Opinion | How Khamenei’s Death Unmasks India’s Opposition Politics

With the passing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a global axis of Shia political theology has been shaken, carrying implications that extend well beyond Iran

The political death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989 and the single most dominant theological and political figure of Shia Islam, on the night of 28 February 2026 during a joint air strike by Israel and the US on Tehran, is not just an event of seismic geopolitical import. It is, for a particular constituency on the Indian subcontinent, an event of profound and multidimensional import.

The death of Khamenei, whose legacy has come to be somewhat loosely associated with that of his illustrious predecessor and founder of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in popular Indian political and theological discourse, removes from the global Islamic political and theological topography a figure who has come to function as an ideological lodestar for a particular constituency of Indian Muslim politics, theology, and economics that has come to locate its identity and politics not around the Constitution of India and its promises of citizenship, but around an extraterritorial theological sovereignty that found its apogee in the Islamic Republic of Iran. To grasp the full import of this blow, one must understand Khamenei’s role not just on the theological front, but on the overlapping fronts of politics, economics, identity politics, constitutionalism, and the ongoing struggle for the very soul of Indian secularism.

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The religious-economic nexus that tied a section of Indian Muslims to Iran under Khamenei is not a subject that is taken too seriously in Indian academia and literature, again because a serious discussion of this issue necessitates an honest debate on how far various religious groups in India, particularly those whose theological affinities are Shia and whose political affinities lie with a political theology that is a variant of Khomeinism, have managed to build ties with the Iranian state that are unrelated to and in contradiction of the model of obligations and entitlements outlined in the Constitution of India. The channels through which money flows include remittances routed through the hawza system of religious trusts and theological schools, financial support for Imambargahs and Ashura organisations, money routed through cultural attachés of Iranian diplomatic missions in cities like Hyderabad, Lucknow, Mumbai, and Delhi, and theological authority that is vested in marjaiyyat — a system of religious jurisprudence in which qualified Shia religious scholars issue edicts that govern everything from personal law to business transactions to political obligations and civic duty.

The death of Khamenei, a political figure but also a marja taqlid — a source of emulation for millions of Shia Muslims across the world — removes a vertical axis of authority and thereby also the economic scaffolding that rested upon it. This is a structural dislocation that cannot be overcome in a hurry even by a new leader, however qualified he may be, and points to a serious weakness in a model in which religious sovereignty was imported from a foreign state that was also a theocratic state and not negotiated within a republican constitution in which Indian citizens happen to reside and in which they happen to hold membership.

The political implications of this rupture for the Indian Opposition are, if anything, even more illuminating — and far less comfortable for those wedded to a particular narrative of minority representation. Since at least the post-Babri Masjid realignment of Indian electoral arithmetic in the early 1990s, a substantial part of the Indian Opposition’s politics has been conducted based on the unspoken assumption that the Muslim electorate can be mobilised and retained as a monolithic grievance-based bloc based on a mix of symbolic politics, institutional appeasement, and the strategic amplification of threat perceptions.

This form of politics, which styles itself as secularism but, in substance, involves the transactional manipulation of religious identity for electoral gain, has traditionally found within Islamist groups, both local and transnational, a useful array of institutional interlocutors. Groups ideologically downstream of Khamenei’s weltanschauung, or sympathetic to the political theology of wilayat al-faqih, the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, provided a disciplined, organised, and often financially potent framework through which the Indian Opposition might seek to connect with, and claim to represent, a particular segment of Muslim political sentiment.

The death of Khamenei, of course, does not necessarily destroy this framework — but it profoundly undermines the ideological authority structure on which it has traditionally been based. Lacking a live, credible, and authoritative marja around whom the crystallisation of a particular political identity might be constructed, the entire project of mobilising politically organised religious sentiment becomes significantly less cohesive, less hierarchical, and less amenable to brokerage by the Indian Opposition.

