ABSTRACT
The academic literature on Indian Muslim communities discusses the term ‘Muslim politics’ in a number of ways. Popular demands such as the protection of Urdu or Muslim Personal Law, the programmes, policies and activities of Muslim organisations or pressure groups, sermons, speeches and statements of influential Muslim personalities and the Muslim voting pattern in elections are often studied as the constituents of Muslim politics in postcolonial India. A few illuminating studies have already made attempts to conceptualise the political power structure among Muslims by employing a Marxist and/or elitist framework of analysis. However, despite such a variety of academic writings, our knowledge of different forms and trajectories of post-1947 Indian Muslim politics is rather limited. A strong conviction that there is only one form of Muslim politics in India, which eventually characterises an indispensable dichotomy between Western modernity and Islam, seems to dominate academic discourses. It is believed that Muslim politics as a manifestation of minority communalism could either be juxtaposed with secular politics or completely ignored as a kind of reaction to assertive Hindu nationalism also known as Hindutva.1 There is an underlying assumption that an upper-class, upper-caste, male Muslim elite divert common Muslims from secular/national issues for the sake of their vested interests. This assumption is often accepted uncritically. As a result, the internal complexities of Muslim politics and the ways in which Muslim political actors
1 The term ‘Hindutva’ refers to the politics of Hindu rightists that has emerged in the mid-1980s. Interestingly, the Supreme Court of India has taken it too literally and conceptualises the ‘Hindutva’ as a way of life (AIR 1996 SC, 1113). However, it should be noted that the rightist Hindu groups, which are often called the constituents of ‘Hindutva family’ popularly known as the Sangh Parivar, do not follow any single political ideology. In fact, the Ram Temple issue gave them an opportunity to form an informal political coalition.
