The Rashtriya Swayamseval Sangh (RSS) as the Gurukul (university) of Hindutva (the ideology that advocates India being a majoritarian theocratic state) specialises in regular training of their cadres at which truncated (read manipulated and selective) versions of history are dished out, ingrained. As the latest evidence of this, we find on the 51^st anniversary of the Emergency [1975-77], a number of RSS-BJP leaders enlightening us Indians on “how the RSS opposed the Emergency, how valiantly its cadres challenged the dictatorial rule of Indira Gandhi and made great sacrifices during anti-Emergency movement” etc. The newspapers are filled with advertisements announcing ‘Samvidhan Hatya Divas’ in which none less than Prime Minister Modi is depicted bowing to the Constitution.

[The Indian Express, Delhi, June 25, 2026]

Only last year, the RSS English organ of the RSS, the Organizer (June 24, 2025) presented PM Modi as a singular symbol of the fight against Emergency and wrote:

“The lesson had been burned into public memory. The Emergency became more than a chapter in history. It became a warning. For Narendra Modi, it was not just a past event. It was part of his personal journey. As Prime Minister, he has often reminded the nation of those dark times…It was about imprisoning free thought, art, and expression. That period left behind not just scars, but reminders. It taught us that freedom is earned, not gifted.”

 [‘National Emergency 1975: The murder of the Indian republic on June 25,  https://organiser.org/2025/06/24/298840/bharat/national-emergency-1975-the-murder-of-the-indian-republic-on-june-25/]

Let us evaluate first, the claim that the RSS-BJP rulers are/have been committed to the liberal democratic values as a faith. The most prominent ideologue of the RSS, MS Golwalkar, also known as ‘Guru of Hate’ [whom PM Modi credits for grooming him into a political leader] while addressing the 1350 top level cadres of the RSS in 1940 declared,

“RSS is inspired by one flag, one leader and one ideology is lighting the flame of Hindutva in each and every corner of this great land.”

[Golwalkar, MS, Shri Guruji Samagar Darshan (collected works of Golwalkar in Hindi), Bhartiya Vichar Sadhna, Nagpur, nd., vol. I, p. 11.]

With such a philosophical love for totalitarianism the RSS has always balked against the sharing of power. It has also been in strong opposition to the federal structure of the constitution, a ‘Basic’ feature of the India polity. Golwalkar declared in 1961,

“Today’s federal form of government not only gives birth but also nourishes the feelings of separatism… It must be completely uprooted, constitution purified, and unitary form of government be established.”

[Ibid. vol. III, p. 128.]

So far as the claims of the outfit battling the Emergency is concerned the RSS, these “claims” need to be evaluated in the light of contemporary narratives including the RSS documents. In this connection two narratives one by a veteran thinker and journalist of India, Prabhash Joshi and the other by TV Rajeswar, former Intelligence Bureau [IB] chief who was the deputy chief of IB during the Emergency are of immense importance. Both, one a senior official of the government of India and the other, a senior journalist in the Hindi language, recounted the days of Emergency (or state terrorism) when RSS surrendered to the repressive regime of Indira Gandhi, assured her and her son, Sanjay Gandhi to enforce faithfully the draconian 20-point programme announced by the Emergency regime. They in fact negotiated surrender with the Indira Gandhi regime. A large number of RSS cadres came out of jails by submitting MAAFINAMAAS (mercy petitions). This account by Prabhash Joshi appeared in the English weekly Tehelka on the 25th anniversary of the Emergency.[1] According to him even during the Emergency “there was always a lurking sense of suspicion, a distance, a discreet lack of trust” about RSS’ joining the anti-Emergency struggle. He went on to recount that,

“Balasaheb Deoras, then RSS chief, wrote a letter to Indira Gandhi pledging to help implement the notorious 20-point programme of Sanjay Gandhi. This is the real character of the RSS…You can decipher a line of action, a pattern. Even during the Emergency, many among the RSS and Jana Sangh who came out of the jails, gave mafinamas. They were the first to apologize. Only their leaders remained in jail: Atal Behari Vajpayee [most of the time in hospital], LK Advani, even Arun Jaitley. But the RSS did not fight the Emergency. So why is the BJP trying to appropriate that memory?”

Prabhash Joshi concluded that “they are not a fighting force, and they are never keen to fight. They are basically a compromising lot. They are never genuinely against the government”.

TV Rajeswar, who served as Governor of Uttar Pradesh and Sikkim penned a book, ‘India: The Crucial Years” [Harper Collins] corroborated the fact that “Not only they (RSS) were supportive of this [Emergency], they wanted to establish contact apart from Mrs. Gandhi, with Sanjay Gandhi also”[2]

Rajeswar in an interview with Karan Thapar also disclosed that Deoras:

“Quietly established a link with the PM’s house and expressed strong support for several steps taken to enforce order and discipline in the country. Deoras was keen to meet Mrs. Gandhi and Sanjay. But Mrs. Gandhi refused.”

[Ibid]

According to Rajeswar’s book,

“Sanjay Gandhi’s concerted drive to enforce family planning, particularly among Muslims, had earned Deoras’s approbation.”[3] Rajeswar also shared the fact that even after Emergency the “organization (RSS) had specifically conveyed its support to the Congress in the post-emergency elections.”[4] It will be interesting to note that even according to Subramanian Swamy during the Emergency period, most of the senior leaders of RSS had betrayed the struggle against the Emergency.[5]

The contemporary documents from the RSS archives also corroborate that the narratives of Prabhash Joshi and Rajeswar were/are accurate. The third supremo of the RSS, Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras wrote the first letter to Indira Gandhi within two months of the imposition of Emergency. It was the time when state terror was widespread. In letter dated August 22, 1975, he began with the following praise of Indira:

“I heard your address to the nation which you delivered on August 15, 1975, from Red Fort on radio in jail [Yervada jail] with attention. Your address was timely and balanced so I decided to write to you”.   

[Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras, Hindu Sangathan aur Sattavaadi Rajneeti, Jagriti Prkashan, Noida, 1997, p. 270.]

Indira Gandhi did not respond to it. So Deoras wrote another letter to Indira on November 10, 1975. He began his letter with congratulating her on being cleared by the Supreme Court of disqualification which was ordered by the Allahabad High Court, 

“All the five Justices of the Supreme Court have declared your election constitutional, heartiest greetings for it.” It is to be noted that opposition was firmly of the opinion that this judgment was influenced by the ruling party, the Congress. Deoras also also stated that

“The RSS has been named in context of Jaiprakash Narayan’s movement. The government has also connected RSS with Gujarat movement and Bihar movement without any reason…Sangh has no relation with these movements…”

[Ibid., pp. 272-73.]

Since Indira Gandhi did not respond to this letter either, RSS chief got hold of Vinoba Bhave who supported the Emergency religiously and was a favourite of Indira Gandhi. In a letter dated January 12, 1976, Deoras begged that Acharya should suggest a way by which the ban on RSS was removed.

[Ibid. pp. 275-77.]

Since Acharya too did not respond to Deoras letter, the latter in another letter without date wrote in desperation,

“According to press reports respected PM [Indira Gandhi] is going to meet you at Pavnar Ashram on January 24. At that time there will be discussion about the present condition of the country. I beg you to try to remove the wrong assumptions of PM about RSS so that ban on RSS is lifted and RSS members are released from jails. We are looking forward for the times when RSS and its members are able to contribute to the plans of progress which are being run in all the fields under the leadership of PM.”

 [Ibid. p. 278.]

[All these letters in Hindi are being reproduced from a publication of the RSS at the end of this article.]

Even a prominent Hindutva ideologue Balraj Madhok who as an RSS whole-timer founded Bhartiya Jana Sangh (1951) on RSS command confessed:

“Sarsanghchalak of the Sangh Shri Bal Saheb Deoras was a MISA prisoner in Pune’s Yervada Jail…his life was full of comforts. Therefore, he wrote two letters to the jailed Indira Gandhi on August 22, 1975 and November 10, 1975 to change her attitude towards the Sangh and lift the ban on it. He also wrote a letter to Shri Vinoba Bhave and requested him to try to remove the feeling of opposition towards the Sangh from Indira Gandhi’s mind. These letters were leaked by the government, and they were published in many newspapers. This naturally had an adverse effect on the morale of the Sangh volunteers and the Satyagraha movement became almost dead.”

[Madhok, Balraj, Zindagi Ka Safar –3: Deendayal Upadhyay Ki Hatya Se Indira Gandhi Ki Hatya Tak (Journey of Life-3: From the Murder of Deendayal Upadhyay to the Murder of Indira Gandhi), Dinman Prakashan, 2003, pp. 188-189.]

It is also historically significant that former President of the Indian Republic, Pranab Mukherjee was invited by the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat as the chief guest at the graduation ceremony of its new recruits must be working over-time to convert India into a Hindu state. Pranab Mukherjee had been indicted as one of the top leaders of Congress for Emergency excesses by the Shah Commission.

Given this history, it is quite regrettable if not downright shameful that despite these facts thousands of RSS cadres continue to get monthly pension for their ostensible “persecution” during the Emergency. The BJP ruled states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra decided to award a monthly pension of Rs 20,000 to those who were jailed during the Emergency period for less than two months, and Rs 10,000 to those who were jailed for less than a month. This rule took care of the financial interest of those RSS cadres who submitted mercy letters completing only one- or two-months’ jail term. For securing this not insignificant amount in pension there was/has been no condition imposed that the beneficiary should have been in jail for the whole period of the Emergency!

Interestingly, in the case of anti-British freedom struggle there has not been even a single RSS cadre to claim the freedom fighter pension. It may be noted that nobody remembers hundreds of Communist youths, branded as Naxals killed in fake encounters during the Emergency. Interestingly, Maharashtra-based Shiv Sena, the Hindutva co-traveller of the RSS openly supported the Emergency.

Renowned senior journalist and one of the most widely read political commentators in India today, Coomi Kapoor evaluating the RSS-BJP over the past last 12 years forthrightly has observed:

“Increasingly, those in power believe they are not directly answerable to the people. The government’s radio silence over major mess-ups in the NEET and CBSE examinations, affecting lakhs of students, is a telling example. To respond to public complaints is perceived as a weakness by today’s regime. The lack of internal debate in the ruling party, too, is perturbing. The BJP parliamentary board rarely meets and when it does, it merely rubber stamps decisions taken elsewhere. The surprise elevation of inexperienced junior party persons as chief ministers, without any prior consultations, is yet another instance of the absence of inner-party democracy. No less concerning is the falling standard of independence and probity of constitutional bodies meant to uphold democratic values.

“The Election Commission’s blatant exclusion of over 90 lakh names from the West Bengal SIR rolls unnecessarily put a question mark over an election where the public mood was clearly against Mamata Banerjee…The crux of a true democracy is securing a majority in Parliament through an ethical recourse to the ballot box, not by winning over opposition legislators by whatever means, fair or foul, post elections. In the ongoing ruthless mission to secure a two-thirds majority, one recalls uneasily just how Indira Gandhi utilised her brute two-thirds majority to subvert our Constitution and push through Emergency rule.

“As the country marks the half-century anniversary of the Emergency, many ruling party supporters wax eloquent on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency excesses as a warning to future generations not to go down that discredited path and derail democracy. Ironically, many of the practices of the Emergency are actually being emulated today. Even the unnecessary sycophancy of rulers in advertisements, bill boards and at public events seems ominously reminiscent of that black period and recalls Congress President D K Barooah’s fawning slogan, ‘Indira is India and India is Indira’.’’

Coomi Kapoor, ‘Five decades after the Emergency, difficult questions, unheeded warnings’, reported The Indian Express.

So, the writing on the wall is clear. Indira Gandhi had imposed the Emergency, using Articles (352-360) of the Indian constitution; the same Indira Gandhi within 18 months announced general elections on January 18, 1977 and officially lifted the Emergency on March 21, 1977. Political prisoners who had been imprisoned were released and free to contest the elections that were held soon thereafter. Despite the robust opposition to the Emergency, there was never a question or doubt that the elections of 1977 would be free or fair. Under the present Modi regime (a minority government in its ‘third’ term), there is no question of withdrawing the state of undeclared emergency that has never been formally imposed. As institution after institution is sought to be, and is subverted, including the hitherto independent Election Commission of India, an unscrupulous regime continues with its agenda of snatching all democratic freedoms!

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.

[1] http://archive.tehelka.com/story_main13.asp?filename=op070205And_Not_Even.asp; this copy is available in libraries

[2] https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/rss-backed-indira-gandhis-emergency-ex-ib-chief-264127-2015-09-21

[3] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/ib-ex-chiefs-book-rss-chief-deoras-had-backed-some-emergency-moves/

[4] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/RSS-backed-Emergency-reveals-former-IB-chief/articleshow/49052143.cms

[5] https://medium.com/@hindu.nationalist1/double-game-of-senior-rss-leaders-during-emergency-74abc07a4fa8

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The post 51st Anniversary of Emergency in India: While the RSS supported the Emergency, it now ruthlessly presides over an ‘undeclared Emergency’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

But when sites are both protected monuments and continued religious spaces, questions of access, maintenance, and control between different governing bodies begin to surface. Who decides how these spaces are used? Who is responsible for their upkeep in practice? And what happens when regulation begins to reshape everyday practices of faith? This report examines these questions through a set of monuments that sit at the intersection of law, history, and lived experience—where protection does not always guarantee accessibility, and recognition does not always ensure care.

