Has the world’s largest democracy failed the world’s largest minority – its nearly 200 million Muslims? That question is at the heart of a polarising debate currently under way in India. The debate started with Sharjeel Imam, a 38-year-old Muslim scholar, who gave a lengthy interview to an Indian news website on September 29 from his prison cell in New Delhi.
Imam covered a wide range of issues and raised uncomfortable questions about the place of the country’s Muslim minority, which forms roughly 14 percent of India’s 1.4 billion population. He criticised the Indian constitution for its “enshrined centralisation” of power and called its brand of secularism “particularly Islamophobic and parochial”, adding that democracy was a tool to deny Muslims their political representation and rights. Hailing from Jahanabad district of Bihar, India’s poorest state, Imam graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in computer science and worked as a software engineer before returning to academics.
As a doctoral student at the Centre for Historical Studies at New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), his primary research area was the political history of India’s Muslims. In 2019, months after winning a second term in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government passed a controversial citizenship law, which granted an expedited pathway to Indian citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from India’s neighbouring countries. The United Nations called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) “fundamentally discriminatory” against Muslims.
The passage of the law ignited nationwide anti-CAA protests. Led by Muslims, mostly women, a weeks-long demonstration near Shaheen Bagh, a densely-populated Muslim ghetto on the southeastern edge of New Delhi, became the epicentre of those protests. Imam was one of the chief organisers of the Shaheen Bagh sit-in.
He was arrested in January 2020 for inciting violence through speeches made at the protests. But there had been no violence until his arrest. It came the next month in northeast New Delhi where anti-CAA sit-ins organised in Muslim neighbourhoods were attacked by mobs, incited by hate speech from leaders from the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Despite him being already behind bars when the violence broke out, Imam was charged with rioting, murder, attempted murder, sedition, and “promoting enmity on grounds of religion” under several laws, including a stringent anti-terror law. Nearly a dozen Muslim students and activists, including another JNU scholar Umar Khalid, were arrested and imprisoned for being the alleged conspirators in the 2020 riots. They remain in jail without trial and repeatedly denied bail, with rights groups calling their continued incarceration a “gross abuse of power” and a glaring example of judicial oversight, in which the accused are “guilty until proven innocent”.
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