It is also critical, at this juncture, to identify with precision what constitutes secularism in a large part of Indian Opposition politics, since the passing of Khamenei reveals to us what this secularism is and how it has functioned, and this should be instructive. What passes for secularism in Indian Opposition politics is not the secularism of Bharatiya civilisational pluralism, that ancient and abiding tradition of sarva-dharma-samabhava, an equidistant respect for all religious traditions that has its organic roots in the philosophical soil of this land. What has been operative in Indian Opposition politics is a pseudo-secularism, a differential management of religious communities that are not treated as equal constituents of a common citizenship, but as vote-banks to be differentially managed, wherein the sentiments of minorities, and particularly Muslims, as represented by the most organised and perhaps most conservative voices of Muslim religious leadership, are given a weight and a deference that compromises the neutral and principled stance that genuine secularism must take.

The theological-political architecture of Khomeinism and its continuation under Khamenei has furnished this pseudo-secularism with an external legitimising authority — a foreign theocratic authority whose pronouncements on Islamic governance, gender, blasphemy, and political obligation could be invoked, explicitly or implicitly, to guide or govern Muslim political conduct in India in a fashion that would serve Opposition politics well and effectively insulate a part of the Indian Muslim community from the full exercise of their constitutional liberties. With Khamenei gone, this external theological warranty, so important in so much of the organised Islamist engagement with Indian minority politics, is suddenly absent, and the nakedness of the underlying transactional politics becomes far more visible.

The third dimension of the setback caused by the death of Khamenei concerns the ambitions of Political Islam in India as a whole, which needs to be carefully distinguished from the genuine, constitutionally grounded religious practices of the overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims, who have no stake whatsoever in Puritan or Salafi projects of any kind, and whose religious practices remain grounded within the pluralistic, syncretic, and localised traditions of Dargah Islam, Barelvi devotionalism, or the quietist piety of ordinary Indian Muslims. Political Islam, as an ideological project, has the goal of transforming Indian Muslim society in accordance with the normative standards of Purism, whether this be the Deobandi-Salafi axis, funded in large part by the petrodollars of the Gulf monarchies and the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia, or the Khomeinism-inspired Shia political theology of Iran itself, which has provided so much of the intellectual, financial, and institutional support for Political Islam across the Indian subcontinent.

The Iran of Khamenei has not been simply a distant theological reference; it has been a participant, however minor, within the project of forging a politically disciplined, doctrinally pure Islamic identity within India, which can stand up against the assimilatory pressures of Indian liberal democracy, as well as the theological deviations of Indian Islam itself, which has always been seen as heterodox by the purists of Deoband, Aligarh, and their allies across the Islamic world.

The ideological, financial, and institutional networks of Iran, which extended through its cultural centres, scholarships for madrasa students, infrastructure for the celebration of Ashura, media presence, and diplomatic influence, have been part of the larger project of making Indian Muslim society, at least in part, more legible, more coherent, and more mobilisable within the framework of Purist political theology. The sudden decapitation of this network at the level of the leadership itself — the removal of the Supreme Leader himself — is not simply a logistical problem for Political Islam; it is an ideological problem, since the entire legitimacy of Political Islam has rested on the theological authority of Khamenei as Imam of the Age.

There is, of course, the countervailing trend in Political Islam that derives not from Shia Khomeinism but from Sunni Salafism, and the passing of Khamenei will not reduce that trend in the least. However, it would also not be analytically correct to equate the two in the Indian context. The Shia political-theology tradition, owing to the extremely centralised nature of the Marja’iyyat and the rigid hierarchies of institutions it spawned, produced a tradition of religious political organisation that was perhaps the most disciplined in the world. The passing of the apex figure of the tradition creates a political vacuum that will be contested, will lead to internal fragmentation, and will reduce the tradition’s overall strategic ability to deploy it in the realm of Indian politics.

Moreover, the fact that the selection of the new Marja in Iran will be turbulent, politically contested, and possibly violent in nature also ensures that whatever transnational authority the new Marja may be able to muster will be significantly less than the unchallenged authority that Khamenei had managed to accrue to himself over the last three and a half decades of his tenure in the position. The loss to the project of Political Islam in India, therefore, is not merely one of numbers, of the passing of one figure, but of structure — of the passing of a tradition of command and authority that took decades to construct and that cannot be rebuilt in the space of a few years.