Paying to Pray: Firoz Shah Kotla Fort

The citadel of Firoz Shah Kotla Fort was built in the 14th century by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, the third ruler of the Tughlaq dynasty. In 1354, he established the city of Firozabad along the Yamuna, with the Kotla serving as its grand citadel. At its centre lies the Jami Masjid—one of the largest mosques constructed during his reign.

The site today is a centrally protected monument under the Ancient Monuments & Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 1958, with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) responsible for its conservation and management. The Act, enacted to preserve monuments of national importance, also regulates how such spaces are accessed and used. Under its provisions—and subsequent amendments—strict controls govern activity around protected monuments.

​Construction is prohibited within 100 metres of a monument and regulated within a further 200 metres, with any intervention requiring permissions from designated authorities. The law also allows the ASI to control access to protected sites, including regulating which areas remain open to the public.

​Within this framework, the Jami Masjid at Firoz Shah Kotla continues to function as a place of worship, with prayers offered during Zuhr (noon), Asr (late noon), and Maghrib(evening). Yet, in recent years, access to this space has become a point of contention.

In 2022, the ASI introduced ticketed entry to the fort for all visitors, including those coming to offer namaz. The move, reportedly linked to restoration work and post-pandemic site management, has since altered how people interact with the space.

For many, this shift has had tangible consequences. Qamarjahan, a resident of Seelampur, said the number of visitors has declined. “The ticket costs 25 rupees. First you spend on travel, then you pay again here—how often can someone keep coming?” she said, adding that she was once a frequent visitor but has since stopped.

Thursdays, in particular, held a distinct significance at Firoz Shah Kotla. ​​​​

For decades, the site drew visitors not only for prayer but also for supplication tied to local belief systems. Many believe that the ruins- especially the structure housing the Ashokan pillar, locally referred to as the Minar-e-Zarin- are inhabited by djinns who could grant wishes. People write letters detailing their desires and tie them to the railings, often returning with food offerings if their wishes were fulfilled.

While this practice continues, several visitors say that the introduction of ticketing has reduced the scale and frequency of these gatherings.

At the same time, some visitors point to visible improvements. Chandramohan Joshi, who has been visiting the fort since childhood, said that the introduction of ticketing has improved cleanliness and upkeep.

“Ibadat ka ghar hai ye, jab hum pooja karne aarahe hai toh saaf kapde pehen rahe hai toh jagah bhi saaf rakhni chahiye. (It is a place of worship—if we come here in clean clothes, the space should also be kept clean) ” he said.

His observation also reflects a shift in the character of the site—from an open, informal space shaped by gatherings and offerings to a more regulated monument with controlled access.

However, Joshi also questioned the principle of charging for prayer. “One does not have to pay to enter a temple or a gurdwara. Those coming specifically for namaaz should be exempted from paying,” he added. ​​

The issue becomes more pronounced during Eid, when large congregational prayers have traditionally been held at the mosque for decades. Worshippers are required to purchase tickets even on these occasions. This year, Aaley Mohammed Iqbal intervened by purchasing tickets for worshippers, allowing them to enter without paying individually. He has since been vocal about the need for a long-term solution, with discussions being done with the ASI in the past.

“Namaaz has always been happening here; foreigners had to pay for the tickets, however, post COVID-19, the ASI started ticketing worshippers as well. People from all backgrounds come to pray here; it is not feasible for a person earning Rs. 200-300 per day to pitch out Rs. 25 each time he wants to pray”, he said, emphasising the need for a permanent solution.

​​​​​​The question of prayer at protected monuments remains governed by ASI regulations. According to officials, permission for religious activity is often determined by whether continuous worship at a site can be historically established. In practice, only three mosques, Neeli Mosque, Palam Mosque and Sunehri Mosque, are formally recognised for offering prayers. ​​​​​​​​

An RTI filed by Sheikh Sartaj Ahmed Masoodi, president of the Muslim Welfare Organisation, Delhi, has raised further questions about how these rules are applied. The response indicated that while the ASI is responsible for maintenance and protection, it does not uniformly permit prayers across all protected mosques, pointing to inconsistencies in decision-making. ​The response also mentioned that permission for religious activity is determined by whether continuous worship at a site can be historically established. Three mosques, Neeli, Palam and Sunehri Mosque, are recognised for offering prayers.

Heritage sites that continue to function as active places of worship present a unique challenge, according to historian and author Swapna Liddle. “If a site remains active, people require amenities like running water, electricity and other facilities, which may not always be in keeping with the heritage character of a 14th-century monument,” she said. Liddle added that this tension is one reason why the ASI is often reluctant to allow monuments that are no longer in religious use to become active worship spaces again.

​At Firoz Shah Kotla, where history, faith, and long-standing practices intersect, the introduction of ticketing has not only affected access to prayer but also reshaped how the space is used. What was once an open site of regular gathering—religious and otherwise— now operates within a more tightly regulated framework, raising questions about who such spaces are ultimately meant for.

Caught Between Authorities: Sunehri Masjid

Tucked away in a corner of the parking complex of the Red Fort stands the Sunehri Masjid—easy to miss, yet still in active use. Built in 1751 A.D. by Qudsia Begum, the mosque is distinguished by its three domes and flanking minarets, a modest but enduring remnant of late Mughal architecture.

Today, the mosque exists in a state of administrative overlap. It is a protected monument under the Archaeological Survey of India and was among the 123 sites in Delhi previously registered as waqf properties that came under scrutiny during the Waqf Amendment Act. Following the Supreme Court’s refusal to stay the amendment, such claims stand void for protected monuments, placing the mosque firmly under ASI’s jurisdiction.

Despite this, it continues to function as a place of worship for local residents and visitors.​

This arrangement is shaped by laws governing protected monuments. Under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (AMASR) 1958, amended in 2010, construction is prohibited within 100 metres of a monument and regulated in the surrounding 200-metre zone, with oversight by the National Monuments Authority.

On the ground, however, these protections do not always translate into adequate facilities. Dr. Mohammed Irshad, who has been visiting the mosque for over two decades, described the challenges faced by worshippers. “There is no proper shade,” he said, pointing out that rain often disrupts prayers, while the lack of cover makes it difficult to gather during extreme summers. The ablution (wudhu) area, he added, is too small—only able to accommodate around 50 people, despite Friday footfall reaching nearly 500. Uneven flooring and broken tiles further make it difficult to perform sajda (prostration).

An official at the site, who requested anonymity, said that while the ASI oversees the monument, routine maintenance often depends on contributions from worshippers. “The roof leakage was fixed by ASI,” he noted, “but other issues like the wudhu area and flooring remain unaddressed.”

Another long-time staff member at the mosque said that restoration work on the roof, stairs, and boundary structures was carried out roughly a year and a half ago. Plans to repair the flooring and gate were also reportedly approved but have yet to be implemented due to budgetary constraints. He added that ASI officials, including engineers and conservation officers, visit the site regularly—particularly on Fridays—given its proximity to the Red Fort.

Despite these visits, basic infrastructure remains inadequate. A single, non-functional washroom and damaged flooring continue to inconvenience worshippers, particularly during peak prayer times.

The Sunehri Masjid thus reflects a larger pattern: while legally protected and actively used, it exists in a state of partial maintenance. Its dual identity—as both a monument and a living place of worship—places it in a grey zone, where responsibility is defined, but not always fully realised.

Heritage sites that continue to function as active places of worship present a unique challenge, according to historian and author Swapna Liddle. “If a site remains active, people require amenities like running water, electricity and other facilities, which may not always be in keeping with the heritage character of a 14th-century monument,” she said. Liddle added that this tension is one reason why the ASI is often reluctant to allow monuments that are no longer in religious use to become active worship spaces again.
ASI officials declined to comment on the status of conservation of the mosque.

Protected yet Abandoned: Begumpur and Khirki Masjid

A Monument Left Behind

Nestled within the narrow lanes of Begumpur in South-East Delhi’S Malviya Nagar lies the Begumpur Masjid, an Archaeological survey of India (ASI) protected monument dating back to the 14th-century Tughlaq period. Once a central place of worship—and believed to have served as the Jama Masjid of Jahanpanah, the fourth city of Delhi—it now stands in a state of prolonged neglect, with sections of its domed structure lying in ruins.

According to available archival references, the mosque was declared a monument of national importance in 1920. More recently, in 2017, the then Minister of State for Culture, Mahesh Sharma, reiterated its status in the Rajya Sabha under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 1958. However, on the ground, these designations appear to have had limited impact on its condition.

A visit to the site reveals a structure marked by visible decay. While traces of restoration work can be seen, large sections remain damaged. The roofs on three sides of the mosque have partially collapsed, several pillars show signs of weakening, and the plaster has deteriorated. The ceiling appears darkened and patchy, indicating prolonged exposure and lack of maintenance.​​ As per a report in The Hindustan Times.

The central courtyard—vast in scale—is littered with cigarette butts, plastic waste, broken glass, and debris. Weed has grown through cracks in the flooring, making parts of the space difficult to access. On the northern side of the mosque, groups of men gather, often using the structure as a secluded spot to smoke and drink. Discarded liquor bottles and other remnants of such activity are visible across the site.

​Vikram Guleria, a resident who lives across the mosque, alleged that the space is frequently misused. “The site is not maintained properly. People come here to drink and take drugs. The authorities don’t object,” he said.

Another local, Mohanlal, 78, who runs a business in the area, said that the site is not safe enough for women to go alone and advised visiting it in groups. “A lot of people, especially tourists, come to explore the mosque, but I have lived here for a long time, so I know that it is not safe to go alone inside. I always tell new people to explore in groups,” he said.

Swapna Liddle, an Indian historian and author, said, “Begumpur Masjid is more like a 14th-century ruin, and it should be preserved as a ruin. The best thing that can be done is to invite and encourage people to visit there. I do not think the ASI does anything like that.” On the northern side of the mosque, groups of men gather, often using the structure as a secluded spot to smoke and drink. Discarded liquor bottles and other remnants are visible across the site.

On whether sites like Begumpur Masjid or Khirki Masjid could be better maintained if they were repaired and people visited or offered prayers there, Liddle says, “In places that are in active use for prayers, issues of management often arise. If people start using Begumpur Masjid for prayers, they will have to transform the place to add basic amenities or paint the structure. This was not there in the 14th century, so the question of preserving the heritage character became an issue for the ASI.”

​An official from the Archaeological Survey of India declined to comment on the condition of the mosque and conservation efforts being made there. Security personnel present at the site said that while warnings are issued against such activities, enforcement remains difficult. “We are often alone here, and most of the people are locals. There have been instances where we are threatened,” the official said.

​​​​​​​​The locality surrounding the mosque has also changed significantly over time. The area is densely built, with houses constructed close to the monument, leading to encroachment around the site. Over the years, surrounding developments have raised ground levels, leaving the mosque in a relatively low-lying position. Ongoing road construction in the area has further altered access to the site.

Built as a grand congregational space, it now stands largely overlooked—protected in law, but neglected in practice.

Like Khairul Manazil, its entrance is from the eastern side, opening into a large courtyard aligned with the western prayer wall. The western façade features a prominent central arched alcove, flanked by smaller ones. These recessed, shadowed spaces now provide cover and privacy, often facilitating misuse.

The Crumbling State of Khirki Mosque

​Tucked within the narrow, crowded lanes of South Delhi’s Khirki village, the Khirki Masjid rises unexpectedly—it’s heavy stone walls and shadowed arches giving it the appearance of a fortress more than a mosque. For many who live around it, that is exactly what it is: not a place of worship, but a neighbourhood fort.

Built between 1351 and 1354 by Khan-i-Jahan Junan Shah, the prime minister of Firoz Shah Tughlaq, the mosque is a striking example of Tughlaq architecture. Its name—Khirki, derived from the Urdu word for “window”—comes from the distinctive perforated openings that once allowed light and air to filter into its enclosed structure. Today, it stands as a protected monument under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 1958, with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) responsible for its upkeep. Reported The Wire.

On the ground, however, the experience of the monument tells a different story. Years of neglect have left visible marks—crumbling domes, broken pillars, and decaying stone surfaces. Residents also point to a persistent bat infestation that has, over time, altered both the physical condition and usability of the space.

Rameshwar Prasad, a tea vendor who has lived near the mosque for over three decades, described the conditions inside. “Cleanliness is a major concern. There are a lot of bats and a constant foul smell,” he said, adding that parts of the monument also get flooded during the rainy season.

Despite being classified as a Grade ‘A’ monument by the conservation body, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage for its historical and archaeological significance, Khirki Masjid remains largely disconnected from the community around it. Many residents say they have never stepped inside. As per a report in The Times of India.

Yogesh Singh, who has lived in the area for 27 years, said the condition of the monument keeps people away. “Many of us haven’t even gone inside. The insects and the smell from the bats make it difficult,” he said.

The mosque’s current state also reflects a shift in how it is used. Once a functional religious space, it no longer sees regular prayer. Personnel at the site, requesting anonymity, said visitors now come primarily as tourists. “People don’t come here to pray anymore. I usually accompany visitors because there are bats in the darker corners,” he said, adding that some maintenance work is underway.

For others, the issue is not just neglect, but safety. A domestic worker living nearby, requesting anonymity, said the place, at times, is used by drunkards and drug users. “I avoid coming here, especially at night. It doesn’t feel safe,” she said.

