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CJP protest is a turning point for Indian Muslims. Speak as citizens, not as a religious bloc

Political quietude is the ethic that befits a minority. We may call it the Minority Dharma.

The cockroaches have crawled back to the crannies from which they emerged like a swarm. They left rejoicing after a protest that was a reel-fest and made the government acquiesce to their demands. But not everyone is happy. Those who dreamt of pulling off a Bangladesh and Nepal in India are despondent. They were delulu if they dreamt of flying back to power on the fragile wings of cockroaches. The ancien régime is gone for good. All the usual suspects — the dynastic opposition, along with their left-liberal loyalists, the left-anarchists and urban Naxals — who hoped for a revival of the pre-2014 era and openly asked for a return to the “Bure Din”, are disappointed even as they pretend to celebrate “our children’s” victory.

There is one group, however, that is covered in gloom at the withdrawal of the protests “without achieving the goal”. Long accustomed to revelling in sulk, they are doing what they do best. Across social media, they are displaying shock, hurt and consternation at the perfidious retreat just as the goal had come into sight. They didn’t participate in the protests — not directly, not as a group, and not with their pet slogans that reverberate like war cries. While some did join in as individuals, they took care not to brandish their identity markers.

You have guessed who I am talking about: the Muslim thought leaders, opinion makers, podcasters and social media warriors. Those who pontificate in Hinglish what ulema preach in Urdu. The wheelers and dealers of the Muslim vote, whose ideas are not a whit different from those of the Muslim League, even if their language is made up of Constitutional vocabulary.

As a group, they remained at a distance from the protests. Possibly a sign of evolving strategic prudence. Or perhaps the organisers kept them at arm’s length. However, teetering on the brink of jumping in, they couldn’t help hovering at the periphery — managing logistics and supplying endless packets of biryani.

It has been a rare anti-BJP movement that wasn’t about “communalism” or the marginalisation and political irrelevance of Muslims. If anything, it recognised, normalised and institutionalised all of this. Crucially, this was done with the tacit approval of Muslims themselves, who, in the interest of the “larger cause” of bringing Hindutva down, happily agreed to make themselves invisible and remain backstage.

A too-clever-by-half broker of votes remarked, “We have outsourced the fight.” Be that as it may, the moral of the story is that Muslims can’t be in fighting mode all the time. Though subconscious and unarticulated, a realisation has begun to dawn on Muslims that something has fundamentally shifted in the political tectonics of India.

It seems that Muslims, as a separate political bloc, no longer command the same heft as they did during the Secular Raj of the pre-2014 era. Their ideological concerns find no resonance with a non-ideological Gen Z. This process has been underway for quite some time. Even the political parties that survive on the Muslim vote bank have read the electorate’s fatigue with Muslim-centric non-issues and are increasingly shy of approaching voters in the name of “secularism”. Muslims are less and less bracketed with SCs, STs and OBCs. Interestingly, in the........

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