Are Muslims Politically Abandoned? Raju Parulekar's Indictment of India's Opposition

A "Smoke Screen" Called SIR

The conversation opens on the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, of India's electoral rolls — the process that has deleted an estimated one crore voters in West Bengal, a crore in Tamil Nadu and nearly 2.83 crore in Uttar Pradesh, with Maharashtra now beginning its own revision. Speaking to host Bushra Khanam, Raju Parulekar, a senior journalist and political analyst, insists the exercise has little to do with winning elections. "SIR is not for elections," he said. "It's a smoke screen" — one whose real purpose, in his telling, is to render non-citizens of people the ruling party would rather not count as voters at all. He argues the BJP did not need SIR to keep winning: in his account, the Election Commission and EVM administration were already compromised well before it, pointing to what he calls the disputed 2019 count in Varanasi and describing the 316 seats he says the India alliance actually won in 2024 before being "converted" into defeat — a claim he attributes to the same argument made publicly by Rahul Gandhi's "vote chori" press conferences and by the political economist Parakala Prabhakar.

Congress as the "Soft Target"

Asked why the BJP nonetheless tolerates opposition state governments in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Parulekar argues that Congress is deliberately allowed occasional wins because it poses no real threat to the centre. "Congress is a soft target for the BJP," he said, describing the party as internally compromised and lacking, in his assessment, any leader besides Rahul Gandhi with the standing to take on the BJP directly. Where a strong regional party or the Left stands in the way, he argues, the BJP prefers to see Congress installed instead, precisely because it can be defeated more easily later — as, in his account, happened when the Shiv Sena was split to hand Maharashtra to the BJP-aligned faction, and when Suvendu Adhikari, whom he numbers among seven chief ministers the BJP has "imported" from rival parties, rose in West Bengal. Bengal, he argues, mattered more than most states to a "saffronisation" project because of its large Muslim population, its Bangla identity, and its position as one of the last major states — alongside the northeast — not yet absorbed into a Hindi-Hindutva template.

The "Israelisation" Thesis

Pressed on how the BJP's continued electoral dominance can be squared with genuine popular support, Parulekar advances his most contested claim: that India's ruling apparatus has effectively been "Israelised," with tools, strategy and even intent supplied by Israel and, in his account, elements of Israeli intelligence embedded across Indian institutions — the judiciary and the Election Commission among them. He points to the malware findings by international forensic labs in the Bhima Koregaon case, and to the mass disenfranchisement under SIR, as evidence of what he calls a deliberate project to strip Muslims and government critics of citizenship before subjecting them to violence with impunity — a scenario he compares, at its most extreme, to genocide, invoking Suvendu Adhikari's own reference to Israel's conduct in Gaza as the explicit model. These are grave, largely unproven allegations that Parulekar presents as certainty rather than hypothesis, and Nous is reporting them here as his stated views rather than established fact. He is careful to note that the ideology itself, in his view, is homegrown — "the ideology is brewing right here," he said — with Israel supplying instruments rather than authorship, and traces the RSS's history of aligning with dominant outside powers back to its wartime approach to the British.

"Vote Is Not Halwa"

Parulekar is particularly exercised by the fate of voters deferred rather than outright deleted under SIR — some 27 lakh in Bengal alone, he says, told they could simply re-register "next time." He rejects the idea that this is a minor bureaucratic inconvenience. "Vote is not halwa," he said — not something to be handed out later at the state's convenience — arguing that a deferred or deleted voter risks losing not just a ballot but a passport and, eventually, citizenship itself. He describes the trajectory he fears: a population first rendered voteless, then stateless, then, in his most extreme framing, disposable — "you were never citizens here, so no one will ask what happened to you." He is careful to frame this as where the current process could lead rather than something that has already occurred, but insists the opposition has not adequately warned people what is genuinely at stake.

A Vote Bank, or a Manufactured Majority?

Challenged that the RSS's decades of grassroots organising suggest genuine, organic support rather than manipulation alone, Parulekar's response is that the RSS's real base has remained roughly constant for a century, while its parliamentary numbers have not: he argues the 2014 collapse of Congress from over 200 seats to 44, and the swing to over 300 BJP seats since, cannot be explained by ideology alone. He describes the "vocal minority" phenomenon — supporters loud precisely because critics are, in his telling, frightened into silence — and dismisses viral images of BJP supporters weeping with devotion abroad as choreographed "mobile units" of party volunteers bussed in from Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh to manufacture crowds and slogans at will.