According to an ASI official, the bat infestation itself has contributed to the monument’s deterioration. “Bat droppings are harmful as they cause corrosion to the pillars,” she said on the condition of anonymity. The ASI official added that the conservation work has been initiated at the site in response to concerns raised by residents and historians.

​​Yet, for now, Khirki Masjid stands in an uneasy state protected on paper, but struggling in practice.

Historian Swapna Liddle said, “When the ASI acquired the Khirki mosque in the early twentieth century and removed the villagers, they designated it a protected monument rather than a place of worship. The continuity as a place of worship had already been broken for centuries, so worship was not resumed. The case of Begumpur and the case of Khirki are pretty identical in that way.”

The Legal gray zone

Worship, Heritage and Control Collide

In Delhi, some monuments are not just remnants of the past. They continue to function as places of prayer, remain part of neighbourhood life, and exist within an ongoing struggle over who owns them, who maintains them, and who decides how they may be used.

At the centre of this dispute are 123 properties in Delhi that were claimed by the Waqf Board as Waqf properties, even as the Centre has maintained that these sites were acquired by the government between 1911 and 1914, with compensation paid and ownership transferred to the Government of India. These include mosques, dargahs and graveyards—several of them also protected by the Archaeological Survey of India.

​This overlap took on sharper legal meaning with the Waqf Amendment Act, 2025. Through Section 3D, the law states that any property already declared a protected monument under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (AMASR) Act, 1958 cannot be treated as waqf property. In September 2025, the Supreme Court refused to stay this provision, while also recognising that protected-monument status does not automatically erase customary religious practices at such sites.

​A similar position has been reflected in earlier judicial decisions. In Zeeshan Ahmed Rizvi v. CEO Waqf (Burhanpur case), the Madhya Pradesh High Court held that a monument protected under earlier heritage laws could not subsequently be reclassified as waqf property. It noted that such monuments remain under government guardianship unless formally relinquished—placing state protection above retrospective waqf claims under Section 11 of the 1904 law.​

The scale of this overlap extends beyond Delhi. The ASI protects 3,679 monuments of national importance across India. Under Sections 20A and 20B of the AMASR Act, a 100-metre prohibited zone and a 200-metre regulated zone surround each monument, restricting construction and development. According to the Joint Committee on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024, 254 protected monuments – nearly 7 per cent of the total—were listed as Waqf properties, including dozens in Delhi. The overlap between heritage protection and religious claims, therefore, is not incidental; it is structural.

​With the Supreme Court allowing Section 3D to stand, such monuments now fall clearly under the authority of the ASI and the Central Government for their maintenance and regulation. Yet, this legal clarity sits uneasily beside another national problem: disappearance and neglect. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s 2013 audit found that 92 centrally protected monuments were missing – around 6 per cent of those examined–a number it said was “far higher than the number communicated to Parliament by the ASI.” Later Press Information Bureau statements and government replies showed attempts to trace some of these missing sites, but the report exposed how fragile “protection” can be even on paper.​

At Firoz Shah Kotla Fort, this tension becomes visible at the point of entry.

​The Jami Masjid within the complex continues to host Friday prayers and Eid namaz, yet worshippers have been required to purchase tickets to access it. The legal basis for this lies in Section 18 of the AMASR Act, which allows public access to protected monuments “subject to rules,” including entry fees imposed by the ASI.

At the same time, the law explicitly protects religious practice. Section 5(6) of the AMASR Act states that “nothing… shall affect the use of any protected monument for customary religious observances.” Section 16(1) further specifies that a protected monument that is a place of worship “shall not be used for any purpose inconsistent with its character.”

​This creates a tension that extends into constitutional guarantees. Article 26 of the Indian Constitution grants religious denominations the right to manage their own affairs in matters of religion, including places of worship. Article 27 adds that no person can be compelled to pay taxes specifically for the promotion or maintenance of any particular religion. Together, these provisions raise a difficult question: if prayer is protected, can access to that prayer be made conditional upon payment?

At Sunehri Masjid, the issue shifts from access to upkeep.

​Under Sections 16 and 19 of the AMASR Act, once a monument is declared protected and maintained by the Central Government, the responsibility for its preservation lies with the state. Section 19 is explicit: “The Central Government shall maintain every monument.”

Historian Swapna Liddle notes, however, that ASI’s approach to maintenance has historically not meant rebuilding monuments to look new. For years, she says, the organisation followed a policy of what conservation experts call “conserve as found” —preserving a monument in the condition in which it exists rather than reconstructing missing portions. “As you find the monument, you try to preserve it in that form,” she explains, “not to try and make it new.”

According to Liddle, this approach began to shift more visibly after restoration work around Humayun’s Tomb, where larger interventions became more common. She points to Khirki Masjid as an example, where a section that had collapsed centuries ago has reportedly been rebuilt by ASI This complicates the question of neglect. What may appear to worshippers as abandonment can sometimes reflect a deliberate conservation choice. However, for those using these spaces every day, broken flooring, unfinished roofing and inaccessible prayer areas remain practical barriers, regardless of conservation philosophy.

Yet the condition of the mosque suggests a gap between this obligation and its implementation, with worshippers continuing to navigate incomplete repairs and inadequate facilities. A similar pattern emerges at Begumpur Masjid and Khirki Masjid. Both are protected monuments, yet both show visible signs of neglect—ranging from structural damage to lack of upkeep and limited oversight. Protection exists in law, but not always in practice.

This gap between law and implementation is not new. In 2009, the Union government stated that prayers would be permitted only at a limited number of ASI-protected monuments where a “de facto status quo” already existed. The position resurfaced in 2023 before the Delhi High Court in the Mughal Masjid case near the Qutub complex, where the ASI argued against allowing prayers in protected monuments. Justice Prateek Jalan questioned that blanket stand and asked ASI to clarify its policy, observing that if the statute itself allowed continuation of prayers in a protected monument, that position would need to be respected. The court also sought old records relating to the site’s protected status, signalling that whether prayers could continue depended not on a universal ban, but on the monument’s legal history and prior use.

What emerges, then, is not a single conflict but a layered one. The Indian Express, reporting on the Martand Sun Temple controversy in 2022, noted the same distinction in ASI practice: worship is generally disallowed unless the site is a “living monument” where prayers were already being offered at the time protection was declared. In such cases, worship may continue, but ASI treats new or revived religious activity as a violation of conservation norms. The written law preserves customary worship. The authority managing the monument often treats conservation control as overriding unless continuity of prayer can be historically proven. The law says prayer survives protection; ASI’s working position often says protection limits prayer unless a narrow exception already exists.

​This ambiguity becomes sharper when viewed against the ASI’s own internal classification of monuments.

An RTI response accessed for this project lists “living” and “non-living” monuments under the ASI’s Delhi Circle. Only a small number of sites – including Firoz Shah Kotla’s Jami Masjid and Sunehri Masjid near Delhi Fort – are officially categorised as “living (prayer)” monuments where worship continues. The majority, including sites such as Begumpur Masjid and Khirki Masjid, are marked as “non-living”.

​The classification, however, does not find explicit mention in the AMASR Act. Nowhere does the law define a “living monument” or prescribe different legal standards based on such a distinction. Instead, the Act uniformly protects “customary religious observances” at any protected monument that functions as a place of worship.

​This creates a gap between law and administration. While the statute protects continuity of worship, ASI’s internal categorisation effectively determines where prayer is treated as legitimate and where it is not. In practice, this shifts the question from what the law allows to what the authority recognises. The RTI list further shows that several monuments currently marked as “non-living” were historically functional religious spaces, raising questions about how and when such classifications were made, and whether they can override the statutory protection of customary practice.

In effect, the distinction between “living” and “non-living” monuments – central to ASI’s operational policy – exists outside the text of the law, but shapes how the law is implemented on the ground.

​The law preserves prayer. Regulation governs access. Maintenance remains uneven. Between these, worshippers navigate a shifting reality – paying to enter a mosque, praying within partially restored structures, or standing in spaces that are legally protected but materially neglected.​

Delhi’s historic mosques are not only being debated in courts. They continue to be used, inhabited, and negotiated every day-existing somewhere between monument and mosque, where neither identity is fully resolved.

Ifrah Asim, Shariya Ahmed, Jess Jojan, Devika Magu

(The authors are freelance journalists and postgraduate journalism students at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia).

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Why was a 200-year-old mosque in Varanasi demolished in the middle of the night?

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Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee (SPM 1901-1953) is a prominent Hindutva icon for the RSS/BJP brigade. It was he who, on the advice of M.S. Golwalkar, the second chief of RSS and its most prominent ideologue, founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), predecessor of the present Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1951 and became the first president of the political arm of the RSS.

Modi and the Hindutva brigade is fond of declaring Mookerjee as great nationalist and patriot who laid down his life for the unity of the nation. The Hindutva rhetoric about patriotism of Mookerjee needs to be crosschecked with the contemporary documents available in RSS and Hindu Mahasabha archives.

Perusal of these documents clearly shows that the claim that Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee was a ‘selfless patriot’ and a great patriot right from his birth is a white lie. Mookerjee never-never participated in the anti-colonial freedom struggle. If patriotism means being part of the freedom struggle and making sacrifices, Mookerjee not only kept aloof from it but also betrayed it by collaborating with the British rulers and the Muslim League in order to crush and communally polarize the anti-British liberation movement.

In the pre-Independence period, he was a prominent leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, which was led by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. When in 1942 Congress gave a call to the British rulers to leave India immediately by launching Quit India Movement (QIM), the British rulers responded to this mass movement by unleashing a reign of terror. Congress was banned, its provincial governments were dismissed, whole of India was turned into a jail and thousands died in the repression unleashed by armed forces of the British and the native rulers. The crime of many of those who were killed was that they dared to carry or unfurl the Tricolour, flag of the resistance.

Hindu ‘nationalist’ organisations namely, Hindu Mahasabha and RSS with the Muslim League (which since 1940 was ferociously demanding Partition of India) not only boycotted QIM but also decided to support the British government in its repressive campaign. The Hindu nationalists under the leadership of Savarkar even ran coalition governments with the Muslim League led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

The Hindu Mahasabha president ‘Veer’ Savarkar joyously chronicled this ganging up of Hindu Mahasabha with the Muslim League in his presidential speech to the 24th session of the Hindu Mahasabha at Kanpur in 1942 in the following words:

“In practical politics also the Mahasabha knows that we must advance through reasonable compromises. Witness the fact that only recently in Sind, the Sind-Hindu-Sabha on invitation had taken the responsibility of joining hands with the League itself in running coalition Government. The case of Bengal is well known. Wild Leaguers whom even the Congress with all its submissiveness could not placate grew quite reasonably compromising and sociable as soon as they came in contact with the Hindu Mahasabha and the Coalition Government, under the premiership of Mr. Fazlul Huq and the able lead of our esteemed Mahasabha leader Dr Syama Prasad Mookerji, functioned successfully for a year or so to the benefit of both the communities.”

[Savarkar, VD., Samagar Savarkar Wangmaya (Collected Works of Savarkar), Hindu Mahasabha, Poona, 1963, pp. 479-480.]

Later this coalition arrangement was extended to NWFP (now in Pakistan, known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) also. SPM was Deputy PM (those days chief minister was designated as prime minister) and held the Home portfolio which oversaw the crushing of QIM.

Following the Hindu Mahasabha directive to co-operate with the British, the Hindutva icon, Dr. Mookerjee assured the British masters through a letter dated July 26, 1942. In an autobiographical work he confessed:

“Let me now refer to the situation that may be created in the province as a result of any widespread movement launched by the Congress. Anybody, who during the war, plans to stir up mass feeling, resulting internal disturbances or insecurity, must be resisted by any Government that may function for the time being”

[Mookerjee, Shyama Prasad, Leaves from a Dairy, Oxford University Press, p. 179.]

Mookerjee’s letter to Bengal governor that the Fazlul Haq led Bengal Government, along with its alliance partner Hindu Mahasabha had made concrete plan for suppressing QIM is to be read and believed:

“The question is how to combat this movement (Quit India) in Bengal? The administration of the province should be carried on in such a manner that in spite of the best efforts of the Congress, this movement will fail to take root in the province. It should be possible for us, especially responsible Ministers, to be able to tell the public that the freedom for which the Congress has started the movement, already belongs to the representatives of the people. In some spheres it might be limited during the emergency. Indian have to trust the British, not for the sake for Britain, not for any advantage that the British might gain, but for the maintenance of the defense and freedom of the province itself. You, as Governor, will function as the constitutional head of the province and will be guided entirely on the advice of your Minister.”

[Cited in A G. Noorani, The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour, LeftWord Books, pp. 56–57.]

It was an abashed glorification of the foreign rule when he stated that freedom

“already belongs to the representatives of the people…Indian have to trust the British, not for the sake for Britain, not for any advantage that the British might gain, but for the maintenance of the defense and freedom of the province itself”.

A prominent historian of India R.C. Majumdar who is also regarded as a true ‘Bhartiya’ historian by the Hindutva brigade commenting on this letter wrote:

“Shyam Prasad ended the letter with a discussion of the mass movement organised by the Congress. He expressed the apprehension that the movement would create internal disorder and will endanger internal security during the war by exciting popular feeling and he opined that any government in power has to suppress it, but that according to him could not be done only by persecution…. In that letter he mentioned item wise the steps to be taken for dealing with the situation…”

[RC Majumdar, History of Modern Bengal, vol. 2, G. Bharadwaj & Co, Calcutta, p. 350.]

