Every Party Failed Us: Raju Parulekar on Twelve Years of Betrayal

A hatred inherited, not invented

Raju Parulekar, the Mumbai-based political commentator and podcaster, has spent much of his career documenting communal violence in Maharashtra, and he began his conversation with Nous Podcast host Bushra Khan Fahad by rejecting a premise she never quite offered: that the Bharatiya Janata Party invented anti-Muslim hatred in India. It did not, Parulekar argued. It inherited a prejudice that was "already there" in Indian society and simply handed it institutional power. "Society already had this hatred brewing," he told Nous. "The BJP just gave it power."

For Parulekar, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 is the moment the country crossed a line it never walked back from. He called it a "red warning bell" that India's institutions failed to heed. The failure was personal for him: he described himself as a riot victim who had to flee his own home, and said his father was arrested, jailed, and beaten so severely during that period that he never fully recovered the use of his legs.

He pointed to the Srikrishna Commission's findings on the 1992-93 Bombay riots, which concluded that police had acted proactively against Muslims during the violence — including in the Suleman Bakery firing case that implicated the late Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray. When the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition took office in Maharashtra in 1995, Parulekar said, it discarded that commission's report. Multiple Congress-era police reform commissions produced recommendations over the decades, he said, and "not one" of the reforms was implemented. Seventy-five years after independence, he argued, police in India have still never been taught that their loyalty is to the Constitution, not to whichever minister currently holds office.

No party escapes blame

Parulekar's sharpest point, pressed by his host, was that the Congress party cannot claim clean hands simply because it did not share the BJP's ideological project. People currently walking free after twenty years in prison on terrorism charges, he noted, were jailed under Congress-era administrations — not because Congress was committed to persecuting Muslims, he argued, but because it never exercised ideological control over the police and bureaucracy it presided over. Being a facilitator of communalism, in his account, is a different failure from actively engineering it, but a failure nonetheless.

He extended that indictment to the socialist tradition in Indian politics — noting that the Jan Sangh, the BJP's ideological predecessor, backed the JP movement of the 1970s, and that most of the regional leaders who emerged from that movement, from Mulayam Singh Yadav's family to Nitish Kumar, went on to ally with the BJP at some point without much hesitation. He made one exception for Lalu Prasad Yadav. Only four national leaders, in Parulekar's telling, showed sustained ideological commitment to protecting Muslim interests: Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi — though he complicated even that praise, noting that Rajiv Gandhi both unlocked the gates of the disputed Babri Masjid site and reversed the Shah Bano verdict under political pressure from within his own party.

The silence of the famous

Parulekar reserved some of his harshest words for Bollywood's most prominent Muslim stars, saying their twelve years of near-silence on rising communal violence amounted to cowardice given the devotion Muslim audiences had shown them. He recalled loving Shah Rukh Khan's Swades and pointedly noted that Rahi Masoom Raza, a Muslim writer, scripted the landmark television adaptation of the Mahabharata — evidence, in his framing, of a contribution history has been quick to forget and a debt the country has never really acknowledged.

What he wants now

Asked what would constitute real progress, Parulekar laid out a concrete list: fifty percent of any reservation quota for women should go specifically to Muslim women; parliamentary and assembly constituencies in sensitive, riot-prone districts of north India should carry some form of reservation for Muslim candidates, citing the 1916 Lucknow Pact, in which Lokmanya Tilak himself accepted separate representation for Muslims; and public use of slurs like "katua" or "mullah" should carry a non-bailable, fast-tracked charge with the possibility of rigorous life imprisonment, on the model of protections that already exist for Scheduled Caste communities.

He also argued that Muslims should negotiate collectively with "the regime," not hand that leverage to any single leader who might sell out the community for personal power — and that Iran's strength as a regional counterweight matters to that bargaining position, since, in his words, "Iran is our friend."

Parulekar closed with a forecast he has made before on his channel: that the current government's "uprooting" is certain sometime between March and April 2027. It is a prediction, not a fact — but Parulekar delivered it, as he did most of the episode, without hedging.