Juveria Asif
On 28 January 2020, Muslim student activist, leader, and key organiser of protests against the then newly instituted Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register for Citizens (NRC), Sharjeel Imam, surrendered himself to the Delhi police. Imam was wanted in relation to a few speeches that he had delivered, most prominently at the Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia, two of the most distinguished non-seminary Muslim institutions of higher learning in India. Later, these speeches were cited as evidence for a slew of charges—including sedition, terrorism, and incitement of violence—being levelled against Imam in at least five different states of the country, in eight other cases. Some of these cases, such as the Delhi Riots conspiracy case, are built on poor evidence and were slapped upon him after he was taken into custody, almost as an afterthought, albeit with dire consequences.
In one of these now infamous speeches, Imam called for chakka jams (or roadblocks) as a means of protest, which was immediately widely cast in the Indian media as a call for insurgency against the state. Imam was later charged with the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which allows the Indian government unchecked power to designate individuals as terrorists, even without any incriminating evidence, and detain them for indefinite periods without charging them and without giving them a fair trial. Even though this law has frequently been criticised and called “unconstitutional” and “a tool to stifle dissent” by prominent activists worldwide, and has even been criticised by the United Nations for its frequent “misuse and abuse,” it has still been upheld, now forming one of the cornerstones of an increasingly violent form of Hindu majoritarian politics that is sanctioned by the state that disproportionately targets Muslims and other minorities.
The Citizenship Amendment Act, an amendment to the original Act passed in 1955, was passed in parliament in December 2019, and sparked nationwide protests due to its inherently discriminatory nature. According to this act, Muslims are the only community that is excluded from a list of communities that may acquire Indian citizenship if they are fleeing persecution (that is, they are undocumented migrants) from the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Coupled with the National Register for Citizens (NRC)—another discriminatory practice that requires people to produce documents of ancestry as proof they are Indian citizens—this law lays down the groundwork for stripping Muslims of India of their citizenship, effectively making them stateless.
India is home to upwards of 200 million Muslims, most of whom belong to the lower and lower middle classes. The NRC has already wreaked havoc in Assam, and the Narendra Modi government is actively seeking to apply it to the rest of the country. Once Muslims are excluded from this list of citizens, it is easy for the government to bar them from reapplying for citizenship on the grounds of the CAA. The full toll this will take on the Muslims of the country is yet to be seen, but detention camps that have been set up in Assam and are up and running have already set a chilling precedent.
Even though Imam gave his speeches on the eve of the institution of the CAA and NRC, his politics go beyond the normative anti-Hindutva “liberal” politics of most of India’s dissenters. For this reason, Imam instantly acquired an almost villain-like aura in the media, with prominent leftist and liberal organisations and individuals publicly condemning and distancing themselves from him. The leftist Students’ Union of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the reputed institution of which Imam was a student, even issued a statement calling him irresponsible and disassociating themselves from him. These condemnations, in addition to the routine disparagement of the actively anti-Muslim Hindutva lobby, have effectively set up Imam as a sort of pariah in the Indian political context, with nobody on the entire political spectrum daring to claim him. He is too Muslim for the right, too political for the liberals, and too politically Muslim for the left.
The reasons for Imam’s exclusion and indefinite detainment go much deeper than a mere incitement of chakka jams. As we saw in recent years, chakka jams have been successfully used as tools of protest, most prominently by farmers protesting unfair practices by the government. Imam has been detained, however, not because of the language he used or the protests he organised, which were all well within the normative bounds of democratic dissent, but because he called into question the very raison d’etre for the constitution of the Indian Republic. According to Imam, Muslim exclusion, dispossession, and subsequent displacement in the modern Indian context is not an aberration, rather, it is the direct outcome of the birth of a nation that was founded on the basic principle of Muslim exclusion—the product of an exclusively Hindu imagination.
In the speech delivered at the Aligarh Muslim University, Imam argued that the historiography of modern India had entirely been subsumed by and under the Hindu imagination. In this speech, he sought to disenchant the Muslims of India from the dream of inclusivity by dismantling the popular narrative of “BJP bad, Congress good,” or the dichotomy, that is usually upheld, of a pre-and post-BJP India. He further asserted that India’s political system (whether under the Congress, the BJP, or any other party) was fundamentally designed by and catered to the interests of (largely upper-caste) Hindus. Relying on this system alone, he said, had brought Muslims to that watershed moment—where they were at the brink of becoming stateless.
Imam laid down a roadmap for the Muslims of India—according to him, they needed to go beyond protesting against specific governments, political parties, or laws—in the form of a deeper re-examination and transformation of the political framework that had reduced them to mere objects of tolerance under the dominance of a (largely upper-caste) Hindu state apparatus. According to him, the implementation of the CAA and NRC provided a platform to highlight over seventy years of systemic injustice and anti-Muslim discrimination, a phenomenon which extended far beyond that present moment.
By doing this, Imam brought the project of Indian historiography under the microscope of critique. His broader argument is that the way South Asian Islam and Muslim history are often understood—even by South Asian Muslims themselves—is deeply influenced by a nationalistic vision of pluralism shaped by a Hindu majoritarian perspective. “We need to write our history,” he declared to the crowd of listening students at the Aligarh Muslim University. “Our history has not been written; writing our history will take fifty more years. But that will only happen if we realise that we must write our history.” Imam’s call is not for the familiar, largely leftist project of decolonising history, rather, it is for reclaiming South Asian Muslim history from the clutches of the normative Hindu nationalistic imagination.
The erasure of non-secular Muslim voices and intellectual contributions to South Asian Muslim thought, according to Imam, was not primarily the work of the British colonial government, but a product of both colonial and postcolonial ideologues of that very brand of politics that sought to overthrow them—nationalist Indian liberal secularism. This brand of secularism, even though it may look “anti-colonial” on the outside, is nevertheless rooted in the normative priorities of the Hindu majority and is responsible for marginalising dissenting Muslim perspectives. Imam’s critique can be seen as a demand to reframe the history of South Asian Islam without privileging the “good Muslims,” or those who conform to nationalist secular ideals, while sidelining or vilifying the “bad Muslims” who challenge those ideals.
Imam’s subsequent arrest and detention, therefore, also remind us of the sacred, mythical stature of a nation’s history and the role it plays in its imagination and subsequent formation. Sharjeel Imam dared to put a spoke in the wheel of this Indian (Hindu) imagination, calling it out for its inherently discriminatory nature. He completes five years in prison today.
Juveria Asif is a doctoral student in the field of Cultural Studies at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.
The information presented in this article represents the personal viewpoints of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Observer Post.
