation, and the plan’s collapse in 1946-47 involved choices by Congress leadership that Maulana Azad himself, no admirer of Jinnah, blamed chiefly on Jawaharlal Nehru; the plan, after being accepted by both parties, was scuppered by Nehru’s remark denying the negotiated safeguards, as Imam’s prison letter argues. Imam’s conclusion from all this is modest and falsifiable: that Muslims entered the republic as a defeated political community, and that this defeat was later rewritten as consent. Whether one accepts the weighting of causes or not, this is a position held in various forms by serious historians of partition, and it cannot be met by the word Islamist.
Second, the constitutional claim: that first-past-the-post voting, adopted in the Constituent Assembly partly on the argument that it would prevent communal parties, has in practice operated as a machine for manufacturing absolute majorities out of pluralities, and has structurally punished concentrated minorities. Imam’s evidence here is arithmetic rather than theology: a party can hold the third-largest national vote share and still win zero seats, as the Bahujan Samaj Party demonstrated in 2014 with 4.2 percent of the vote and no MPs. Anderson’s line, which Imam quotes, is worth repeating: the introduction of plurality voting may prove a more damaging colonial legacy than the stoking of communal furies, since it converts plurality into monopoly. Imam’s remedies, proportional representation, genuine federalism, statutory recognition of Dalit Muslims and Christians in reservation policy, are the standard repertoire of comparative constitutional engineering, debated in every political science department on earth. A reader of the column would never learn that Imam’s programme is electoral reform. The word used instead is manifesto.
Third, the theological claim: that Imam’s political thought flows from Islamic modernism, from the lineage of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, through Akbar Allahabadi and Iqbal to Ali Shariati, and that a democratic, revolutionary Islam is the answer to both the autocracies of the Muslim world and the pathological reaction to modernity that we call fundamentalism, as he states in the interview. The column seizes on the word Shariati and files Imam under Islamo-Marxism, which manages to be wrong twice: wrong about Shariati, who was a sociologist of religion, and wrong about the tradition, which is precisely the strand of Islamic thought that has argued, for a century, that Islam is compatible with, indeed requires, mass democratic politics. Imam’s invocation of ijma, the juristic concept of communal consensus, to describe the 1946 Muslim vote is a scholarly concept, not a call for clerical rule; the column, which claims to be written by a student of Islam, surely knows this and prints it anyway.
On Silence, and Who Is Actually Silenced
The column’s title announces its true subject: the silence of liberals. Consider what this silence consists of. The liberals the author waits for are the same people who spent 2020 defending Shaheen Bagh, who signed the open letters against the arrest of student activists, including for Imam himself, who argued in courtrooms and op-eds that sedition is a colonial instrument that should have died with the empire that used it against Tilak and Gandhi. Perhaps they did not write 4,000 words about an interview they had not all read. But silence, for a Muslim, has a very particular meaning in India today, and it is not the silence of columnists. It is the silence of a man who cannot speak to a reporter without the police filing to cancel his bail. It is the silence of students who watched the state decide that the anti-CAA movement’s most articulate voice should be removed from it before the movement peaked. It is the silence the column itself demands and then mourns: for if liberals had rushed to rebut Imam in the column’s own terms, they would have conceded the column’s premise, that Imam is an Islamist to be contained rather than a citizen to be answered. The author has constructed a trap in which the only permitted liberal speech about a Muslim dissident is agreement with his jailers.
The Speech, Examined Rather Than Inherited
It is here that the column most depends on inherited judgment, and here that the record is most unforgiving to it. Imam’s words of January 2020 were circulated as a viral clip; his own prison letter records that a month of working and speaking at Shaheen Bagh and Jamia, and a decade of sustained research and writing, were all ignored because of a clip mischievously propagated by the Bharatiya Janata Party and their supporters. His mother said his statements were distorted and selectively played; his uncle noted that a 40-second video of the 40-minute speech is being presented, and it is being exaggerated. Imam’s own clarification was recorded: the call was for a peaceful chakka jam, blocking roads to press opposition to the NRC, the repertoire of Gandhian civil disobedience. The trial court that actually examined the theory found the evidence that the speech incited rioters scanty and sketchy, declared that the prosecution’s version appears to be crumbling like a house of cards, and recorded that no eyewitness was cited and no evidence showed the accused even heard the speech. The Supreme Court of India itself suspended the sedition law under which his words were prosecuted. A citizen warned against an unconstitutional law; he was punished with six years of pre-trial detention under a terrorism statute; and the punishment has been the proof of the argument. The response Imam met is itself the phenomenon Imam warned about, performed upon him as a lesson to everyone who watched.
The Final Judgement
The final judgement on the column is this. It calls Imam’s doctrine a provocative reiteration of the Muslim League’s politics and Jamaat-e-Islami’s ideology, which is a slander by juxtaposition: the League’s politics, as Imam presents it, was federal constitutionalism, and the Jamaat’s ideology is the Islamism he has explicitly argued against in his prison writings. It predicts that his manifesto will soon be forgotten. Here, at last, the author may be right, but not as he intends. Texts are forgotten when the conditions that produced them are resolved. Imam’s conditions- a constitution that counts a minority’s votes and then discards them, a terrorism law used against speeches, a citizenship law with a religious exclusion clause- remain unresolved, and every year they persist will recruit more readers for the man who named them first. The column will be forgotten for a better reason: it was written to be forgotten, a stone thrown into a well, whose only ambition was the splash. Imam’s words will remain, as he himself wrote from Tihar, because words that name a people’s condition outlive the anxieties of those who wish the naming had never happened. We were told, in the Quran, to return an evil greeting with a better one. The better greeting owed to Sharjeel Imam is not flattery and not silence. It is the argument he has never been given: an honest reckoning with the constitutional history he has read so carefully. Ibn Khaldun Bharati had the space for it and spent it on fear. History will file the column where it files such things, among the anxious witnesses, and will remember, if it remembers anything, the man who studied while the state tried to make him an example, and whose trial still has not begun.
Muzaffar is a qualitative researcher exploring the sociology of time under colonialism, and the historical and sonic dimensions of sacred spaces in contexts shaped by colonial endurance, dispossession, and the persistence of communal memory. For Publishing, he goes by the name of Omar Zaki.
The information presented in this article represents the personal viewpoints of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Observer Post.
