Aditya

We should be thankful to The Quint for publishing Sharjeel Imam's interview. It brings to light a view that a section of the Muslim community holds under the garb of rights. Sharjeel's thought robs pre-independence Muslim groups of the guilt of partition, as he squarely blames the Congress leadership for the subcontinent's partition. I do not see Sharjeel as a terrorist, but rather as a person who has no faith in India's Constitution, its liberal values, its pre-Islamic civilisational past, Hindu philosophy, and, most importantly of all, its democratic structure. His comparative analysis of rights is blind when it comes to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Maldives. He imagines Muslims in South Asia as a unified community but does not accord the same status to Hindus. He derives his method from Marxist thought and his working philosophy from Islam. In fact, he goes on to argue that only Muslims had a sense of "us" in South Asia. He excludes Islam's contact with Western modernity and its inability to respond to it from a non-religious perspective. In the name of empowerment, he puts forward the idea that two states exist within India: a Hindu upper-caste state at the top, and another occupied by Muslims, Dalits, and other religious denominations at the bottom. He builds this fallacy by drawing ideas from Sayyid Qutb, a leading literary critic who was one of the foundational ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sharjeel is an Islamist opposed to the very democratic idea of India and its civilisational past. I am not bothered by his reverence for Jinnah, Ali Shariati, or Iqbal—that hardly affects me. What bothers me is that his ideas have been left unattended academically. The debate around his bail is another matter. The real debate centers on what Sharjeel proposes. He proposes another mobilisation of Muslims in India, which aligns with the same language used by the Muslim League before partition. It is full of disdain for other communities. His proposed alliance with Dalits, Tribals, and other religious minorities is envisioned as a path towards monotheism. He finds redemption in this ideological path rather than in what the Constitution, the civilisation, and the state stand for today. This is deeply disturbing. His idea of representation in elected bodies that accounts purely for numbers is an argument borrowed directly from the Muslim League. Furthermore, Hinduism in India has continuously evolved through various internal reform movements that have left the Muslim community largely untouched—questions that have been completely left unattended by him. Most importantly, he confuses backwardness with the specific historical practice of untouchability. It is for this reason that quota extensions in the Central List have not been blindly given to other communities at large. Lastly, it is no surprise that both Islamists like Sharjeel and the Indian Right blame the Congress for partition. This ideological congruence needs to be studied further. Subsequently, Sharjeel's denial of Bharat's civilisational past, alongside his view of India as merely a product of partition, closely mirrors the rhetoric of certain Congress leaders who define India strictly as a "Union of States." This, too, requires a rigorous academic response.