Muslim Politics in India, through a Humanist-Modernist Lens
Hamid Dalwai (Image Courtesy: The Siasat Daily)
‘…Now, suppose that all English, and the whole English army, were to leave India, taking with them all their cannon and their splendid weapons and everything, then who would be rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations — the Mahomedans and the Hindus — could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable….’ (1)
The above is an extract from Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s speech in Meerut in 1888 and is widely considered to be one of the earliest public pronouncements of the two-nation theory. That it culminated in the partition of India in 1947 and remains the founding idea of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was affirmed in (now) Field Marshal Asim Munir’s infamous speech delivered in April this year (2).
In the 1946 provincial elections, which were held under the system of separate electorates, the Muslim League won more than 80% of the seats reserved for Muslims. While the franchise was limited to property owners rather than universal suffrage, the results conferred political legitimacy on the League’s claim to be the exclusive representative of India’s Muslims. The path to Partition was soon to become a fait accompli (3).
Truncated India, even after independence, remained home to over forty million Muslims. Sardar Patel, in his Calcutta Maidan speech delivered on January 03, 1948, voiced the anxiety many felt. How, he asked, could those who had till recently supported the demand for partition suddenly change their political preferences (4).
Weeks later, at Aligarh Muslim University’s convocation on January 24, 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru suggested a way forward. He asked the students to reflect on their shared cultural inheritance, which belonged to them as much as to him. Would their being Muslim make them feel alien to it? He urged them instead to help build a future India that, as in centuries past, would be home to many faiths, all equally respected, but united in one national outlook (5).
When placards demanding a “Khilafat 2.0” surfaced during the anti-CAA protests in 2019, it was hard to avoid the uneasy conclusion that the vision of a united national outlook articulated by Nehru in 1948 remains, at best, a work in progress. In fact, Nehru’s own commitment to that ideal was subsequently questioned. In the parliamentary debate on the Hindu Code Bill in 1955, Acharya Kriplani, a lifelong Gandhian socialist, famously accused Nehru of communalism for introducing monogamy legislation only for Hindus, while leaving personal laws of other communities untouched (6).
A few years later, an ardent Nehru admirer would offer one of the clearest early analyses of Muslim politics in independent India. Hamid Dalwai was a noted social activist and writer who passed away prematurely in 1977. His “Muslim Politics in India” was first published in 1968 and was built on the four essays written by him for the Marathi weekly Sadhana. A revised and expanded edition appeared in 1972. Dalwai is today remembered as one of the earliest and most courageous campaigners against the triple talaq. His wife, Mehrunnisa Dalwai, continued that struggle. In 1996, she led a march to “Mantralaya” in Mumbai and submitted a memorandum to Vasantrao Naik, then Chief Minister of Maharashtra, calling for its abolition (7).
Both the preface and the foreword to the book underline Dalwai’s central argument. A student of history and culture, he reflected that Hindu society had undergone a kind of renaissance in the nineteenth century, sparked by figures such as Raja Rammohan Roy, which, in Dalwai’s reading, continued with Nehru. Muslim society, in contrast, had seen no comparable internal reform movement over the course of a thousand years, except for a few isolated instances. The difficulty of democratic integration of Muslims in the larger Indian society, he argued, was therefore derivative. It stemmed less from inherent incompatibilities and more from the absence of sustained socio-cultural reform.
Dalwai envisioned an India committed to secular, humane, and liberal values. Modernity would create the space for inherited belief systems and practices to be placed under the critical gaze of reasoned enquiry. Religion, in his view, belonged to the personal sphere, while obscurantism of any kind had no place in the country’s socio-political life. Swami Vivekananda, in contrast, articulated a different grounding for Indian nationalism. He had called for a national union in India to be founded on the gathering of its scattered spiritual forces, a union of those whose hearts beat to the same spiritual tune (8). A fuller exploration of the convergences and divergences between these two visions must await a separate essay. This piece focuses on bringing out key themes from Dalwai’s book (9).