The Hindu Mahasabha decision to betray Quit India Movement resonated with the RSS also. MS Golwalkar, the then chief of RSS admitted:

“In 1942 also there was a strong sentiment in the hearts of many. At that time too the routine work of Sangh continued. Sangh vowed not to do anything directly. However, upheaval (uthal-puthal) in the minds of Sangh volunteers continued. Sangh is an organization of inactive persons, their talks are useless, not only outsiders but also many of our volunteers did talk like this. They were greatly disgusted too.”

[Shri Guruji Samagar Darshan (collected works of Golwalkar in Hindi), vol. IV, Bhartiya Vichar Sadhna, Nagpur, nd, p 40.]

Nowhere in pre-Partition RSS literature do we find any references to any work which RSS might have done ‘indirectly’ against the British for Quit India Movement.

In a more shocking development, the Hindu Mahasabha of Dr Mookerjee decided to help the British rulers in World War II. It was the time when Subhash Chandra Bose, known as Netaji, was organizing the INA (Azad Hind Fauj) in a military campaign to force the British out. The extent to which the Hindu Mahasabha was willing to help the British masters is clear from the following directive issued by Savarkar as President of the Mahasabha:

“So far as India’s defence is concerned, Hindudom must ally unhesitatingly, in a spirit of responsive co-operation, with the war effort of the Indian government in so far as it is consistent with the Hindu interests, by joining the Army, Navy and the Aerial forces in as large a number as possible and by securing an entry into all ordnance, ammunition and war craft factories…. Again it must be noted that Japan’s entry into the war has exposed us directly and immediately to the attack by Britain’s enemies. Consequently, whether we like it or not, we shall have to defend our own hearth and home against the ravages of the war and this can only be done by intensifying the government’s war effort to defend India. Hindu Mahasabhaites must, therefore, rouse Hindus especially in the provinces of Bengal and Assam as effectively as possible to enter the military forces of all arms without losing a single minute.”

[V.D. Savarkar, Samagra Savarkar Wangmaya: Hindu Rashtra Darshan, vol. 6, Maharashtra Prantik Hindusabha, Poona, 1963, p. 460.]

Thus, according to PM Modi and Hindutva brigade, being a ‘patriot’ and ‘self-less’ freedom fighter is synonymous with being a stooge of the British, a collaborator of Jinnah led Muslim League and organiser of mass murders of brave participants of Quit India Movement. All those who fought and laid down their lives against the colonial masters for freedom of an all-inclusive democratic-secular must then have been fools!

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.

Related:

Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee the Hindutva Icon was a Collaborator, with the Muslim League as much as the British

Syama Prasad Mookerjee: How `selfless’ was this `patriot’?

The post Syama Prasad Mookerjee: ‘Patriot’ or collaborator of British Rulers & Muslim League? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In May 1925, state troops opened fire on protesting farmers in Neemuchana village of Alwar State in present-day Rajasthan. Five years later, in May 1930, another massacre unfolded at Tiladi Sera in the Rawain region of Tehri Garhwal. Though separated by geography, ecology, and language, the two movements reflected strikingly similar tensions over taxation, forests, customary rights, and the changing nature of native states in late colonial India.

The rulers were a retreating British colonial state.

Both movements emerged within princely states that colonial administrators categorised and later historiography continued to categorise as ‘Rajput States’.  Yet in both cases, the protesters themselves were overwhelmingly drawn from Rajput agrarian communities resisting policies imposed by those very states.

The Neemuchana Movement of Alwar State

In Rajasthan, the Rajput socio-political setup traversed through all three stages: a quasi-republican clan, the feudal state and the imperial power, sometimes all three existing simultaneously.

However, Professor Shail Mayaram notes that the most basic unit of the Rajput sociopolitical setup was a coparcenary bhaichara (brotherhood) which was always represented by the khamp (sub-lineage) headed by a chief. (Against History, Against State, p. 202)

The Alwar State was formed by the Naruka khamp of Kachhwahas in 1775. However, at Neemuchana Kisan Andolan in 1925, the Alwar King and the protesting farmers of Alwar belonged to the same Kachhwaha clan.

The protest itself was not unique in Rajasthan. Historian R. W. Stern documents the mobilisation of Jaipur State forces in the early 20th century, to subdue the Shekhawat clansmen of Sikar and arrest their chief Rao Raja Hardayal Singh of Sikar, a move that was met with fierce armed resistance from the Shekhawats, another Kachhwah subclan.

In the Essays on Rajputana, Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph observe that the States were confronted with a dual task. First, to weaken the political power of the Rajput chiefs and agrarian clansmen who, despite having played a central role in the formation of these states, were increasingly perceived as threats to centralised authority. Second, to strengthen the State’s centralised governments headed by the King and led by the educated Brahmin elite and the wealthy Mahajan class i.e. Bania and Khatri elites. Efforts to regulate and control farmers and clan-based agrarian structures frequently generated clashes between State police and agrarian clansmen, even compelling minor States to seek colonial intervention for suppression.

In the context of Alwar, Rajesh Kumar writes “The third land revenue settlement in Alwar was revised in 1923-24 by Pandit N.L. Tikko, raising the annual total demand to Rs. 29,39,112. Under this new settlement the land revenue was increased by 50 per cent and no concession was given to the Rajput cultivators, instead their Biswedari rights were forfeited.”(Proceedings of the Indian History Congress,Vol. 73 (2012); pp. 794-798)

In October 1924, the farmers began the first agitation to cancel the rates of land taxation. By early 1925, the Biswedars across Bansur, Thanagazi, Neemuchana, Bamanwas began collecting in huge numbers. Led by Govind Singh and Madho Singh of Neemuchana, they approached the Akhil Bhartiya Kshatriya Mahasabha and published their grievances in a pamphlet titled “Pukar”. Apart from reversion to previous rates, they demanded cessation of auction of banjad (infertile) land, cessation of blockage at roads connecting Alwar and Bansur, abolition of begar, permission to kill wild animals destroying crops.

In response, the Alwar government began confiscating grain stocks from the Biswedars, a move that deeply angered Rajput cultivators across the region. Many of these farmers were veterans of the First World War and began collecting weapons in anticipation of armed confrontation. They began organizing in Neemuchana. On May 14, 1925, Neemuchana was surrounded by State forces. As per official figures, 156 farmers were killed, while non-official figures claim much higher numbers. The public outrage that followed enabled the British to force Raja into exile, although the extent of accountability faced by the minister N L Tickoo remains far less clear.

Tiladi Movement of Tehri Garhwal State

The region of Uttarakhand — Garhwal and Kumaon— was ruled by three Rajput dynasties for thirteen centuries: the Katyuris of Khas origins who united the entire region in the 8th century, the migrant Panwar dynasty who replaced them in Garhwal and the Chand dynasty who replaced them in Kumaon. Unlike Rajasthan, both the Garhwal and Kumaon states were established through the gradual consolidation of numerous hill chieftaincies, forts, and clan-based polities.

After the Gurkha invasion and Anglo-Gurkha war, the Kumaon state was permanently annexed by the British and the Garhwal state was divided into British Garhwal and the smaller Tehri-Garhwal, which was retained by the Panwar dynasty.

When the Tehri ruler Kirti Shah died, his minor son Narendra Shah ascended the throne. By the late 1920s, Narendra Shah had largely withdrawn from day-to-day governance and was living comfortably in Europe, leaving the administration in the hands of his Diwan, Chakradhar Juyal. Acting in the name of an absentee and politically inexperienced ruler, the Juyal administration embarked upon an ambitious project to construct a new capital, while simultaneously facing growing pressure from the British owing to the rapid expansion of railway infrastructure in the Himalayan region.

To finance these projects and strengthen state control over resources, the administration introduced a series of deeply unpopular measures in the Rawain region. These included a grazing tax of ₹1 per head on sheep and goats, restrictions on grazing rights, fodder collection, and fuelwood harvesting, as well as bans on local forest-based festivals and customary rituals. Such policies directly undermined the subsistence economy and customary rights of local communities, fuelling widespread resentment against the Tehri State.

Author and Human rights activist Vidyabhushan Rawat notes, “Access to forests, fishing, and even keeping cattle became restricted or criminalized. Local people were prohibited from collecting minor forest produce, while British settlers such as Frederick Wilson enjoyed vast forest leases, exporting pine and chir timber to Britain”

Bhoon Singh and Heera Singh of Nagaon; Ludhar Singh, Jaman Singh, and Dalpati of Barkot; Dayaram of Kanseru , Dhoom Singh of Chakargaon started organizing the farmers of Rawain valley. On May 20, 1930, four farmer leaders were arrested and presented before the SDM (sub-divisional magistrate) Surendra Dutt. To protest the arrests, the farmers gathered in huge numbers prompting the Divisional Forest Officer Padamdutt Raturi to open fire, killing three farmers. However, the protesters managed to forcefully, free their leaders.

On May 30, 1930, the protesters gathered in huge numbers in Tiladi Sera on Yamuna bank. Diwan Juyal ordered Colonel Sundar Singh to fire. Sundar Singh refused and was suspended. Natthu Sajjwan was appointed the next army chief and ordered to fire, killing at least eighteen protesters (as per official), although local accounts put the fatality at 60-80. Around 194 farmers were arrested and sixteen more died in custody.

Conclusion

The histories of Neemuchana and Tiladi complicate, rather nuance, over-simplistic understandings of princely India by revealing deep internal tensions between the elite classes emerging within princely capitals — royalty, bureaucratic elites, and wealthy mercantile interests — and rural farming communities, both landed and landless, amid mounting colonial economic pressures. The histories of Neemuchana and Tiladi ultimately undermine the very premise of colonial labels such as the “Rajput State”.

They highlight the growing alienation of largely uneducated Rajput farmers and the increasing dominance of Brahmin and Khatri bureaucratic elites and Bania capitalist classes within the centres of princely power. Questions of taxation, forests, customary rights, and administrative centralisation frequently produced conflict between ruling establishments and the very communities in whose name political legitimacy was claimed..

Recovering, rather re-discovering, these movements is therefore essential not merely for regional history but for understanding the changing nature of power in late colonial India. They remind us that the politics of princely India cannot be understood through simplified dynastic or communal frameworks alone. Beneath the formal authority of princely cabinets existed complex struggles over land, resources, administration, and political representation — struggles that continue to remain insufficiently remembered in mainstream accounts of Indian history.

(The author is a mechanical engineer and an independent commentator on history and politics, with a particular focus on Rajasthan. His work explores the syncretic exchanges of India’s borderlands as well as contemporary debates on memory, identity and historiography; he can be contacted on adityakrishnadeora@gmail.com)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.

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The post Rethinking the ‘Rajput State’: The Neemuchana & Tiladi agrarian movements appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The 242-page judgment delivered by the Division Bench of Justice Vijay Kumar Shukla and Justice Alok Awasthi goes far beyond a conventional determination of competing religious claims. The Court purportedly undertook an exhaustive examination of archaeological surveys, inscriptions, architectural remains, historical literature, colonial gazetteers, legislative history, constitutional principles, Hindu endowment law, Islamic waqf doctrine, and the jurisprudential framework evolved by the Supreme Court in the Ayodhya judgment.

At the heart of the ruling lies the Court’s conclusion that the present structure standing at Bhojshala was constructed after the destruction and alteration of an earlier temple complex and that the continuity of Hindu worship at the site “has never been extinguished”.

The Bench ultimately quashed the 2003 arrangement framed by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to the extent that it permitted Friday namaz while restricting Hindu worship inside the complex. At the same time, the Court attempted –not very convincingly–to balance competing religious claims by observing that the Muslim community may apply to the State for allotment of an alternative site in Dhar district for construction of a mosque.

The ruling is likely to have profound legal and political implications, not merely because of its conclusions regarding Bhojshala, but because of the constitutional and evidentiary methodology adopted by the Court — one that unmistakably draws from and expands the contentious principles articulated in the Supreme Court’s decision in Ayodhya Verdict.

Dismantling the 1991 Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act

What is crucial for the citizen and legal mind to understand and assimilate is what the Courts are themselves doing to an existing law, the 1991 Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act. Passed in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition on December 6, 1992, this law that received resounding support of the legislature after it was tabled by the Narasimha Rao government (that incidentally also was in power when the illegal act of the demolition took place) is currently under constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court of India.

Ironically, the last time that the “challenge to this law” was heard by the apex court was in December 2024 when the matter was supposed to be heard after four weeks. While this has not happened, verdicts such as the Bhojshala verdict, again, seek to undermine this law. The Supreme Court’s December 12, 2024 order –albeit directed at trial courts—asked them to refrain from registering new suits and passing any effective orders (including survey orders), in cases challenging the religious character of places of worship pending the challenge to the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act of 1991.

This order was passed by a bench, led by Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and comprising Justices PV Sanjay Kumar and KV Viswanathan and the Judges had then emphasised emphasised that such proceedings violate the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act of 1991. This law prohibits altering the religious character of places of worship as they stood on August 15, 1947.

