Not Just Citizenship: Tanveer Fazal on India’s ‘Project of Denationalisation’

Is the erosion of citizenship something Indian Muslims have experienced alone, or has it happened to other communities too? Political scientist Prof. Tanveer Fazal, in a short excerpt from a longer conversation with Nous, starts by conceding the comparison has some force. Dalits, he notes, have been kept at the bottom of India’s social hierarchy since long before independence, and continue to face discrimination despite decades of political mobilisation. Sikhs, too, have had their citizenship rights eroded at various points — Fazal recalls watching Sikh passengers singled out for luggage checks on trains while others were waved through, a quiet, procedural form of suspicion.

But Fazal is careful to draw a line between that kind of erosion and what he sees happening to Muslims specifically. “It is not only the citizenship,” he says, “but it is the project of denationalisation.” The distinction matters. Citizenship, in his framing, is a legal status that can be narrowed or restricted. Denationalisation goes further: it questions whether a community can make an equal claim on India as a homeland at all — a claim, he argues, that no amount of visible loyalty can fully settle.

A Claim That Can Never Be Proven

Fazal illustrates the point with the example of Asaduddin Owaisi, the Hyderabad MP who has in recent years adopted an assertively nationalist, anti-Pakistan posture. The posture, Fazal argues, changes nothing, because the project of denationalisation is embedded too deeply in what he calls “the Indian subconscious.” Any Muslim gesture of national belonging is read back as performance — “something which your heart is not into,” as he puts it — rather than as evidence. The more a Muslim politician or citizen asserts loyalty, in other words, the more that assertion can be reframed as proof of the opposite.

This is where Fazal locates the specific danger of the current moment: a combination of citizenship erosion and denationalisation that pushes, in his words, toward “questioning the loyalty” and toward “unwarranted violence.” He points to ordinary situations — a train journey, a marketplace, a school — where exclusion has become, in his word, “normalised,” no longer confined to moments of visible unrest.

Why the Dalit Comparison Breaks Down

Pressed on why he treats the Muslim case as structurally distinct from caste-based discrimination, Fazal argues that the Dalit question, serious as it is, has never been a question about national belonging. “No one is questioning their nationality,” he says. Dalits have faced what he calls social and physical violence from dominant groups since the republic’s founding, but no major political formation — including those of the Hindutva variety — organises its politics around casting Dalits as foreign to the nation. If anything, he notes, Hindutva politics actively works to accommodate Dalits within its fold: prominent BJP figures are Dalit, and the Prime Minister himself claims OBC identity.

Muslims, in Fazal’s account, occupy a different structural position precisely because Hindutva politics needs them not to be accommodated. “Muslims have to be another,” he says, adding that Hindutva itself “won’t survive” without that permanent outsider to define itself against. Where caste politics can absorb and co-opt, majoritarian nationalism, in his reading, depends on a permanent outsider against which the insider identity is defined.

A Conversation Still Unfolding

This excerpt is drawn from a longer conversation with Fazal on citizenship, identity and democratic belonging in contemporary India, in which he develops these arguments at greater length — including how the same logic of denationalisation plays out in everyday bureaucratic encounters, not just in moments of overt conflict. What comes through even in this condensed form is a specific and carefully argued claim: that the crisis facing Indian Muslims is not reducible to prejudice, to economic exclusion, or even to the kind of episodic violence that other minorities have also suffered.

It is, in Fazal’s telling, a structural project aimed at an idea — the idea that a Muslim’s claim on India can be as unconditional and uncontested as anyone else’s. That is also why he resists any framing that treats Hindutva’s occasional targeting of Sikhs or its historical suspicion of other groups as proof that Muslims face nothing unusual. Suspicion that can be managed through accommodation, he suggests, is a different phenomenon from exclusion that is structurally necessary to an ideology’s survival. Until the underlying idea of equal claim is restored, he argues, no amount of individual loyalty, assimilation or performance will be enough to settle the question.