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What Type of Country Should India Be? The Debate Over the Sharjeel Imam Interview

Entrenching more group rights would permanently institutionalize the division of Indian society — already an issue — into a large number of groups with different privileges.

A 2020 photograph of jailed Indian Muslim activist Sharjeel Imam.

Sharjeel Imam, an Indian Muslim student activist who has been in jail since 2020 on charges relating to his alleged role in instigating communal riots in Delhi that year, recently gave an interview to The Quint news outlet.

Imam’s interview has sparked much debate in India, particularly because it presents a vision of India that is starkly at odds with the project of the modern Indian state and its constitution. Whatever one may think about the circumstances of his arrest — he has been both denied bail and trial — his ideas on India’s constitutional and political arrangement are problematic and deserving of criticism.

At the heart of Imam’s vision is the need for the Muslim community to have “community rights.” Community rights refer to group or corporate rights, which is the notion that groups can have certain rights particular to their group rather than those possessed by society — and all the individuals belonging to it — at large. This idea is necessary, as per Imam, because Muslims are a separate nation apart from, and distinct from, the larger mass of Indians, who are majority Hindu. Imam’s preference is for a “constitutional arrangement in which Muslims will have full autonomy to administer their affairs, carry out those reform programs, etc without fear of violence and interference from the majority community.”

The reason given for this proposal is the assertion that Muslims have faced discrimination within the modern Indian state, something that is true in some times and places. But his definition of discrimination goes beyond combating bigotry and guaranteeing constitutional rights so every citizen of India is treated with equal dignity. Rather, he alleges Muslims are discriminated against by the very circumstance of living under a constitution “which gave no statutory guarantees to Muslims.”

As the pseudonymous Muslim writer Ibn Khaldun Bharati noted in ThePrint news portal, Imam essentially rejects the framework of liberalism, rather than criticizing the Indian state for not living up to liberalism. According to Ibn Khaldun, Imam “dismisses liberalism as a ploy for majoritarianism… he contemptuously rejects any suggestion of a difference between liberals and Hindutvadis. For him, both are simply Hindus. In his essentialist worldview, all Hindus are the same, for they are unanimous in denying Muslims the political power they claim as a divine right….” In other words, the liberal promise of constitutionally protected individual rights is problematic by its very nature in denying groups their corporate rights. It privileges the group — and its desire to preserve its own distinctive traditions, laws, and customs — over the larger body of citizens which form the Indian nation.

Imam’s arguments are not new, nor are they exclusive to him or his community. In fact, India has long had a problem of groups demanding group rights, quotas on the basis of caste and gender, disproportionate regional representation, and various other schemes to privilege the rights of communities at the expense of individuals. In each instance, despite very different historical justifications, the logic is similar: a belief that a community’s needs or importance entitle it to a special dispensation, reserved seats, or legal privileges.

On the subject of needs, one of Imam’s defenders, Asim Ali, notes in The Telegraph that Imam’s proposals lie within the tradition of radical democratic politics, arguing that communities should organize around their own particular demands before negotiating with other communities. Imam holds that various underprivileged communities like Muslims and Dalits must work together and fight for decentralization, autonomous institutions, and proportional representation, making it more difficult for the majority to exercise power over minorities.

At the heart of this issue is a question: should India’s constitutional model be that of a country of individual citizens and individual rights or a country of corporate communities, including various religious groups, regional ethnicities, and jatis........

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