The Court’s intervention in December 2024, after years of pendency and delay (notice was issued on these petitions in 2021) came amidst a rising tide of petitions and suits challenging the status of religious sites, many of which are medieval mosques and shrines. At the time, a November 2024 survey order by a trial court regarding the 16th-century Sambhal Jama Masjid in Uttar Pradesh escalated communal tensions, culminating in violent clashes that claimed four lives in November. While the court had then stated that it would begin hearing the challenges to this law, the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, this has not yet happened. Read on those developments here.

Context and broader implications of the PWA 1991

The 1991 Act was introduced to prevent the conversion of the religious character of places of worship, with an exception only for the Babri Masjid site, which was the subject of the Ayodhya dispute. The Act, which has been subject to increasing challenges, seeks to ensure that no new legal disputes are initiated over the status of religious places, especially those with historical significance, as of August 15, 1947.

Read this crucial reference on ‘When and How Ram Vilas Paswan made a strong pitch for the Places of Worship Act, 1991 here: A powerful leader from Bihar, unkindly known as the shrewd weatherman of Indian politics, Ram Vilas Paswan, then a member of the National Front, spoke powerfully from the Opposition benches, in support of the proposed law and scathingly of the BJP’s destructive politics of demolishing places of worship (Babri masjid, December 6, 1991) while not sparing the Congress either.

Read about the Babri Masjid demolition and also extensive analyses of the flaws in the Babri Masjid judgement here, here and here.

Even as we understand and analyse the flaws behind the ‘Bhojshala’ verdict –and there are several—it is crucial to also understand what the courts are themselves doing to this law. Across several states and sites, courts are reaching the same destination through different presumptions and conclusions. As a result, now the ‘Bhojshala Order’ just like several others that are being conclusively passed while the constitutional challenge to a vital law hangs in judicial limbo, effectively is doing to the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, what neither parliament nor the Supreme Court has been willing to do. The Act is not being amended. It is not being struck down. It is being made rendered ineffective and inapplicable to those it was written to protect, one site at a time, through a different doctrinal route each time.

Incidently, the Bhojshala verdict delivered on Friday (May 15) by the Indore Bench of the Madhya Pradesh high court is the latest expression of this pattern. It is also the most ambitious. The Bench comprised Justices Vijay Kumar Shukla and Alok Awasthi. It has held the 1991 Act inapplicable to Bhojshala. The ground is that the site is a centrally protected monument under a different statute. The route that this bench has introduced was not, until now, judicially available. This verdict now sets another precedent for those litigating sime verdict adds a sixth procedural pathway to a map that already had five.

As the Hindustan Times has reported, litigation similar to Bhojshala is now alive in courts from Uttar Pradesh through Karnataka. The geographic spread is itself the analytical fact. What follows is the spread, read against the Act it is dismantling.

Section 4 of the 1991 Places of Worship Act law says that the religious character of a holy site “shall continue to be the same as it existed” as it was on August 15, 1947, the day of independence. The only exception, under Section 5, said: “…nothing contained in this act shall apply to the place or place of worship commonly known as Ram Janma Bhoomi-Babri Masjid situated in Ayodhya.”

However be it Gyan Vapi Mosque (Varanasi) or the or the suits related to the 13.37-acre land of Katra Keshav Dev Temple, seeking the removal of the 17th-century Shahi Idgah mosque, there are cases pending across courts that violate this law passed by Parliament. At least 18 suits for possession of land after removal of Shahi Idgah Masjid as well as for restoration of the temple and for permanent injunction are pending before the high court. The case was first heard on October 18, 2023 and the next hearing date is not available.

Apart from the Sambhal Shahi Masjid site in western UP, the site of the Idgah maidan dispute in Hubali, the Baba Boudhangiri syncretic shrine in Chikmagalur, Karnataka and the Malali Mosque in Malali village Mangaluru are already under similar litigation by far right Hindu organisations.

A dispute rooted in competing historical claims

The Bhojshala dispute –on which the MP HC pronounced its verdict on May 15–concerns an ASI-protected medieval structure in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh, long claimed by multiple religious communities. While Hindu groups have since the early 1990s claiming that the structure has historically been regarded as Bhojshala — a temple of Goddess Saraswati and a renowned centre of Sanskrit learning established by Raja Bhoj, the celebrated Paramara ruler associated with scholarship, literature and temple patronage, the site has Mosque located there too..

The Muslim community, however, has been worshipping here at the Kamal Maula Mosque, claiming that the site functioned as a mosque for centuries and relying upon historical references from the Khilji period as well as a 1935 Ailan issued by the erstwhile Dhar State recognising it as a mosque.

A separate set of claims was raised by Jain petitioners, who argued that certain recovered idols and iconographic features suggested that the site was originally a Jain temple associated with Goddess Ambika or Jain Vidyadevi traditions.

The dispute had for years been governed by a 2003 administrative arrangement framed by the ASI under which Hindus performed puja on Tuesdays while Muslims offered namaz on Fridays.

The litigation intensified after petitions were filed seeking recognition of the site as a Hindu temple and restraining namaz within the complex. During the proceedings, the High Court ordered a scientific survey of the site by the ASI — an order that briefly reached the Supreme Court before the survey process was ultimately permitted to continue under judicial supervision. The resulting ASI report became the backbone of the High Court’s eventual conclusions.

The Court’s Central Finding: Bhojshala was a Saraswati Temple and centre of Sanskrit learning

The High Court concluded that the cumulative historical and archaeological material overwhelmingly established Bhojshala as a temple dedicated to Goddess Saraswati and a Sanskrit educational institution associated with Raja Bhoj.

The Bench recorded:

“We have noted the continuity of hindu worship at the site through regulated over time has never been extinguished. We record finding that historical literature placed established that the character of the disputed area was Bhojshala as a Centre of Sanskrit learning associated with Raja Bhoj of Parmar dynasty and the literature and architectural reference including those connected with the period of Raja Bhoj indicate the existence of temple dedicated to the goddess Saraswati at Dhar.” (Para 210)

Crucially, the Court clarified that it was not adjudicating a civil title dispute in the conventional sense. Unlike the Ayodhya litigation, which arose from suits concerning ownership and title over land, the Bhojshala matter, according to the Bench, primarily concerned determination of the “religious character” of the disputed structure through archaeological, historical and documentary evidence.

This distinction allowed the Court to focus extensively on patterns of worship, inscriptions, architectural continuity, historical references and archaeological findings rather than conventional proprietary claims.

The ASI Survey: The foundation of the judgment

The most decisive aspect of the ruling was the Court’s reliance on the scientific survey conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India.

The Muslim parties had strongly challenged the fairness and methodology of the survey, raising objections regarding excavation practices, debris contamination, recovery of artefacts and interpretation of findings. The Court, however, categorically rejected allegations of bias or procedural impropriety.

The Bench noted that the survey had been carried out by a core technical team of senior archaeologists under the supervision of an Additional Director General of the ASI. It also recorded that officers belonging to the Muslim community participated in the process and that representatives of all contesting parties were present during videography and photography throughout the survey proceedings.

The Court held:

“We find that the survey was conducted by adopting scientific method in a fair and impartial manner. The presence of representatives of the petitioners and the respondent can be very well seen in the videography. The method which has been adopted by the experts was as per their expertise. The carbon dating method is used to determine the age of material itself and not for the age of construction period.” (Para 195)

Rejecting allegations regarding plastic waste and modern debris allegedly found at the site, the Court accepted the ASI’s explanation that such material was located only in upper heterogeneous debris layers containing modern dumped material, wrappers and conservation waste, and did not compromise the archaeological integrity of deeper strata.

The Bench further accepted the ASI’s clarification that carbon dating was not necessary because the purpose of the survey was not to determine the age of isolated organic material but to identify the architectural period and historical evolution of the structure itself.

Some facts about the History & structure

For 700 years, the Kamal Maula Mosque had been a place of worship for Dhar’s Muslims. Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, and the political ascendance of Hindutva majoritarianism, the efforts to twist and misrepresent archaeology and history both at Faizabad-Ayodya and elsewhere had begun. In fact, in May 2003, a year after the Gujarat pogrom, Communalism Combat, had published a detailed list –sourced from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)—of dozens of such “site on Hindutva’s hit list.” These may be read here.

Coming back to the Kamal Maula Mosque. History tells us that, in 1903, a British-era education officer named K.K. Lele while viewing a structure that locals called “Raja Bhoja ka Madrassa” decided to call it Bhojshala. Every British officer before him had called it a mosque. John Malcolm visited Dhar in 1822 and removed an inscribed panel from the structure. Of the building, he said only that it was a “ruined mosque.” William Kincaid, writing in 1888 about his years in Malwa, documented local legends about Raja Bhoja extensively and never once mentioned a Bhojshala. Then, in 2003, after the matter was contested in the courts, that is one hundred and twenty-three years later, the ASI submitted a 2,000-page report to the Madhya Pradesh High Court where this nuance around nomenclature was erased and only “Bhojshala Temple” appeared throughout. For locals, the structure that had stood in Dhar since 1304 CE is the Kamal Maula Mosque. Yet this history stands erased by this verdict of the MP High Court.

“Evidence of a pre-existing Temple structure”

The High Court repeatedly returned to one central conclusion drawn from the voluminous but flawed ASI report: that the existing structure was built upon and through the remains of an earlier temple complex dating to the Paramara period.

The Court observed that the remains of the earlier structure still survive beneath the present complex and that numerous inscriptions, sculptures and architectural fragments embedded within the existing structure clearly belonged to an earlier Hindu religious monument.

The judgment notes that hundreds of large and small inscription fragments were found in and around the structure, demonstrating that the site once possessed a substantially different architectural and religious identity.

The Court noted from the brief findings of the survey:

“Fragments of inscriptions, sculptures and architectural members suggest that superstructure of this stone structure was later modified and converted into mosque.” (Para 173)

The ASI findings also became central to the Court’s conclusion that the pillars and pilasters used in the present structure originally belonged to temples. There was no attempt by the Court to test the independence or autonomy of the ASI itself or seek expert autonomous opinion on the structure.

The Bench referred extensively to sculptural remains depicting:

• Ganesh,
• Brahma with consorts,
• Narasimha,
• Bhairava,
• divine and semi-divine figures,
• animal and human carvings,
• and temple motifs such as kirtimukhas.

According to the Court, many of these figures had been intentionally defaced, mutilated or chiselled out before reuse in the later structure.

The Court specifically noted that anthropomorphic depictions are generally inconsistent with mosque architecture and treated the mutilation itself as evidence that temple material had been repurposed during construction of the mosque structure.

The Bench also relied on the ASI’s observation that the present structure lacked architectural symmetry and appeared to have been assembled hurriedly from reused material of varying periods and styles.

The Paramara Dynasty, Raja Bhoj and the dating of the site

A substantial part of the judgment is devoted to dating the earlier structure to the 10th–11th centuries CE during the rule of the Paramara dynasty.

The Court relied upon:

• Paramara-era pottery,
• Indo-Sassanian coins,
• Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions,
• temple architectural remains,
• iron objects,
• mutilated Vishnu sculptures,
• and historical references associated with Raja Bhoj.

The Bench referred to the ASI’s finding that the earliest coins recovered from the site belonged to the Indo-Sassanian period, corresponding to the time when the Paramara kings ruled Malwa from Dhar.

One of the most important inscriptions discussed in the judgment contained two Prakrit poems consisting of 109 stanzas each associated with Raja Bhoj.

The Court noted that the inscriptions reportedly opened with invocations such as:

“Om Sarasvityanamah”

“Om Namah Shivay”

The Bench regarded this as significant evidence that the site possessed a deeply rooted Sanskritic and Hindu religious identity prior to later Islamic inscriptions. Importantly, the Court also observed that the Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions predated all Arabic and Persian inscriptions found at the site.

Bhojshala as a great centre of Sanskrit learning

The High Court accepted the argument that Bhojshala was not merely a temple, but a renowned educational institution associated with Sanskrit learning under Raja Bhoj.

The Court relied on several historical texts and administrative publications, including:

• the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908),
• publications of the Royal Asiatic Society,
• G. Yazdani’s Mandu: The City of Joy,
• archaeological reviews from 1972–73,
• and educational records from the Dhar State.

The Bench repeatedly referred to the famous “serpentine grammatical inscriptions” found at the site — Sanskrit grammatical formulae carved in serpent-shaped arrangements on floor slabs and architectural members.

These inscriptions became central to identifying the structure as “Bhojshala” or “Hall of Bhoja”. Historical literature cited before the Court described the structure as: “Raja Bhoja ka Madrassa” or Raja Bhoja’s School.

The Court treated these records as corroborative evidence establishing the site’s longstanding association with scholarship, Sanskrit education and Goddess Saraswati.

The Court’s Conclusion: The existing structure was built from Temple remains

The judgment repeatedly emphasises that the current structure reflects unmistakable evidence of reuse of temple material after demolition or dismantling of an earlier Hindu religious structure.

The ASI report, extensively reproduced in the judgment, stated that the structure appeared to have been assembled rapidly using material from an earlier building without regard for symmetry or consistency.

The Court pointed to:

• reused basalt pillars,
• temple-style columns,
• mutilated deity carvings,
• reused sculptural blocks,
• and fragmented inscriptional material embedded within the mosque structure.

According to the Court, the cumulative architectural evidence clearly established that temple components had been dismantled and incorporated into the later Islamic structure.

Why the Court rejected the Mosque claim

One of the most consequential portions of the judgment concerns the Court’s rejection of the claim that the disputed structure was originally and validly a mosque. The Muslim parties had relied on historical references from the Khilji period and the 1935 Ailan recognising the structure as a mosque.

