Salman Khurshid on Reading the Constitution After Ayodhya

Salman Khurshid has occupied some of the Indian cabinet's most consequential portfolios — External Affairs, Law, Minority Affairs, Commerce — making him, by his own account, one of a shrinking number of Muslims to have held such offices since the generation of Maulana Azad and Zakir Hussain, his maternal grandfather and India's third president. Now president of the India International Islamic Cultural Centre and a practising Supreme Court lawyer, Khurshid used a wide-ranging Nous Podcast conversation to work through what he called the country's "basic crisis": not a crisis of Muslims alone, but of democracy itself, one that will eventually be recognised, in his words, as being "against everyone."

Minority Rights as Compensation, Not Appeasement

Khurshid opened by rejecting the framing, now commonplace in Indian public discourse, that constitutional protections for minorities amount to special favours. Democratic structures, he argued, exist to compensate a numerical minority for the simple fact that it cannot project its voice as forcefully as a majority can. "It is not appeasement, it is compensation," he said, adding that the charge of appeasement is routinely fused with the demand that minorities not be "different" — a demand he traced back to the discredited claim that concern for minority rights caused Partition. He called this line of attack "propaganda," but was equally critical of how secular parties respond to it: largely by falling silent, calculating that engagement invites harsher attacks. That silence, he said, is itself corrosive, because a live democratic discourse — the willingness to answer bad arguments rather than concede them by omission — is what keeps democracy's core alive even as its edges fray.

What the Babri Masjid Judgment Actually Said

The conversation's most technical stretch concerned the 2019 Supreme Court verdict on the Ayodhya title dispute, and how it has since been invoked — Khurshid argues wrongly — to justify a wave of new claims against mosques including the Gyanvapi complex, the Kamal Maula Masjid in Dhar, and the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal.

Khurshid, who argued the Kamal Maula Masjid case, insisted the Ayodhya judgment was not the sweeping reversal it is now treated as. It was a title suit — a dispute over ownership of land — in which the court found that the outer platform, the Ram Chabutra, had long been in Hindu possession and use, a fact Muslim litigants themselves conceded, while the inner structure had remained under Muslim possession and control until it was demolished in 1992. The court, Khurshid said, effectively acknowledged the injustice: "It said you have been wronged," he noted, but concluded that because the structure itself no longer existed, restoring it was impractical, and instead awarded five acres of alternate land under Article 142's power to do "complete justice." Muslim litigants declined the offered land near the disputed site — a decision Khurshid, with the benefit of hindsight, called a missed opportunity to create "a template of Indian secularism" in which a mosque and temple would have stood facing each other in Ayodhya.

His central argument was that the newer cases are being wrongly treated as extensions of that precedent. The Kamal Maula Masjid dispute, he stressed, was never filed as a title suit — it was a writ petition challenging permissions granted by the Archaeological Survey of India — precisely because, unlike Ayodhya's demolished structure, worship was still ongoing there at the time of the case, which would have made a title suit favourable to the mosque. "This is not a clear-cut reversal," he said of how commentators invoke Ayodhya to justify the newer claims; the two legal postures, title suit and writ petition, are fundamentally different instruments, and applying the logic of one to the other, in his view, is precisely how "a new generation of judges" ends up reinterpreting old laws to reach conclusions the laws' framers never intended — a dynamic he also traced through the Aligarh Muslim University minority-status case and India's anti-terror laws (UAPA, PMLA), which he noted were originally drafted by his own Congress colleague P. Chidambaram to fight terrorism and economic crime, not, as he put it, "to teach people a lesson."

The Places of Worship Act and "How Far Back Do We Go"

Khurshid situated the current wave of mosque litigation against the 1991 Places of Worship Act, which he described as a deliberate line drawn by Parliament: whatever happened before 15 August 1947 would be set aside, and no further alterations to the religious character of any place of worship would be permitted going forward. That settlement, he argued, is now being unpicked case by case, with each new judgment justified as restoring an arrangement supposedly six or seven hundred years old — even though the reversal itself is being carried out today, under a democratic mandate, not medieval fiat. "How far back will we go?" he asked, framing this as a question for the whole country, not just Muslims, since the 1950 Constitution's explicit intent was to look forward rather than relitigate the past indefinitely.