Missing the Bus to Modernity
Dalwai traces the cause of Muslim backwardness in the community’s resistance to educational reform during the early British rule, a resistance shaped by resentment that the British had displaced a once-dominant Muslim Empire. When Sir Syed Ahmed Khan urged Muslims to accept Western education, the Deoband Ulema denounced him as a kafir. His efforts did eventually produce a limited thaw, but modern Indian Muslims, Dalwai argues, were ultimately unequal to the challenge. Even Sir Syed, by succumbing to the egoistic belief that Muslims were the historic conquerors of India, helped give rise to separatist Muslim nationalism, which rested on the notion that Hindu and Muslim societies were separate and parallel structures. This, in turn, led to a second missed opportunity when Muslims declined to join hands with Hindus to strengthen a shared Indian nationalism.
He sees two influential currents within Indian Muslim thought, one deriving from Shah Waliullah and the other from Sir Syed. He urges rejection of both and calls for the embrace of the liberal humanist tradition embodied by Gandhi and Nehru.
The Quest for a Third-party Judge
Dalwai argues that the behavior of Indian Muslim leaders has long been shaped by a courtroom mentality. They treat their demands as disputes to be won by presenting clever arguments before a “third-party judge,” historically the British, rather than as questions requiring compromise with the Hindu majority. This mindset, Dalwai believed, not only contributed to the demand for Pakistan but continues to color political attitudes even after Partition.
He also criticizes Muslim leaders for embracing what he calls the “hostage theory,” the view that Muslims in the subcontinent needed a separate sovereign Muslim-majority state, where Hindus would be in a minority, to feel secure. Dalwai notes the irony of Pakistan itself not eventually retaining Hindus as hostages. He highlights how many leaders insist that Hindus in Pakistan suffer no injustice simply because Pakistan is an Islamic state, while remaining ever ready to blame Hindus for any communal tension in India. Dalwai further observes that several Muslim organizations advocate the establishment of an Islamic state within India, privileging the idea of a “state within a state” or a “society within a society” over the acceptance of a shared national identity.
Nationalists and Communalist Muslims, Closer than Imagined
Dalwai examines two influential strands of Muslim politics in post-independent India: those who proclaim themselves “nationalists,” and those who openly advocate a more communal, religiously defined politics. He argues that the differences between these two camps are far thinner than commonly assumed.
He notes that many Muslim leaders define “injustice” in India simply as the fact of a Hindu majority and then frame political demands around this premise. These range from opposing family planning to claiming that infiltrators in Assam are not Pakistani (today, Bangladeshi) at all. He also highlights the tendency to attribute the outcome of military conflicts to degrees of religious zeal and an aversion to accepting scientific explanations.
The so-called “nationalist Muslims,” Dalwai says, subscribe to similar assumptions. He cites Dr Syed Mahmud of the Majlis-e-Mushawarat, once a Congress Party leader and often regarded as a “nationalist Muslim,” who maintained that Hindus were incapable of ruling and that Muslim rule was essential for the good of all Indians. Dalwai contends that both Jinnah and the nationalist Muslims ultimately sought recognition of a distinct Muslim political identity, differing mainly on whether this required a separate state. He contrasts this with the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru, who rejected all forms of religious sub-nationalism.
Diagnosis of the Communal Malady — Moving beyond Appeasement
Dalwai highlights that secular parties have long approached Hindu-Muslim relations with a kind of sentimental idealism, contending to denounce Hindu communal forces while avoiding a fuller examination of forces shaping Muslim political attitudes. To understand the true character of the conflict, he maintains, one must acknowledge the historical impulses of a mindset that interprets nationalism through a religious lens. In his view, separatist urges of Muslim nationalism have always run parallel to secular nationalism. The partition of India was merely an interruption. He cites Huseyn Suhrawardy’s (chief minister of undivided Bengal) 1946 warning that Pakistan would not be their “last demand,” as emblematic of this continuity.
Nehru, Dalwai believes, grasped this challenge more deeply than his critics realized. Through his insistence on a common electorate and other similar measures, he sought to strengthen secular nationalism and blunt the appeal of Muslim separatism. After Nehru’s death, however, the political landscape shifted. The Majlis-e-Mushawarat, a united front of Muslim communalist organizations, began to articulate demands for a sovereign constitutional status for Muslims within the Indian Union. Dalwai is sharply critical of (then) Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s willingness, as he sees it, to indulge Muslim separatist forces while acting firmly against Hindu communalists.