The Court, however, concluded that none of the historical material produced by the Muslim side established that the structure existed as a mosque prior to the already established 1034 AD Hindu religious structure. More significantly, the Bench held that there was no evidence establishing the site as valid waqf property.

The Court undertook a detailed discussion of Islamic waqf doctrine, referring to Sir Dinshaw Mulla’s Principles of Mahomedan Law. It observed that a valid waqf requires:

• ownership by the waqif,
• dedication of the property to Almighty God,
• and extinction of the waqif’s ownership.

The Bench held that no evidence showed that the disputed land had ever been dedicated as waqf property.

It observed:

“No material suggests that the part of the land No.604 (Old No.313) is a Waqf property and the same was dedicated or could be dedicated to Waqf. It is imperative under Muhammadan Law that property must belong to waqif and the owner must belong to waqif and the owner must dedicate the property to the Almighty. Historical material placed before us could not show that waqf has been created and therefore, there can be no presumption regarding existence of a mosque in the disputed area which is prima facie established to be constructed as Bhojshala and temple of goddess Vagdevi (Saraswati) a place of learning Sanskrit language in 1034 AD.” (Para 192)

The Court further reasoned that land already vested in a Hindu deity could not validly become waqf property.

The 1935 Ailan declared constitutionally unsustainable

The Court also rejected reliance on the 1935 Ailan issued by the ruler of Dhar State recognising the site as a mosque. The Bench held that the order could not automatically survive after the Constitution came into force.

Invoking Articles 13 and 372 of the Constitution, the Court observed that pre-Constitution executive orders remain operative only if they conform to constitutional principles. According to the Court, the Ailan was inconsistent with the overwhelming archaeological and historical evidence establishing the site’s Hindu religious and educational character.

The Court further held that because the site had already been notified as a protected monument under the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, 1904, the Dhar ruler lacked authority to alter its essential legal status in 1935.

The Jain claims and the British museum idol

The judgment devotes considerable attention to claims raised by Jain petitioners who argued that certain idols and iconographic features established the site as a Jain temple. Particular emphasis was placed on an idol presently located in the British Museum and identified by some petitioners as Ambika, a Jain goddess. The Court, however, rejected the argument that the disputed structure was a Jain temple.

The Bench held that no historical literature, ASI findings or architectural material supported the conclusion that the site functioned as an exclusively Jain religious structure.

It observed:

“Whether the idol is of Saraswati or of Ambika would not render much assistance to his submission that the disputed area was a Jain temple as we held that no material has been placed before us either by way of historical literature, architectural features or in ASI survey suggesting that the disputed area was a Jain temple.” (Para 209)

The Court noted that Saraswati is worshipped in both Hindu and Jain traditions as a deity associated with learning and wisdom.

The Bench also referred to iconographic features such as books held by the deity, accompanying figures and seated ascetic forms.

In one of the most controversial observations in the judgment, the Court stated that Jainism and Hinduism evolved alongside each other and referred to statutory provisions under the Hindu Marriage Act and Hindu Succession Act to note that Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs are treated within broader Hindu legal frameworks for certain civil purposes.

The Court therefore concluded that the presence of Jain-associated iconography did not alter the essential Hindu character of the site.

The Saraswati Idol and the possibility of repatriation

The High Court also considered requests seeking the return of the Saraswati idol presently believed to be housed in the British Museum.

The Bench noted that representations had already been submitted to the Union Government seeking repatriation of the idol and observed that the Government of India may consider taking steps to bring the idol back and reinstall it within the Bhojshala complex.

The Court referred to inscriptions associated with the idol mentioning Vararuci, an official in the Paramara kingdom, who had commissioned images of Vagdevi and Ambika.

How the High Court imported the Ayodhya framework into Bhojshala

Perhaps the most legally significant feature of the judgment is its explicit adoption of principles articulated by the Supreme Court in the Ayodhya verdict. The High Court treated the Ayodhya decision not merely as persuasive precedent, but as a foundational jurisprudential framework for resolving historical-religious disputes.

The Court identified several governing principles:

• disputes over ancient religious sites must be decided on the civil standard of “preponderance of probabilities” rather than proof beyond reasonable doubt;
• courts must focus on continuity of worship, patterns of religious use and historical belief;
• destruction or removal of idols does not extinguish the underlying religious endowment;
• ASI reports deserve substantial evidentiary weight because they are prepared by technical experts;
• and archaeological remains, inscriptions and religious motifs possess strong probative value in determining the historical religious character of a site.

The Court also emphasised that faith cannot always be tested through rigid secular logic or documentary proof and that longstanding continuity of belief deserves legal recognition where corroborated by historical circumstances.

Final directions of the court

The High Court ultimately:

• declared the religious character of the disputed site to be Bhojshala, a temple dedicated to Goddess Saraswati;
• recognised the site as a Sanskrit learning centre associated with Raja Bhoj;
• quashed the 2003 ASI arrangement permitting namaz at the site;
• directed the Union Government and the ASI to formulate arrangements for administration and management of the temple and Sanskrit learning centre;
• clarified that the ASI would continue exercising overall statutory control over the protected monument;
• and observed that the Muslim community may apply for allotment of alternative land for construction of a mosque in Dhar district.

The Bench further stated:

“Every Government has the constitutional obligation to ensure preservation and protection of not only the ancient monuments and structures including temples of archaeological and historical importance, but also of sanctum sanctorum as well as the deity of spiritual importance. There is a constitutional duty even to sanction funds for providing basic amenities to pilgrims, proper arrangements for shelter places, maintenance of law and order and the preservation of purity and pristine character of the deity. We have noted the continuity of hindu worship at the site through regulated over time has never been extinguished. We record finding that historical literature placed established that the character of the disputed area was Bhojshala as a Centre of Sanskrit learning associated with Raja Bhoj of Parmar dynasty and the literature and architectural reference including those connected with the period of Raja Bhoj indicate the existence of temple dedicated to the goddess Saraswati at Dhar.” (Para 210)

Why the judgment will matter far beyond Bhojshala

The Bhojshala judgment is likely to become one of the most consequential religious-site rulings in India after the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya verdict, not merely, because of what it decided, but because of the legal framework, it normalises and expands. The judgment represents a significant moment in the evolution of Indian constitutional jurisprudence on contested religious spaces, where courts are increasingly being called upon to adjudicate centuries-old historical, theological and civilisational disputes through the language of archaeology, faith, continuity of worship and constitutional law.

At the heart of the ruling lies a judicial methodology that goes far beyond the facts of Bhojshala itself. The High Court explicitly imported and applied core principles from the Ayodhya judgment — particularly the reliance on “preponderance of probabilities”, continuity of worship, archaeological interpretation, and the survival of religious endowments despite destruction of structures or idols. In doing so, the Court has effectively reinforced and expanded a legal template through which competing historical claims over religious sites may increasingly be litigated and judicially resolved.

The judgment is particularly significant because it elevates archaeological evidence to a position of extraordinary constitutional and evidentiary importance. The Court repeatedly treated the ASI report as a highly persuasive and technically authoritative document capable of determining not merely architectural history, but the religious character and historical evolution of the site itself. Although the Court formally acknowledged that expert reports are not conclusive, the structure of the judgment demonstrates that the ASI findings became the backbone of almost every major conclusion ultimately reached by the Bench.

This growing judicial centrality of archaeology is likely to have implications far beyond Bhojshala. The ruling strengthens the idea that excavation reports, inscriptions, iconography, architectural fragments and material remain can decisively shape constitutional adjudication concerning religious identity and historical memory. In practice, it signals a judiciary increasingly willing to reconstruct medieval histories through archaeological interpretation and then attach contemporary legal consequences to those reconstructions.

Equally significant is the Court’s treatment of continuity of worship. The Bench repeatedly emphasised that Hindu worship at the site had “never been extinguished”, even if regulated or interrupted over time. This formulation mirrors a crucial aspect of the Ayodhya framework: that religious continuity may survive political conquest, structural alteration or physical destruction. The judgment therefore deepens the doctrinal move away from viewing religious disputes purely as questions of title and possession, and toward a broader inquiry into historical faith, devotional memory and civilisational continuity.

The ruling may consequently influence future litigation concerning other disputed religious sites where arguments are framed around claims of interrupted worship, historical destruction or continuity of sacred identity despite architectural transformation.

At the same time, the judgment raises serious constitutional, factual and secularism-related concerns. The Court repeatedly entered deeply partisan and contested theological and historical terrain, particularly while discussing the relationship between Hinduism and Jainism. Its observation that Jainism is “a branch of Hinduism”, supported through references to personal law statutes such as the Hindu Marriage Act and Hindu Succession Act, is likely to invite substantial criticism from constitutional scholars, historians and members of the Jain community. Critics are likely to argue that civil statutory classification for limited legislative purposes cannot automatically determine independent religious identity or theological distinctiveness.

The judgment also raises larger concerns regarding the role of courts in resolving historical controversies that are often shaped by fragmentary evidence, competing interpretations and politically charged narratives. By relying heavily on bodies like the ASI that are neither independent nor autonomous, the kind of “literature, inscriptions and archaeological reconstruction” that the ASI has indulged in without the expertise of subject experts –that too, to determine the “religious character” of a centuries-old structure—is seriously questionable. The Court has moved the judiciary further into the terrain of subjective adjudication — an area where legal institutions may struggle with methodological and (absence of expertise) limitations.

Another critical aspect of the ruling is its treatment of waqf doctrine and mosque status. The Court concluded that no valid waqf existed because there was insufficient evidence showing dedication of the property by a lawful waqif. It further suggested that a mosque constructed upon a pre-existing Hindu religious structure could not acquire legitimacy in the absence of valid waqf dedication. This reasoning and subsequent conclusion is inherently problematic. Besides, it could have repercussions on future litigation involving mosque structures standing over sites claimed to have earlier religious histories.

Importantly, the judgment also reflects the continuing constitutional afterlife of the Ayodhya verdict. Ayodhya was initially presented by many as a singular and exceptional resolution to an unusually complex dispute. However, judgments such as Bhojshala indicate that the legal principles evolved in Ayodhya are now becoming part of a broader and expanding jurisprudential framework governing religious-site litigation across India.

The Bhojshala ruling therefore marks more than a adjudication of a long-running dispute in Dhar. It signals the consolidation of a new judicial approach in which courts are increasingly prepared to engage with questions of untested sacred geography and ‘historical grievance’ through constitutional adjudication. This kind of approach is unlikely to be healthy for a modern constitutional approach that is required to lean not on majoritarian contestation of historical fact –like in Faizabad-Ayodhya but on a sober evaluation of all aspects of such engendered conflicts.

The complete judgment may be read below:

Related:

Ayodhya, January 22: Growing influence of religion in state & society matter of disquiet say 65 former civil servants

Babri-Ayodhya verdict: Will appeal for peace apply to Hindutva hardliners in future?

Reading SC order on Ayodhya: Condemn the Sin but Concede to Sinners

Political dimensions of Ayodhya verdict

Ayodhya Verdict: Has Faith Prevailed Over Justice?

The post Bhojshala Judgment: MP High Court declares Dhar site a Saraswati Temple, ends Namaz rights at complex appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The paper proceeds in four major movements. First, it situates Baghdadi biographically, tracing his formation from an obscure religious student in Baghdad through his radicalisation at Camp Bucca and his eventual ascension to the leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Second, it dissects the theological architecture of his ideology, identifying six primary pillars: the absolutism of divine sovereignty (hakimiyyah), the weaponisation of excommunication (takfir), the hegemonic caliphate claim, apocalyptic eschatology, ultra-literalist hermeneutics, and sectarian hatred. Third, it traces the intellectual genealogy of these doctrines from Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood through Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Baghdadi’s own synthesis. Fourth, it proposes a comprehensive Islamic humanist response grounded in the higher objectives of Islamic law (maqasid al-sharia), the primacy of reason (aql), contextual Quranic hermeneutics, and the recovery of pluralist and humanitarian traditions within the faith.

The Crisis of Authority

When Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri mounted the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul on the last Friday of June 2014 and announced that he was henceforth to be known as Caliph Ibrahim — Commander of the Faithful — the act registered across the Muslim world as something more disturbing than mere political theatre. It was, in the first instance, a breath-taking claim of religious authority, one that had not been formally asserted since the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. Yet it was also, and more fundamentally, a theological provocation of the gravest kind: the assertion that God’s sovereignty on earth could be concentrated in the person of one man, backed by a private army, and enforced through mass violence, slavery, and public execution.

Baghdadi was not, as some early commentary suggested, a simple warlord who had stumbled into religious rhetoric. He was, at heart, a theologian — one who had earned a doctorate in Islamic studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad and who understood, with considerable precision, the power of religious language to mobilise, to legitimise, and to sanction violence. His message was internally consistent: divine law demanded obedience, the existing Muslim world had apostatised by submitting to human-made governance, and the sword was the only instrument adequate to the scale of that apostasy. In this reading, cruelty was not a deviation from his theology — it was the very expression of it.

To defeat the ideology that Baghdadi represented — and that continues to inspire violence across the world even after his death in a United States Special Forces raid in October 2019 — it is necessary to understand it from the inside. This demands something more rigorous than a catalogue of atrocities or a chronology of military defeats. It demands a sustained theological engagement: an examination of the doctrinal claims upon which the Islamic State’s authority rested, a tracing of their intellectual genealogy, and a systematic refutation grounded in the very tradition that Baghdadi claimed to represent.

