The Institution Gap: Why India's Muslims Are Building Their Own Media and Politics

A Panel Convened Around One Question

Four journalists sat down for a Nous Podcast panel to ask a blunt question: after more than a decade of what they describe as escalating dehumanisation, do India's Muslims need media houses, think tanks and political institutions that are unambiguously their own? The host, Bushra Khanam Fahad, who spent nearly two decades in mainstream media before leaving it in 2019-20, opened by arguing that India's so-called mainstream media bears more responsibility for anti-Muslim sentiment over the past twelve years than the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party itself, because it functions, in her words, as journalism conducted "sitting in the government's lap." She was joined by Asad Ashraf, an independent senior journalist; Aditya Menon, Political Editor at The Quint; and Ali Javed, founding editor of Nous, who started the organisation while he was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens. The conversation ranged from newsroom hiring practices to the political economy of Muslim organisations to the nineteenth-century Bengali novel that, the panel argued, still supplies the vocabulary of suspicion applied to Muslims today.

The Two Failures of Alternative Media

Menon set the terms early. Alternative media, he argued, exists in opposition to the BJP government, but when it comes to Muslims it suffers from two distinct problems. First, a representation problem: top editorial positions in most alternative outlets are held by upper-caste liberals rather than Muslims or people from oppressed castes, even though the majority of these platforms' YouTube-driven audience and revenue comes from Muslim viewers. Second, a framing problem: Muslims are seen through what he called a "limited gauge," reduced to victimhood, while the internal debates, pushback and diversity of opinion within the community rarely surface. "The alternative that was supposed to exist has not succeeded to that extent," he said of alternative media's failure to become a genuine substitute for the mainstream.

Ashraf agreed, adding a further layer: left-liberal discourse carries a reluctance to accept Muslim political identity on its own terms. A journalist who identifies openly with his community, he said, draws suspicion even from outlets that claim to defend minorities. Ashraf warned that when alternative media only makes space for Muslim voices who fit a predictable pattern, it replicates the very demand for conformity it criticises in Hindutva-aligned media — "that is setting up a dangerous precedent," he said. Real diversity, both agreed, meant welcoming Muslim voices that push back internally on caste, patriarchy and communal politics, not just voices that perform victimhood on cue.

Judged by Present Work, Not Past Politics

The panel drew a distinction between two kinds of alternative-media actors: former mainstream journalists who broke away to start YouTube channels, some of whom had earlier supported the 2014 change of government or the Anna Hazare movement before growing disillusioned, and organisations built from scratch specifically to represent underrepresented communities. Menon argued that intent should matter less than current conduct: people should be judged by their present work, and if an outlet is now reporting honestly against majoritarianism, its past associations should not be held against it indefinitely.

Building Nous Amid the CAA-NRC Protests

Javed traced Nous's origins to a specific historical moment. As CAA-NRC protests convulsed the country and he was among students pursuing an MPhil at JNU, he said the group came to see history as a continuous negotiation between identities and ideologies — communities that remain internally distinct while sharing overlapping public space. He argued that post-independence India's structural inequalities in access to education and health meant the demographic majority built the institutions — media houses, the bureaucracy, hospitals — while Muslims did not build parallel capacity at the same scale. That gap, he said, allowed categories like "jihad" to expand almost infinitely in public discourse: first a discursive category, then attached to interfaith relationships ("love jihad"), then to public spitting, land disputes, and eventually corporate employment, with no organised Muslim institutional voice available to contest each new iteration as it appeared. He pointed to the 2022 hijab controversy as an example: when the question of whether the hijab was religiously "essential" reached the courts and media, no institutional Muslim voice existed with the standing to answer.

When Security Becomes the Only Demand

Fahad turned the conversation to recent state elections in Bihar and West Bengal, and to the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls (SIR), which risks stripping welfare benefits from voters — disproportionately poor Muslims — who fall off the rolls. She argued this has narrowed Muslim political demands to a single, minimal ask: physical safety. "Just let us live, let us survive, and we'll handle the rest ourselves," is how she characterised the prevailing mood, arguing that this defensive crouch has crowded out any sustained push for think tanks, institutions or independent media. Javed agreed that achievements since Partition — the Babri Masjid movement, the Shah Bano case, decades of incremental gains — remained incomplete without parallel gains in institutional representation and identity, and said Muslims bear some responsibility for not using the political space available even before the BJP's rise.