A Trustee Who Broke Faith

Parulekar offers his own theory of why the opposition, rather than street revolt, remains the default response to what he describes as systematic vote theft. A vote, he argues, functions like something held in trust: citizens hand it to a party as trustee, expecting it to be protected and represented. When that trust is betrayed — when, in his account, votes are stolen after being cast — citizens' faith collapses not only in the ruling party but in the very idea of trusting any party with their vote again, which he offers as one explanation for public passivity in the face of mounting disenfranchisement. He is equally unsparing about India's elected opposition, arguing that MPs enjoy enough personal comfort and privilege — official travel, security, status — that few of them personally bear the costs of the fight they nominally lead. Rahul Gandhi, he concedes, is a partial exception, someone who has "borne it" in a way most parliamentarians have not; he singles out BJP MP Ravi Kishan's public confusion between "work from home" and "home from work," and remarks by another BJP MP blaming Congress-era family planning policy for his own four children, as evidence of the intellectual thinness he says now passes for opposition-adjacent political discourse.

Political Prisoners and the Price of Dissent

Parulekar reserves some of his sharpest language for the continued incarceration of activists including Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and Khalid Saifi, arrested in relation to the 2020 Delhi riots case. Invoking the memory of Imam Hussain at Karbala, he argues that history will remember Umar Khalid for what he has endured — including, he says, being denied parole to be with his mother during her surgery — in a way it will not remember those who prosecuted him. He extends this into a broader argument about religious minorities and dissent under British rule, contrasting what he describes as Muslim rulers who lost their wealth resisting the British with Hindu princely families he says compromised and whose descendants remain politically prominent today — pointing, by way of illustration, to the folklore around the last Nawab of Awadh's reduced circumstances in exile.

An Apology, and a Question for Silent Hindus

Pressed by Khanam on why the large section of Hindus who reject Hindutva remain publicly silent while all this unfolds, Parulekar does not deflect. "On my own behalf, I apologise to you and to the entire Muslim community," he said, arguing that passive, "neutral" Hindus bear real responsibility for what has been allowed to happen, even as he admits he cannot explain why prominent opposition figures have stayed quiet on specific abuses. He extends the same charge to Bengal's intelligentsia, long assumed to be a bulwark against communalism, asking pointedly why they too have said so little as the state's politics have shifted. He does not exempt himself either, telling Khanam he expects history to eventually draw up a list of the guilty and that he will not claim exception from it — "if we were, no Hindu would speak the way I do."

Hinduism Versus Hindutva

A significant portion of the conversation is devoted to Parulekar's argument — offered, he says, as someone raised Brahmin who has read the Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas — that Hindutva bears no relationship to Hindu scripture. He cites a Sanskrit verse from the Puranas, attributed to Vyasa, holding that helping others is virtue and causing others pain is sin, arguing that nothing in the classical texts sanctions targeting a religious minority. On this basis he calls the RSS not only what he terms an "anti-national" and "terrorist" organisation but, in his words, "dharmadrohi" — a betrayer of the very faith it claims to defend — while stressing that Gandhi, whom he calls an original Hindu, never built temples to himself or worshipped through an intermediary "baba," unlike, in his telling, the godmen who have flourished under the current political order.

Foreign Policy as Theatre

Turning to foreign affairs, Parulekar is scathing about the government's diplomacy with the Gulf, Israel and the United States, describing recent viral clips of the Prime Minister greeting Gulf leaders as choreographed theatre reminiscent of old Hindi film romances, and arguing that a government simultaneously courting Muslim-majority states abroad while presiding over anti-Muslim violence at home cannot indefinitely paper over the contradiction. He also links the country's economic difficulties, following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to some Iranian oil shipments, to what he calls a foreign policy realigned toward the interests of a small circle of allies rather than ordinary citizens — dismissing the government's professed environmental rationale for reduced fertiliser subsidies, and drawing a contrast with the food shortages of decades past.

Demonetisation, GST and a Theory of Economic Capture

Parulekar extends his broader thesis to economic policy, arguing that 2016's demonetisation and the design of the Goods and Services Tax were not primarily anti-corruption measures but mechanisms to force India's cash-dependent small traders and informal workers into a digitally surveilled, centrally controlled economy — cash, he insists, is liquidity for the ordinary vendor, not inherently "black money." He connects this, speculatively, to what he calls global financial interests uncomfortable with India's cash economy and, by extension, to Islam's own prohibition on interest-based finance, framing the entire episode as one front in a wider economic and psychological contest rather than a domestic tax reform. This is, again, an interpretation Parulekar offers with total conviction but little documentary evidence, and readers should treat it as his opinion rather than settled fact.

What Happens Now

Parulekar's closing message is that little should be expected from the ballot box in its current form. Real change, he argues, will not arrive through an election in 2029 but only when ordinary citizens — and he points specifically to farmers' and labourers' protests as the model of what he calls a genuinely "revolutionary force," as distinct from opposition parties that remain, in his view, part of the existing power structure rather than outside it — assert their own agency. Until then, he offers Muslims and other minorities little concrete counsel beyond the example of resistance itself: to stand, as he puts it, on the right side of history, regardless of the immediate cost.