Why Muslims Face More Than Citizenship Questions

A shared experience, but not an equal one

Citizenship rights have eroded for more than one Indian community in recent years. Political scientist Prof. Tanweer Fazal, in conversation with Nous, begins by conceding this point without hesitation. Sikhs, he recalls, were once treated as a "suspect community" too. He remembers watching their luggage searched on trains while other passengers were waved through, a small but telling marker of who the state trusted and who it did not.

But Fazal draws a sharp line between that experience and what Indian Muslims face today. It is not simply that citizenship guarantees have weakened for them, as they have, in different ways, for others. It is that Muslims are subject to something more corrosive: a "project of denationalisation" that questions whether they can ever claim India as their motherland on equal terms with everyone else.

The logic of an impossible bargain

The distinction matters because it changes what counts as proof of belonging. Under an ordinary citizenship dispute, a person can point to documents, residence, birth, lineage. Under denationalisation, Fazal argues, no amount of evidence resolves the question, because the question was never really about evidence. "The more you try to assert it, the more you fall under suspicion," he says of the Muslim claim to Indian nationhood — a dynamic that turns every act of assertion into fresh grounds for doubt.

He offers a pointed illustration: Asaduddin Owaisi's recent efforts to sound more aggressively nationalist and more overtly anti-Pakistan than his Hindutva critics. The strategy makes no difference, Fazal argues, because the deficit it is trying to correct is not really about words or postures. The suspicion runs too deep in what he calls the Indian subconscious for any performance to resolve it. Every gesture toward inclusion is received not as sincerity but as theatre — "something where your heart is not in it," staged for effect rather than felt.

That combination, Fazal says — an ongoing erosion of citizenship protections layered onto a standing question mark over national belonging — pushes the resulting hostility somewhere darker than bureaucratic exclusion. It becomes a routine, almost casual violence: exclusion from a train compartment, a marketplace, a school, sometimes escalating to lynching. What makes this violence distinctive, in his account, is that it has come to be treated as unremarkable. It is not that such incidents provoke no outrage; it is that they have stopped requiring explanation at all.

Why the Dalit comparison does not hold

Fazal is careful, though, not to let the argument collapse into a simple hierarchy of suffering. Dalits, he notes, carry a distinct and undeniably brutal history of exclusion — one that is structural, embedded in social practice, and enforced through violence that long predates the current political moment. He does not minimise it.

What he insists on is a different axis of comparison. However entrenched the discrimination Dalits face, their nationality has never itself been the subject of political contest. No mainstream political current, including the Hindutva formations most associated with caste hierarchy, builds its platform on questioning whether Dalits belong to the nation. If anything, Fazal observes, the opposite dynamic is at work: Hindutva politics has actively sought to fold Dalits into its fold, elevating prominent Dalit figures within its own ranks, and pointing to leaders — including the prime minister's own claimed backward-caste identity — as evidence of an inclusive project. Whether that accommodation is sincere or strategic is a separate question; what matters for Fazal's argument is that the door is held open at all.

For Muslims, he argues, no equivalent door exists, because the logic of Hindutva politics requires that it stay shut. Muslims must remain the constitutive "other" against which a Hindu nationalist identity defines itself. Absorb that other, and the entire political project loses its organising principle. It is not a matter of degree, in Fazal's telling, but of function: Hindutva politics can survive Dalit inclusion because caste hierarchy is not the axis on which it is built, but it cannot survive Muslim inclusion, because national self-definition against a permanent internal enemy is precisely what the project requires.

A structure built to endure

The implication that hangs over this account is a bleak one. If the exclusion of Muslims from full national belonging is not incidental but functional — not a policy that could be reformed but a structural requirement of the politics now dominant in India — then no single election, court judgment, or change in rhetoric is likely to dislodge it on its own. The "othering" Fazal describes is not a temporary excess to be corrected; it is, in his analysis, the load-bearing wall of a particular kind of nationalism, which is exactly why he insists that Hindutva itself "will not survive" without it.

This conversation is excerpted from a longer interview with Prof. Tanweer Fazal on citizenship, identity, and belonging in contemporary India.