Personal Law Is Not a Rival to the Constitution

Pressed on the philosophical tension between secular law and religious personal law — an argument frequently deployed around triple talaq, uniform civil code, and religious dress in public institutions — Khurshid rejected the premise that the two systems inherently clash. Personal law, he argued, is not external to India's secular framework but embedded within it, protected by the Constitution's own guarantees of the right to worship, to maintain one's institutions, and to preserve one's customs. Apparent conflicts, he said, usually dissolve on inspection: dietary practices around cattle sacrifice can be accommodated the same way religious processions already pause for each other's observances; loudspeakers and prayer timings are routinely adjusted through mutual courtesy rather than confrontation. Where genuine restriction is imposed — as with proposals to standardise hijab colour to match a uniform, a step he compared to existing accommodations for Sikh turbans — he sees no principled objection, but stressed that manufactured controversies, where no actual harm to a third party exists, should not be treated as constitutional crises. On triple talaq specifically, he offered an interpretive defence rarely heard in mainstream debate: because a divorce can be revoked during the iddat period after the first two pronouncements, the practice functions, in his reading, as a modern, low-cost alternative to decades-long court battles — a "do-it-yourself divorce" comparable to systems now emerging in the United States — undermined less by its own logic than by documented abuse.

The Sachar Committee's Unfinished Revolution

Some of the interview's most pointed material concerned the legacy of the 2006 Sachar Committee report, prepared under the government of Manmohan Singh, in which Khurshid served as Minority Affairs Minister. He said the committee deliberately used the word "Muslim" rather than the euphemism "minority" — a choice he credited significantly to Singh's insistence that policy actually engage with Muslim socio-economic outcomes rather than talk around them — a full fourteen years, he pointedly noted, before critics began praising the Congress in 2026 for merely deciding to say the word again.

The committee's most ambitious proposal, an Equal Opportunity Commission that would have assessed disadvantage across all communities through a single, integrated structure, was never implemented — blocked, Khurshid said, by resistance from existing caste- and community-based commissions unwilling to cede their separate turf. What did succeed, he said, was a scholarship scheme paid directly into the bank accounts of Muslim students' families, whose demand grew every year it ran — and which was, he noted bitterly, the first thing "these people" zeroed out entirely after 2014, without a single public complaint reaching the volume of grievance the scheme itself used to generate over unmet demand. He also singled out a widely misquoted line from Manmohan Singh — that minorities, and Muslims specifically, should have "first claim on resources" — as a statement of emphasis in the spirit of international development language, deliberately stripped of context and repurposed by opponents as evidence of appeasement, a distortion he said continues in political speeches to this day.

A Party That Would Not Admit Its Mistakes

Asked repeatedly to weigh Congress's own responsibility for the political conditions that produced Hindutva's rise — the reopening of the locked Babri Masjid site, the shilanyas ceremony, Rajiv Gandhi's promise of "Ram Rajya" — Khurshid conceded strategic mistakes had been made, while resisting the equivalence some critics draw between Congress and the BJP. His sharper point concerned honesty: he argued that Congress's failure to publicly own its errors, for fear of handing opponents a headline, has cost it more than the errors themselves, whereas the BJP's refusal to ever admit fault leaves it, in his telling, permanently unaccountable — even for the 1975 Emergency, which he noted was carried out within, not outside, the constitutional structure, an inconvenient legal fact he insisted still needs stating even while calling the Emergency's abuses indefensible.

Khurshid was most candid discussing the years leading up to the Congress-led UPA government's 2014 defeat, describing a coalition "drowned" by the 2G and coal-allocation scandals and an unusually adversarial Supreme Court, which he believes diverted attention and sapped the political energy Congress and Muslim civil society might otherwise have spent confronting the rising communal tide beneath the surface. He also brought up the unresolved case of Ehsan Jafri, the Congress leader killed in the 2002 Gujarat violence whose widow Zakia Jafri fought for accountability until her death last year — acknowledging that despite Congress's public opposition to the Gujarat riots, its own machinery failed to see the case through, a failure he attributed to a broader "wave of hostility" the party could not out-organise.

What Comes Next

Khurshid was unambiguous that he considers 2029 an "extremely critical year" for India, one in which the opposition INDIA alliance either arrests the current trajectory or watches it entrench for a generation. He pointed to internal cracks already visible within the BJP-led coalition, particularly disputes over the Ayodhya trust's finances, as an opening. On rebuilding a Muslim political constituency, he argued the responsibility runs in both directions: Congress under Rahul Gandhi, whom Khurshid credited as the party figure "bound" by principled commitment to pluralism, has tried to create channels — bringing in younger Muslim leaders such as Nasir Hussain, and inviting scholars and activists for direct conversation — but communication remains difficult partly because, in his words, Muslims do not easily accept any single person as their representative. In Uttar Pradesh specifically, he said an alliance with the Samajwadi Party is "essential," but warned that Congress's own workers need visible respect within any such arrangement if it is to hold. His closing argument was that no single leader or party can carry this alone: what pluralistic communities across India need now, he said, is to revisit their own political philosophy, built on universal constitutional principles rather than shifting, contextual arguments — and to organise a "much wider mobilisation" than any one party can offer.