For Dalwai, the real task lies in fostering liberal and modern attitudes within Muslim society itself. Appeasement practised by so-called secular parties, he argues, only hinders the deeper transformation required for genuine national integration.
Humanist Modernism: The Remedy for Secular Integration
Dalwai explores why Indian Muslims have struggled to develop a liberal intelligentsia capable of challenging religious dogmas and championing secular values. He identifies three core obstacles. First, the assumption that Islamic faith already embodies a perfect social order encourages the view that further progress is unnecessary, creating resistance to modern norms such as gender equality. Second, there is the resentment stemming from being a minority, accompanied by the historically revisionist dream of becoming rulers. This generates a peculiar mindset infected by both grandeur and persecution mania. Third, many continue to imagine a “parallel co-existence” with the majority, with full communal autonomy, an idea fundamentally at odds with democratic social mores.
He distinguishes sharply between Hindu and Muslim communalism. Hindu communalism, he argues, is largely defensive, while Muslim communalism is aggressive and expansionist. Eliminating the latter, he believes, will significantly weaken the former. The Hindu community already contains a small but influential liberal minority that consistently pushes back against Hindu revivalism, and Hindu society’s lack of rigid cohesion acts as a natural check on these impulses.
Yet Dalwai detects signs of hope. Across northern Indian cities, purdah is receding and educational opportunities for Muslim women are expanding. Many of them have married men of other faiths, who were not pressured to convert. These “islands of modernity,” though still scattered, signal the beginnings of a slow but meaningful transformation.
Dalwai proposes several practical steps toward a modernist future: universal registration of marriages under a common civil code; uniform personal law for all citizens; regulating religious conversion through magistrates; resisting demands for giving Urdu the status of a second official language; ending Kashmir’s special status; and adopting a firm policy towards Pakistan’s expansionism. Hindus, he stresses, must support progressive Muslim voices, without strengthening communalist forces on either side.
Conclusion
The Waqf Amendment Act, 2025, with its emphasis on transparency, accountability, and better governance of religious endowments, echoes in some measure Dalwai’s call for a shift toward humanist modernism (10). If implemented with sensitivity where needed and firmness where appropriate, such reforms may help in creating conditions for coming to the fore of a liberal, forward-thinking leadership within the Muslim community, one capable of guiding the secular integration that Dalwai envisaged.
References
1. Speech of Sir Syed Ahmed at Meerut (1888)
https://franpritchett.com/00islamlinks/txt_sir_sayyid_meerut_1888.html
2. Ndtv (April 17, 2025). “The 1.3-Million Indian Army…: Pak Army Chief On Kashmir, Balochistan”
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/pakistan-army-chief-general-asim-munir-kashmir-our-jugular-vein-we-wont-forget-it-pakistan-army-chief-8185034
3. Wikipedia. “1946 Indian provincial elections”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1946_Indian_provincial_elections
4. Cbkwgl (January 02, 2021). “Sardar Patel’s Calcutta Maidan Speech-Transcript”
https://cbkwgl.wordpress.com/2021/01/02/sardar-patels-calcutta-maidan-speech-transcript/
5. The Nehru Blog. “Nehru’s Speech at AMU Convocation-1948”
https://www.thenehru.org/2017/11/nehrus-speech-at-amu-convocation-1948.html
6. Times of India (August 16, 2010). “Is Govt ready for Uniform Civil Code after 63 years ?”
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/is-govt-ready-for-uniform-civil-code-after-63-yrs/articleshow/6316723.cms
7. Feminism in India (April 10, 2023). “Mehrunnisa Dalwai: An Unsung Muslim Activist | #IndianWomenInHistory”
https://feminisminindia.com/2023/04/10/mehrunnisa-dalwai-an-unsung-muslim-activist-indianwomeninhistory/
8. Vivekavani (August 11, 2014). “The Common Bases of Hinduism – Swami Vivekananda”
https://vivekavani.com/common-bases-hinduism-swami-vivekananda/
9. Penguin. Muslim Politics in India
https://www.penguin.co.in/book/muslim-politics-in-india/
10. PIB (April 04, 2025). The Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2025: An overview of the Act vs Bill
https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=154130&ModuleId=3