That refutation is the business of this paper. It proceeds from a foundational conviction of Islamic humanism: that the Quranic tradition, rightly understood through its historical contexts, its ethical objectives, and its overarching commitment to mercy and justice, is not merely consistent with the dignity and freedom of every human being but actively demands it. The Quran’s insistence that God sent the Prophet Muhammad as a mercy to all the worlds — and not as a commissioning agent for a caliphate of terror — is the ultimate theological rebuttal to everything Baghdadi built.

Historical Background: The Making of a Caliph

Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri (Baghdadi’s real name) was born in 1971 in the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad, into a family that claimed descent from the tribe of Quraysh — the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. That genealogical claim, contested by many scholars who found no independent verification of it, would later become central to his bid for caliphal legitimacy. His early religious formation took place within the Sunni Muslim communities of central Iraq, and he proceeded to the Islamic University of Baghdad, where he eventually completed a doctorate in Quranic studies with a concentration in jurisprudence and Islamic history. This academic background was unusual among jihadist leaders and afforded him a scholarly credibility that figures such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had conspicuously lacked.

His radicalisation appears to have accelerated dramatically in the years following the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The dismantling of the Iraqi state, the de-Baathification of the army and civil service, and the emergence of virulent sectarianism between Sunni and Shia communities created conditions of extreme political and social dislocation that extremist ideologies were uniquely well positioned to exploit. Al-Badri was detained by American forces in early 2004 and held at Camp Bucca, a detention facility in southern Iraq that has been described by former inmates and intelligence analysts alike as an unwitting incubator for the very extremism the United States sought to suppress. Thousands of jihadist militants, former Baathist officers, and would-be ideologues were held together in conditions that facilitated networking, indoctrination, and the forging of alliances that would later prove decisive in the formation of the Islamic State.

Released in mid-2004, al-Badri — now increasingly operating under the alias Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — rose through the ranks of the organisation that would eventually become the Islamic State of Iraq. He served as a sharia adjudicator and propagandist, ensuring that the group’s activities were clothed in religious legitimacy. Following the deaths of senior leaders in a United States raid in 2010, Baghdadi was elevated to the leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq. He proved a more capable administrator, strategist, and propagandist than his predecessors. He exploited the civil war in Syria — which erupted in 2011 — to expand his organisation’s reach, dispatching fighters across the border and eventually attempting to absorb the rival jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra under his authority. This manoeuvre brought him into direct conflict with the central leadership of al-Qaeda, which disowned the Islamic State in February 2014.

The capture of Mosul — Iraq’s second city — in June 2014 provided the dramatic platform for Baghdadi’s caliphal declaration. The subsequent months represented the high-water mark of his movement: at its territorial zenith the Islamic State controlled an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom, spanning parts of Iraq and Syria, governed by Diwans (ministries), sharia courts, a tax system, and an oil revenue stream. It attracted foreign fighters from dozens of countries and produced multilingual propaganda of considerable sophistication. The physical caliphate was progressively dismantled by military campaigns between 2014 and 2019; Baghdadi himself died on 26 October 2019 during a Special Operations Forces raid in Idlib Province, Syria. His death, however, did not extinguish the ideological project he had embodied.

The Theological Pillars of Baghdadi’s Project

Baghdadi’s ideology was not improvised from raw ambition. It was constructed with theological deliberateness upon six interlocking doctrinal pillars. Understanding each pillar in detail is essential not merely for analytical purposes but for the practical work of refutation: an ideology can only be effectively dismantled where it stands, and it stands on specific claims.

The concept of hakimiyyah — the absolute sovereignty of God — was the ideological keystone of Baghdadi’s entire project. He did not originate the concept; he inherited it, primarily from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb, whose prison writings of the late 1950s and early 1960s had transformed it from a theological observation into a revolutionary programme. In Qutb’s formulation, the recognition that God alone possesses the right to legislate entails a corresponding rejection of all human-made legal systems as acts of idolatry — specifically the unforgivable sin of associating partners with God (shirk).

Baghdadi absorbed this framework entirely. In his speeches and in the extensive propaganda apparatus of the Islamic State — including the English-language magazine Dabiq and its Arabic counterpart Rumiyah — the contrast between divine law and the corrupt governance of existing Muslim states was presented as absolute, binary, and requiring violent resolution. Any Muslim who voted in an election, accepted employment in a secular state bureaucracy, served in a national army, or carried a state-issued passport was, in this reading, guilty of participating in a system of collective apostasy. This radical extension of hakimiyyah provided the theological foundation for what proved to be the Islamic State’s most audacious and destructive innovation: the systematic murder of fellow Sunni Muslims — imams, teachers, civil servants, police officers — on the grounds that they were apostates from the true faith.

The Islamic humanist response to hakimiyyah does not deny the sovereignty of God but challenges the inference that Baghdadi drew from it. The Quran’s own political ethics are far more complex, contextual, and attentive to human welfare than the hakimiyyah doctrine allows. Governance in the Quranic tradition is grounded in consultation (shura), justice (adl), and the protection of those under authority — values that are inconsistent with the dictatorship Baghdadi exercised.

From the absolute sovereignty of God flowed Baghdadi’s second and most lethal pillar: the industrialisation of takfir, the practice of declaring a Muslim to be an apostate and therefore — in the most extreme reading of Islamic law — a legitimate target for violence. Excommunication has a long and contested history within Islamic theology. Classical jurisprudence treated it as a grave legal matter, surrounded by procedural safeguards, requiring extraordinary certainty of proof, and generally avoided precisely because of the civil strife (fitna) it inevitably generated. The Prophet himself is reported to have warned his followers in the gravest terms against recklessly accusing their brothers and sisters in faith of unbelief.

Baghdadi’s organisation swept aside these safeguards with systematic ruthlessness. It did not merely declare Yazidis or Shia Muslims to be unbelievers — a horrifying enough stance that provided the theological licence for the Yazidi genocide and the massacre of Shia civilians — it extended takfir to any Sunni Muslim who refused to pledge allegiance to the caliphate, who participated in the political processes of existing states, or who belonged to rival jihadist organisations. The Open Letter to al-Baghdadi, signed by more than 120 leading Muslim scholars from around the world in September 2014, addressed this doctrine directly and at length, citing the Prophetic injunction that any person who declares the shahada — the testimony of faith — cannot be killed except for specific, legally determined violations. The letter emphasised that mainstream Sunni jurisprudence imposed such demanding conditions on excommunication that it could not legitimately be used to justify mass violence of the kind the Islamic State was perpetrating.

Takfirism, in the Islamic humanist analysis, is not merely a legal error; it is a theological inversion. It transforms the humility before God that authentic faith demands into a presumptuous claim to divine judgment, placing finite human beings in the seat of infinite divine authority. The Quran reserves final judgment on matters of faith and apostasy to God alone, and the tradition of Islamic scholarship has, with near unanimity, insisted that this reservation be respected.

The third pillar of Baghdadi’s theology was his claim to the caliphate itself. In classical Sunni political thought, the caliphate was the office of the Prophet’s successor as guardian of the Muslim community — an office with stringent requirements of scholarly learning, moral character, lineage, and, critically, communal consensus (ijma). Baghdadi claimed all of these, and upon his 2014 declaration in Mosul, demanded that every Muslim in the world pledge allegiance to him, on pain of spiritual — and ultimately physical — consequences.

The claim rested on two foundations, each deeply contested. First, Baghdadi asserted genealogical descent from the Quraysh, the Prophet’s tribe — a traditional caliphal requirement. His family did indeed make such a claim, but no independent scholarly verification was offered, and many scholars dismissed it as opportunistic fabrication designed to satisfy a formal requirement without substantive merit. Second, he pointed to the territorial control exercised by the Islamic State as practical evidence that a functional Islamic state — with courts, taxation, and defence — had been established, meeting the material conditions for a valid caliphate.

Both claims were systematically demolished by Muslim scholars. The Open Letter pointed out that a caliphate requires the consensus of the global Muslim community expressed through its recognised scholarly leadership — a consensus that was conspicuously absent from Baghdadi’s unilateral self-appointment. Historical precedent was equally unhelpful to Baghdadi: The Rashidun caliphs were selected through deliberation among the Prophet’s closest companions, not through military conquest and self-proclamation. The very concept of a caliphate that demanded global submission under threat of death contradicted the historical reality of the classical caliphate, which had always been characterised by a degree of political pluralism and which had never claimed theological authority over individual conscience.

The fourth pillar of Baghdadi’s theology was its apocalyptic character, and it is in some respects the most psychologically powerful and analytically interesting of the six. Unlike al-Qaeda, which concentrated its justifications for violence on political grievances against Western imperialism and apostate regimes, the Islamic State was animated by a conviction that it was not merely fighting a political war but fulfilling divine prophecy regarding the end of time. Specific hadith traditions regarding a final battle between the forces of true Islam and the forces of unbelief — located in the Syrian town of Dabiq — were not merely cited but made constitutive of the movement’s identity. The choice of Dabiq as the title of the English-language propaganda magazine was calculated and deliberate.

This eschatological framing was extraordinarily powerful as a recruitment tool precisely because it removed the ideology from the realm of rational deliberation. If one’s violence is understood not as a political act subject to human evaluation but as a divinely scripted role in the final drama of history, then conventional arguments — about proportionality, civilian casualties, or legal constraints — become irrelevant by definition. Setbacks and defeats could be reframed as preludes to prophesied martyrdom and ultimate divine vindication. The more the world opposed the Islamic State, the more its followers could perceive themselves as inhabiting the role of the persecuted righteous awaiting cosmic vindication.

The Islamic humanist response to apocalyptic theology is not to deny the eschatological dimension of Islamic faith but to insist, with the weight of classical scholarship, that the relationship between sacred history and human action is characterised by responsibility, restraint, and mercy — not by the nihilistic acceleration of violence in the hope of triggering divine intervention. The classical Islamic tradition approached apocalyptic hadith with considerable interpretive caution, recognising their metaphorical and contextual dimensions.

The fifth pillar of Baghdadi’s project was its hermeneutical method: a rigid literalism that insisted on reading Quranic verses and hadith in isolation from their historical contexts, their ethical objectives, the diversity of jurisprudential opinion within the tradition, and the fundamental principle that the Quran must be understood holistically rather than through selective extraction. This method — characterised by critics as the cut-and-paste approach to scripture — allowed Baghdadi’s organisation to cite individual verses in support of practices that the weight of Islamic scholarship had consistently regarded as forbidden or impermissible.

The most egregious example was the treatment of the so-called Verse of the Sword (9:5), which commands fighting against polytheists who have broken their treaties. Baghdadi’s ideologues cited this verse as a universal, permanent mandate for offensive warfare against all non-Muslims and all Muslims who refused submission. They insisted that it abrogated the hundreds of verses commanding peace, mercy, forgiveness, and equitable treatment of non-Muslims. Classical Islamic scholarship, by contrast, had consistently read this verse in its specific historical context — the breaking of treaties by the Meccan polytheists — and had explicitly rejected the claim that it constituted a universal licence for aggression. The Quranic injunction in verse 2:190 — to fight those who fight you but not to transgress — had never been abrogated in mainstream scholarship; it expressed a foundational ethical constraint on the conduct of armed conflict.

Beyond this specific misreading, Baghdadi’s theology required the erasure of fourteen centuries of Islamic intellectual history. The sophisticated legal reasoning of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence, the philosophical contributions of figures such as al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd, the spiritual depth of Sufi thought, the hermeneutical richness of classical tafsir — all of this was dismissed as innovation (bidah) and deviation from the pristine original. What remained was a radically impoverished version of the faith: hollowed of its cultural and intellectual complexity, stripped of its ethical nuance, and weaponised for the purposes of domination and violence.

The sixth and final pillar of Baghdadi’s theology was its profound sectarianism. The Shia Muslim community was portrayed not as a divergent school within the broad family of Islam but as a category of existential enemy deserving extermination. Sufi shrines were demolished. Yazidi communities were subjected to genocidal violence. Christian communities, which had maintained a continuous presence in Iraq and Syria for nearly two thousand years, were expelled or murdered. This sectarianism drew heavily from the most extreme strands of Wahhabi polemics against alternative Islamic traditions, intensified by Zarqawi’s particular fury against Shia Muslims and translated into a systematic programme of ethnic and religious cleansing.

The Quranic basis for this sectarianism was, to put it charitably, threadbare. The Quran repeatedly affirms the diversity of human communities as a divine creation to be respected (49:13) and commands justice even toward those with whom one is in conflict (5:8). The Prophet Muhammad’s own practice — including the Covenant of Medina, which guaranteed the rights of Jewish, Christian, and pagan communities alongside Muslims — provided a direct historical rebuttal to the Islamic State’s model of religious uniformity enforced by violence.

Intellectual Genealogy: From Qutb to the Caliphate

Baghdadi did not construct his theology in isolation. He was the heir to a specific intellectual tradition that had been developing within Sunni Islamism for most of the twentieth century, and his own particular synthesis represented the culmination of a trajectory that can be traced with reasonable precision.

