“Muslims in this country are being asked to prove their patriotism. Don’t answer the question—ask who fought for India’s freedom.”
When you look at 1947 and then at India today, 80 years later, how do you view the role of Muslims in the struggle for independence? And in your book, you mentioned that not all Muslims were in favor of Pakistan or a separate nation; who were those Muslims? And what did those who were not in favor actually want? And why were those who were in favor, in favor of it?
Actually, you have described it well, and it is a truly horrendous situation. It is a very, very dangerous situation that the Muslims of this country are being told they are not patriots and that they do not love India. They are being put on trial and placed in the dock regarding this. Do not do this at all. There is no need to give any answer. Instead, ask the RSS members and those Hindutva proponents who are raising this question: what role did you play in India's freedom? The RSS was formed in 1925, and the Hindu Mahasabha was formed even earlier; these contractors, whose descendants are ruling this country today. They should tell us.
After 1925, there were many crucial movements during the freedom struggle. There was the Non-Cooperation Movement. After that, the Salt Satyagraha. Before that, there was the Khilafat Movement. After that, the Quit India Movement. And this is the 84th anniversary of the Quit India Movement. I mean, this is the week when there was a massacre happening across the entire country. Because under the leadership of Gandhi ji and Maulana Azad, the Congress had taken a decision. Quit India, Britishers. Quit India, Britishers. The RSS did not raise this slogan. The Hindu Mahasabha did not raise this slogan. The Congress members raised it. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad raised it. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose raised it. Sardar Patel raised it.
So, we must first ask these contractors of Hindu religion and Hindus. What is happening is that the tide is turning against us, and we are told to answer for it, and we end up answering. We must ask counter-questions. We must ask counter-questions about what happened in 1942. And after that, many of the movements I mentioned took place. What role did the RSS play in this?
Today, they are telling us to hoist the tricolor flag, to use the tricolor. Does this country know that on August 14, 1947, their own English newspaper wrote about the tricolor flag? I will read the English first, because it is an English newspaper. I am reading out its English version. I will provide its Urdu translation, its Hindustani translation. The people who have come to power by a fluke of fortune may give us the Tricolour in our hands. But it will never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word 'three' is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country. Those who have come to power in India by a fluke of fortune. They want to place the Tricolour flag in the hands of the Hindus of this country. There are three colours in the Tricolour flag. Therefore, it is ominous. They used the English word, saying it is an evil. The word 'three' is an evil, and Hindus will never accept it, and it will have a very bad psychological impact on them.
Today they are telling Muslims to hoist the Tricolour flag. You do not love the Tricolour flag. We are grabbing them by the collar and asking them to tell us if they did this, and to name even one person of yours who lost even a fingernail in the freedom struggle. In the freedom struggle. You talk about Vande Mataram. Vande Mataram! Tell us if you ever raised the slogan of 'Vande Mataram' in your private meetings against the British on the day of Dussehra, from 1925 to 1947.
And the legacy of Muslims that we come from, one thing is that they should stop talking to us like 'all Muslims, all Muslims!' Hey, those Muslims who were against this country, those Muslims who were agents of the British, who did not want the freedom of this country—RSS members, you rulers of this country, friends of Modi, members of Modi's clan—you were running governments with them. Exactly 84 years ago today, during the Quit India Movement, you were running governments with the Muslim League in Sindh, in Bengal, and in the North-West Frontier.
Today, when Netaji was forming the Azad Hind Fauj, which included Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and everyone else, two of its leading commanders were Muslims. And this Netaji was the one who knew how much conflict Vande Mataram was causing, which is why he kept 'Jai Hind'. He had removed Vande Mataram. Vande Mataram, to all...because Vande Mataram is linked to a novel that speaks of the massacre of Muslims; he removed it and said that we will say Azad Hind, we will say Jai Hind. Yes, so those you... but the traitorous Muslims, those who were against this country, you had a friendship with them. Savarkar-sahab used to have meetings with Jinnah, and he would say that we are one.
If you want an account of us Muslims, we will tell you how we took part in the freedom struggle, and that history is truly golden. It is magnificent; it's not just about the independence of August 15, 1947, but the 1857 war of independence where we note that Muslims were 25% of the population in 1947. It's official government data, 25% of the Muslims; sure, there were Muslim agents for the British, but those who fought accounted for 40% of the martyrs in the 1857 war.