It is in this context that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence is seen in its full import and recognised not merely as a tactical move but as a philosophical move of statecraft in keeping with the demands of the moment. In the aftermath of the assassination of Khamenei, while other world leaders either offered condolences for his death, issued condemnations of the attack, or voiced their dismay at the escalation of the Iran-Israel conflict, PM Modi maintained a silence that was both deliberate and conspicuous. However, this was no silence of indifference or ignorance but a silence of positional clarity from a leader who recognises that a genuflection does not advance the interests of the Indian Republic and its 1.4 billion citizens before any external theological authority, however important his death may be to particular domestic constituencies. India is not a confessional state.

India does not derive its legitimation from any theology — Christian, Islamic, Hindu, or otherwise. The relationship between the Indian state and theology is governed by the Indian Constitution, which guarantees every citizen the right to practise, profess, and propagate their religion as a personal freedom, not as a state endorsement of foreign theological projects. For PM Modi to have offered condolences for the death of Khamenei would have been to implicitly endorse the very architecture of extraterritorial religious authority that the Indian state has, in principle if not in practice, always resisted.

The concept of “principled distance", or the constitutional commitment to maintaining an equidistant relationship with all religious communities without favour or disfavour, has been asserted far more than adhered to in Indian governance since Independence. The pseudo-secularism of the Congress-led Opposition has essentially replaced “principled distance" with “differential deference" to minority religious interests in terms of electoral expediency.

The silence of PM Modi in the face of Khamenei’s death can be seen, in this context, not in terms of absence but presence — in terms of principle — signalling that the Indian state, in this instance at least, does not see the death of a foreign theocratic leader as warranting any domestic political choreography in deference to any religious vote bank in India. In other words, it is in the deepest sense a far more secular position than any Opposition pseudo-secularism that refuses to permit foreign religious authority to dictate terms to Indian domestic political expression. One may or may not agree with Modi’s or his government’s politics in India or elsewhere. Still, in this instance at least, it was an expression of constitutional fidelity that would have been recognised and appreciated by the founders of India’s liberal democracy.

To place all this in the broader context of Indian civilisational politics, it must be pointed out that the challenge posed by Political Islam to the Indian republic is, in a very real sense, a challenge to the indigenous pluralism that is so emblematic of Bharatiya culture, a pluralism that has never been imposed from the liberal Western tradition, but has been organic in its growth and has been a product of a civilisation that has, over millennia, accommodated and assimilated an unprecedented diversity of religious, philosophical, and cultural thought and practice. The Puritanism that found expression in the theology of Khamenei, and that sought to make Islamic identity more uniform, more doctrinally rigid, and more resistant to the syncretic and heterodox pluralism that has characterised Indian Islam, has been, in a very real sense, a challenge not merely to secularism in its constitutional form, but to the organic culture that has ensured that Hindu-Muslim coexistence has endured in India, even in the face of the traumas of Partition and its aftermath.

The death of Khamenei, and the disruption that this causes to the ideological and institutional networks that carried Puritanism into the Indian Muslim community, creates, in a very real sense, a window of opportunity — not for triumphalism, and certainly not for exploitation, but for the reintegration of Indian Muslims, particularly those from the Shia community and those who are politically organised, into the mainstream of the Indian republic. No responsible political actor should fail to seize this opportunity.

What the death of Khamenei ultimately reveals, then, is the structure of dependence which had been constructed, over decades, beneath the surface of Indian Muslim political and religious life — a dependence not on the Indian Constitution, not on the democratic institutions of the Indian republic, and not on the indigenous pluralistic traditions of Bharatiya culture, but on a foreign theocratic state whose authority had been borrowed, whose economic scaffolding had been conditional, and whose political project had, at its core, been incompatible with the full exercise of Indian Muslim citizenship.

The reverses inflicted by the death of Khamenei are real, and they will be felt intensely by those who had invested most heavily in this structure of borrowed certainties. But they are, from the standpoint of the Indian republic, also invitations — invitations to rebuild Indian Muslim political engagement on the more secure and dignified ground of constitutional citizenship, indigenous cultural identity, and the unparalleled philosophical riches of a culture which has never felt the need to import its pluralism from anywhere outside its own borders. Silence, on the part of PM Modi, is, in this context, the beginning of that invitation, which is both firm and impossible to misunderstand.

(Dr Barthwal teaches Political Science at the University of Delhi. He tweets @prashbarthwal. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.)

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