The Internal Hegemony Problem

One of the panel's sharper arguments concerned power within Muslim institutions themselves. Javed said that Muslim organisations decades old, sitting on relevant human and financial resources, consciously sideline new intellectual and political formations emerging among younger Muslims, in order to protect their own control. "People are not ready to share power," he said, adding that sharing power requires sharing both human and financial capital — something established organisations resist, and in his observation, actively work against rather than merely withhold. He argued this internal hegemony, more than the BJP or Congress, is today the single biggest obstacle to institutionalising Muslim political and intellectual life, because a stronger, more organised community would produce leaders who challenge the existing mediator class. New, smaller outlets that do try to form, he said, often collapse under financial strain precisely because larger, established organisations decline to support parallel structures that might dilute their own hegemony.

Fahad connected this to uneven community mobilisation: enormous crowds gather for religious causes such as the Waqf Act protests, she noted, but comparable numbers have not turned out over the hijab issue or the near-daily incidence of lynching. Ashraf, pointing to community response after the 2015 Dadri lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq, recalled early symbolic protests — Eid black-band campaigns — that failed to sustain momentum, which he attributed partly to competition among community leaders unwilling to let a protest movement grow beyond their own reach.

The TCS Case and the Machinery of Belief

The panel spent considerable time on the case of Nida Khan, a Muslim employee at Tata Consultancy Services in Nashik arrested over an alleged forced-conversion racket — a case both Ashraf and Menon said mainstream and even some ostensibly secular commentators found instantly credible despite thin evidence, coining it "corporate jihad." Menon argued that a basic journalistic instinct — asking for internal complaint records, email trails, verifying whether a low-level call-centre employee could plausibly coerce colleagues — was abandoned in the rush to believe the narrative. "Just do your job," he said, arguing journalists should investigate thoroughly and, if evidence supports the claim, report it — but should not skip the verification step simply because the accusation fits a pre-existing script.

Javed extended the point into a broader argument about vocabulary. He distinguished secularism from what he called secularisation: a process in which international funding structures — the World Bank, the IMF — shaped decades of alternative and liberal media around a narrow set of acceptable causes (ecology, LGBTQ rights, a single template of gender norms) while treating religious identity and spirituality as illegitimate or backward. He argued that this same "secular vocabulary," originally developed to marginalise all religious expression, has since been selectively weaponised by the BJP against Islam specifically, and that the psychological groundwork of twelve years of majoritarian narrative-building is what makes accusations like the TCS case instantly believable to a broad public.

The Politics of Representation: Owaisi and the Partition Hangover

A substantial section of the discussion turned to Asaduddin Owaisi and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. Menon defended AIMIM's basic right to contest elections as legitimate political mobilisation, arguing Muslim political formations are reflexively branded "sectarian" or "separatist" because of an unexamined historical hangover from Partition — one he said should be discarded the same way Dalit political mobilisation, culminating in Kanshi Ram's Bahujan Samaj Party and Mayawati's chief ministership, is no longer treated as inherently separatist despite Dalits also being a minority.

Fahad pushed back, asking what tangible outcomes Muslim political mobilisation had actually delivered — noting AIMIM's five Bihar assembly seats in the 2025 election — and contrasted Owaisi's visibility with veteran CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat's widely photographed 2024 confrontation with bulldozers in Delhi. "Why don't we see them like that?" she asked, questioning why prominent Muslim political figures are rarely as visible resisting demolitions as they are in televised studio debates. Javed countered by arguing the comparison was unfair on its own terms: Owaisi is frequently present at both Waqf-related mobilisations and lynching sites, and singling out one high-profile case of allyship, such as Karat's, obscures the absence of similar visibility around the roughly one hundred lynchings that receive no comparable coverage. He argued the deeper problem is that Muslim political expression is evaluated only through the lens of Owaisi, rather than being allowed the same diversity of local, regional expression that Congress or the BJP enjoy.