In the 1857 war, and on that, Bushra ji, let us talk about it. What did Muslims do in 1857? How Muslims stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Hindus; there isn't an inch of this country that they haven't drenched with their blood. I have documents from that era. I speak based on primary sources. So, if you talk about 1857, I can tell you every detail about what Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians did together for this country. And the RSS, the princely states that acted as agents for the British, and the Muslim princely states that acted as agents, they went into the Muslim League or the Hindu Mahasabha. All those treacherous states and kingdoms only served the British after 1857, and later in the 20th century, they all became the founders of the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha, and Muslim League.
Companion article
When Muslims are told today that they are not patriots, that they do not love India, a historian interviewed on the anniversary of the Quit India movement has a blunt response: stop answering, and start asking. "Ask the RSS members and those Hindutva proponents who are raising this question: what role did you play in India's freedom?" he said, noting that the RSS was formed in 1925 and the Hindu Mahasabha even earlier — well before most of the freedom movement's defining campaigns.
The speaker, whose name was not given in the source material, describes himself as working from primary documents on Muslim participation in the independence struggle. The interview was recorded on the 84th anniversary of the Quit India movement, a coincidence he uses to frame his argument.
His case rests on a simple sequence: the Non-Cooperation Movement, the Khilafat Movement, the Salt Satyagraha, and finally Quit India in 1942 — the campaign that, under the joint leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, told the British to leave. "The RSS did not raise this slogan. The Hindu Mahasabha did not raise this slogan," he said. Those who did, in his account, included Azad, Subhas Chandra Bose and Sardar Patel — all figures associated with the Congress, not with the Hindu nationalist organisations now questioning Muslim loyalty.
The habit he objects to, he says, is a one-way interrogation: Muslims are repeatedly asked to account for their loyalty, and rarely push back with the same question. "We must ask counter-questions," he said — specifically about what the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha were doing during 1942 and the string of movements that preceded it, rather than simply supplying an answer each time patriotism is challenged.
He turns the same scrutiny on a more recent symbol: the tricolour flag that Muslims are now urged to fly to prove their nationalism. He cites an English-language editorial published on August 14, 1947, arguing that the flag would never be respected by Hindus because the number three was inauspicious — "the word 'three' is an evil," as he quotes it — and that it would produce a harmful psychological effect. The people now demanding the flag be embraced without question, he argues, are the political descendants of those who dismissed it at independence.
The historian is careful to distinguish between Muslims who backed the British and those who fought them, rejecting what he calls the flattening habit of speaking of "all Muslims" as a single bloc. Some Muslim-ruled princely states, he says, collaborated with the British just as some RSS- and Hindu Mahasabha-linked figures did — and, in his account, both the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha trace their organisational roots partly to that same collaborationist current.
He points to Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army as a counter-example: an armed movement that included Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, with two Muslim officers among its senior commanders. Bose, he notes, deliberately replaced the slogan "Vande Mataram" with "Jai Hind" once he recognised how divisive the earlier phrase — drawn from a novel depicting violence against Muslims — had become. He also references meetings between V. D. Savarkar and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in which Savarkar reportedly told Jinnah the two men's political projects were closely aligned.
Pushed further back, to the 1857 uprising, the historian says the record is even starker. Citing official data putting India's Muslim population at roughly 25 percent, he says Muslims nonetheless accounted for around 40 percent of those martyred in that revolt — evidence, in his framing, of a disproportionate share of the earliest sacrifice against British rule. "There isn't an inch of this country that they haven't drenched with their blood," he said of Muslim participation across both 1857 and the later movements of the twentieth century.
His closing point returns to the present demand for proof of loyalty: those asking Muslims to name a single freedom fighter from their community, he argues, should first answer the same question about their own organisations — whose founding generation, on his account, spent the freedom struggle governing alongside the British in Sindh, Bengal and the North-West Frontier rather than resisting them. Both the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, he adds, drew later recruits from the same pool of princely states that had served the British as agents after 1857 — a shared origin he says gets left out whenever loyalty is put up for debate along religious lines alone.
11:27Following the demolition of the mosque inside the Saharanpur Collectorate, Saharanpur MP Imran Masood discusses the legal battle surrounding the site, the documents cited by the mosque committee, and the questions being raised over the demolition process.
11:27Following the demolition of the mosque inside the Saharanpur Collectorate, Saharanpur MP Imran Masood discusses the legal battle surrounding the site, the documents cited by the mosque committee, and the questions being raised over the demolition process.
22:41In an exclusive interview with senior journalist Bushra Khanum, Saharanpur MP Imran Masood discusses the demolition of a mosque inside the Saharanpur Collectorate and the questions it has raised over law, equality and religious sites. Masood argues that the issue should be viewed through the lens…
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