Menon drew the sharpest historical comparison, tracing what he called the "hangover" of separatism accusations back roughly a century — arguing that the ideological architecture predates the RSS. He located the Hindu Mahasabha's late-nineteenth-century cow-protection agitations, the 1905 Bengal Partition-era Vande Mataram rhetoric, and violent akhadas as the true originators of the two-nation framework, which the RSS inherited "without that criticism" after Nathuram Godse's assassination of Gandhi diminished the Mahasabha's standing. He singled out Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Anandmath, written while its author served as a British district magistrate, for erasing the historical role of Muslim fakirs who fought alongside Hindu sannyasis in the 1770s-90s Sannyasi Rebellion against British-induced famine, replacing them in the narrative with an oppressive Muslim nawab — a substitution Menon said laid the template for treating Muslims, rather than the British, as the primary long-term threat to a Hindu nation. By contrast, the panel held up Gandhi as a leader who, whatever his limitations, uniquely engaged Hindu spiritual and cultural expression from within a pluralist, negotiated framework — something Menon said no subsequent Congress leader, including Rahul Gandhi, has managed to replicate, leaving that ground open for Hindutva to claim uncontested.

A Five-Point Blueprint

Fahad asked Javed to distill the conversation into a practical roadmap, and he offered five areas of work that he said must proceed simultaneously rather than sequentially: building the vocabulary and confidence to respond to loaded questions about jihad or the hijab; presenting an accurate account of Islamic texts and history against distortion; building independent institutions; building independent media; and holding existing, resource-rich Muslim organisations accountable for what they actually deliver in exchange for community funding. He stressed this was not a checklist to complete in order but a long process requiring years of parallel effort, and cautioned that Muslim political mobilisation should not be read as hostility toward the Left, secular parties or Dalits — all of whom he described as allies — but only as a demand for a fair share, roughly proportionate to a 14 percent population, within a system all communities negotiate together. He was careful to distinguish these allies from Hindutva, which he said cannot be treated the same way because its political philosophy structurally excludes Islam by design.

Symbolic Representation Versus Real Editorial Freedom

Returning to newsroom practice, Menon and Fahad discussed the difference between symbolic and substantive diversity. Hiring a hijab-wearing presenter, Menon argued, means little if she is denied the freedom to choose her own stories and vocabulary; genuine diversity requires giving different perspectives real editorial latitude, not using them as a branding device for an outlet's own credibility. Fahad, drawing on her own reporting experience, described the instinctive self-censorship many Muslim journalists practise — hesitating over vocabulary for fear it will be read by editors as excessive advocacy — and criticised the common newsroom pattern of assigning Muslim reporters only to "minority" stories while barring them from covering finance, home affairs or Hindutva politics. She cited a documentary on the Karnataka hijab protests where a practising Muslim reporter's coverage foregrounded the protesting girls' courage and aspirations, in contrast to typical mainstream coverage — including, she noted, a prominent journalist's framing of Shaheen Bagh's women protesters as "stepping outside their homes for the first time," an assumption she said no one familiar with Muslim neighbourhoods, where women are routinely out late at night in safe communal spaces, would make.

What Gaza's Coverage Exposed

Fahad offered the global response to Gaza as a contrast to the Indian situation: a broad, cross-religious wave of sympathy and protest was possible, she argued, largely because Palestinian journalists reporting from inside Gaza were simultaneously the story's subjects and its tellers, bypassing outside gatekeepers entirely. She said India lacks an equivalent capacity — not necessarily because the world is uninterested, but because Muslim institutions and media in India remain too underdeveloped to generate an unfiltered, first-person narrative at comparable scale.

Closing on an Uncomfortable Irony

The panel closed on an observation from Menon that stayed unresolved: the RSS-affiliated Muslim Rashtriya Manch currently offers Muslims perhaps the most "normative" representation available in Indian public life — visibly wearing the cap, the beard, the imam's bearing — even as it participates in a project many panellists see as fundamentally hostile to Muslim political autonomy. Javed's response was that adopting Hindutva's own visual grammar to gain acceptance is no different in kind from what Hindutva demands elsewhere, only differing in degree. All four agreed the discussion illustrated exactly the case for the institutions they had spent ninety minutes describing: without independent Muslim-run media, research bodies and political vocabulary, the community remains dependent on other people's narratives about it — sympathetic or hostile — rather than producing its own. The panel signed off proposing a follow-up conversation on how Bollywood and streaming platforms shape the same narrative terrain the discussion had just mapped.