The foundational figure in that trajectory is Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian literary critic and Muslim Brotherhood theorist who was executed by the Nasser government in 1966. Qutb’s most influential work, Milestones, written during his imprisonment in the late 1950s, advanced a revolutionary reading of the concept of hakimiyyah that broke decisively with the gradualist, social-reform orientation of the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna. Qutb argued that modern Muslim societies — including ostensibly Muslim states such as Egypt — had fallen into a state of pre-Islamic ignorance so profound that only a vanguard of true believers, physically and spiritually separated from the corrupt society, could wage the violent jihad necessary to overthrow the existing order and establish God’s sovereignty. It is difficult to overstate the influence of this text on subsequent generations of jihadist ideologues; Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Baghdadi himself all drew directly from Qutb’s conceptual vocabulary.

The immediate intellectual channel through which Qutb’s ideas reached Baghdadi’s generation was the Jordanian-Palestinian scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, whose extensive writings from prison elaborated a rigorous Salafi creed that combined Wahhabi purism with the revolutionary political conclusions of Qutbism. Al-Maqdisi’s most important contribution was his systematic application of the charge of apostasy to Muslim rulers who governed by human-made law — an application that radicalised the takfir doctrine beyond even Qutb’s formulation. Al-Maqdisi became the mentor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who founded the organisation in Iraq that would eventually evolve into the Islamic State. Zarqawi added to this inheritance a particular ferocity toward Shia Muslims, whom he regarded not merely as theologically deviant but as agents of a cosmic conspiracy against Sunni Islam.

Baghdadi, rising through the ranks of Zarqawi’s successor organisation following his mentor’s death in a United States airstrike in 2006, inherited this entire theological toolkit. He was, however, more systematically educated than his predecessors, and he gave a more scholarly, jurisprudential veneer to the same core doctrines. Where Zarqawi had been a violent street-level operative who acquired his theology opportunistically, Baghdadi was a trained religious scholar who could deploy the classical categories of Islamic jurisprudence with the facility of someone who had spent years immersed in the tradition. This credential was essential to the Islamic State’s claim to be not merely a jihadist organisation but the legitimate restoration of the caliphate.

The wider Wahhabi tradition also contributed, more ambiguously, to this intellectual inheritance. The teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) — emphasising strict monotheism, the prohibition of innovation in religious practice, and the legitimacy of violence against those declared polytheists — provided an ideological arsenal that Baghdadi’s organisation drew upon selectively. Saudi-funded institutions, mosques, and madrasas had disseminated this tradition across the Muslim world since the 1970s oil boom, creating a doctrinal environment in which Baghdadi’s particular syntheses could find receptive audiences. The Saudi religious establishment itself condemned the Islamic State as a deviant movement, and mainstream Salafi scholars characterised it as a modern manifestation of the ancient Kharijite heresy — a sect that had been condemned by the Prophet’s own companions for its extremism. But this condemnation sat awkwardly alongside the structural role that Wahhabi educational institutions had played in creating the conditions for Baghdadi’s rise.

The intellectual genealogy is therefore clear in its broad outlines: The Muslim Brotherhood’s political vision, radicalised by Qutb’s revolutionary hakimiyyah; al-Maqdisi’s systematic Salafi jurisprudence of apostasy; Zarqawi’s sectarian fury; and the wider context of Wahhabi purism — all synthesised by a trained scholar who understood how to dress revolutionary violence in the authoritative language of classical Islamic jurisprudence. Each stage in this genealogy represented an intensification of the rejection of mainstream Islamic authority and a corresponding embrace of violence as the primary instrument of theological purification.

Socio-Political Conditions Enabling the Rise of the Islamic State

Theology does not operate in a social vacuum. The extraordinary resonance of Baghdadi’s message — which attracted foreign fighters from dozens of countries and inspired attacks across four continents — cannot be explained by doctrinal analysis alone. The Islamic State’s rise was simultaneously a product of specific socio-political conditions and an exploitation of them.

The American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the chaotic, ill-planned occupation that followed, created the foundational conditions for the Islamic State’s emergence. The dissolution of the Iraqi army and the de-Baathification of the civil service threw hundreds of thousands of trained, armed, and profoundly alienated Sunni men into a social order from which they were now excluded. The subsequent political arrangements, which concentrated power in Shia-dominated governments that were widely perceived as Iranian proxies, intensified Sunni grievances to the point of desperation. Baghdadi understood these grievances with the clarity of personal experience and made their exploitation the centrepiece of his recruitment strategy.

The Syrian civil war, which erupted in 2011 following the Assad government’s violent repression of peaceful protests, provided the Islamic State with both a territorial base and a continuous flow of recruits radicalised by the experience of watching civilian populations subjected to barrel bombs, chemical weapons, and starvation sieges by a regime that called itself the guardian of Arab nationalism. The combination of political marginalisation, economic collapse, and a sense of civilisational humiliation provided what Baghdadi’s propagandists accurately identified as fertile soil for their message of restoration, dignity, and divine vengeance.

Beyond the immediate regional context, the global appeal of the Islamic State’s message pointed to structural conditions that extended far beyond Iraq and Syria. Economic marginalisation, social exclusion, the experience of Islamophobia, and the crisis of identity among Muslim minorities in Western societies all contributed to the vulnerability of young people in Birmingham, Brussels, and Beirut alike to recruitment narratives that promised belonging, purpose, and significance. The Islamic humanist response to this reality must therefore be not merely theological but socio-economic: extremism flourishes in conditions of hopelessness, and those conditions cannot be addressed by fatwas alone.

The Islamic Humanist Critique

Islamic humanism is not an import from the Western Enlightenment awkwardly grafted onto an alien religious tradition. It is a recovery of modes of thought, ethical commitments, and interpretive practices that have deep roots within the Islamic tradition itself — in the classical rationalist theology of the Mutazilites and the Maturidis, in the philosophical humanism of the Andalusian Golden Age, in the legal theory of scholars such as al-Ghazali and al-Shatibi, and in the prophetic practice of a Muhammad who described himself as sent to perfect noble character. Against Baghdadi’s theology of power and death, Islamic humanism offers a theology of mercy and life.

The most powerful analytical instrument that Islamic humanism offers against Baghdadi’s literalism is the framework of maqasid al-sharia — the higher objectives of Islamic law — developed most systematically by the Andalusian scholar Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi in the fourteenth century but rooted in centuries of earlier jurisprudential reflection. This framework argues that the Sharia is not an end in itself but a means to specific human goods: the protection of life, the protection of intellect, the protection of faith, the protection of lineage and social order, and the protection of property. Any legal ruling, any interpretation of scripture, any exercise of political authority that demonstrably undermines these goods is, on this account, a false interpretation — regardless of the literal support it can muster from individual texts.

When the maqasid framework is applied to the practices of the Islamic State, the verdict is unambiguous and devastating. Mass executions destroy life. The suppression of education and critical thought destroys intellect. The imposition of a singular, totalitarian theology by violence destroys freedom of conscience in matters of faith. The systematic looting of minority communities and the destruction of the cultural heritage of human civilisation — including the deliberate dynamiting of ancient Assyrian ruins at Nimrud and the burning of the Mosul Library — destroys the accumulated property and intellectual heritage of humanity. The Islamic State was not, on any serious reading of the maqasid tradition, implementing Islamic law; it was systematically violating every value that Islamic law exists to protect.

The Quranic tradition places extraordinary emphasis on the exercise of reason. The Arabic root aql — denoting the faculty of rational comprehension — appears in various forms dozens of times in the Quran, almost always in the context of a divine invitation to observe, reflect, reason, and understand. The Quran repeatedly chastises those who follow custom and inherited authority without thinking for themselves and praises those who use their rational faculties to perceive the signs of God in creation and in human history. This Quranic rationalism was developed into sophisticated philosophical and theological traditions by scholars from al-Kindi and al-Farabi in the early medieval period through to Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and his commentaries on Aristotle, which profoundly shaped European scholasticism.

Baghdadi’s ideology was built on the systematic suppression of this rationalist tradition. It demanded blind obedience (taqlid) to a single, politically driven interpretation, condemned philosophical inquiry as heresy, and treated the exercise of independent legal reasoning (ijtihad) with the same suspicion it reserved for all human intellectual autonomy. The Islamic humanist response revives the Maturidi theological tradition’s insistence that good and evil are not merely arbitrary divine commands but realities that can be discerned through human reason — that cruelty and injustice are wrong not merely because God forbids them but because they contradict the nature of a rational moral universe that God has created. If an action is inherently cruel, it cannot be the will of a just God; and if an interpretation of scripture mandates cruelty, the fault lies with the interpretation, not with the God it purports to serve.

Against Baghdadi’s monolithic theocracy, Islamic humanism opposes a tradition of principled pluralism that is as old as the Prophet himself. The Covenant of Medina — the constitutional document established by Muhammad shortly after his migration from Mecca — created a multi-religious community of Muslims, Jews, and pagan Arabs with shared rights, shared obligations, and a shared commitment to mutual defence. This document is not a marginal curiosity of early Islamic history; it is a foundational precedent for the proposition that a polity guided by Islamic values can accommodate and protect the religious diversity of its members rather than demanding their conformity.

The historical record of the classical Islamic caliphate, for all its complexities and failures, is broadly consistent with this pluralist precedent. Non-Muslim communities — Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and others — lived under Islamic governance with a degree of legal autonomy and religious freedom that was, by the standards of the medieval world, considerable. The dhimmi system, which imposed certain civic disabilities on non-Muslims, is not defensible by contemporary standards of human rights; but it is radically different from the genocidal elimination of religious diversity that the Islamic State practised. Baghdadi’s model was not a restoration of the historical caliphate; it was a totalitarian innovation that had no serious precedent in Islamic political history.

At the ethical core of the Quranic message lies an affirmation of the sanctity of every human life that is among the most powerful moral statements in the world’s religious literature. The Quran declares that to kill one innocent soul is as if one killed all of humanity, and to save one soul is as if one saved all of humanity (5:32). This principle — cited in the Open Letter to al-Baghdadi as one of the central refutations of the Islamic State’s theology — reflects a Quranic anthropology that treats every human life as of infinite worth. It is complemented by the equally powerful declaration that God has honoured the children of Adam (17:70) — a statement of universal human dignity that applies to every human being regardless of faith, ethnicity, or political allegiance.

The theology of human dignity (karamah) that flows from these verses provides the most fundamental Islamic humanist rebuttal to Baghdadi. A theological system that produces mass graves, public beheadings, the enslaved auction of Yazidi women, and the deliberate targeting of mosques full of worshippers has not merely made errors of legal interpretation; it has committed the deepest possible betrayal of the faith it claims to represent. The Quran’s God is not the tyrant that Baghdadi worshipped; the Quran’s Islam is not the cult of death that Baghdadi built.

One of Baghdadi’s most consequential misappropriations was of the concept of jihad itself — a term whose Arabic root denotes effort, struggle, and striving that has been consistently understood by mainstream Islamic scholarship to encompass a wide spectrum of spiritual, moral, intellectual, and social endeavours, with armed conflict representing a specialised subset governed by strict ethical conditions. The inner jihad against one’s own moral failures, the intellectual jihad of scholarship and inquiry, the social jihad of working for justice and the welfare of the community — these were the primary forms of jihad in the understanding of scholars such as al-Ghazali, whose Ihya Ulum al-Din constitutes perhaps the most sustained exploration of the spiritual life in the Islamic tradition.

Even armed jihad, in the classical tradition, was understood as a defensive instrument, subject to conditions of proportionality, protection of non-combatants, and declaration by legitimate political authority — conditions that the Islamic State’s campaigns of aggressive, indiscriminate violence violated in every particular. Reclaiming jihad for Islamic humanism means restoring its primary meaning as a commitment to justice, moral discipline, and social reform, and insisting that armed struggle, where it is permissible at all, must be conducted within the ethical limits that the tradition has always imposed.

Quranic Hermeneutical Counter-Arguments

The most direct response to Baghdadi’s abuse of scripture is a rigorous, contextual hermeneutics — a systematic approach to the interpretation of the Quran and hadith that reads texts in their historical, linguistic, and ethical contexts and refuses the de-contextualising literalism upon which the Islamic State’s ideology depended.

Classical Islamic hermeneutics has always insisted on the importance of the occasions or causes of revelation in understanding Quranic verses. This principle holds that the meaning and application of a given verse cannot be understood apart from the specific historical circumstances in response to which it was revealed. The Prophet’s companions and their successors preserved extensive traditions about these circumstances precisely because they understood that without them, verses could be misapplied in ways that were both historically erroneous and ethically disastrous.

Baghdadi’s organisation systematically ignored these contextual traditions. Verses revealed in the context of specific military conflicts during the early Islamic period were universalised into permanent, global mandates. Verses addressing the particular situation of the Prophet’s community in Medina, surrounded by hostile powers and subject to constant attack, were stripped of their situational character and treated as timeless directives applicable to twenty-first-century conditions that bore no resemblance whatsoever to seventh-century Arabia. The humanist hermeneutical response insists that this de-contextualisation is not merely a scholarly error but a form of textual violence — a violation of the integrity of the revealed text and a betrayal of the tradition of scholarship that exists precisely to prevent such violations.

Baghdadi’s organisation treated certain verses as abrogating — that is, annulling — a wide range of other verses that enjoined peace, mercy, and equitable treatment of non-Muslims. This abrogation (naskh) argument, in its extreme form, claimed that a handful of so-called sword verses from the later Medinan period of the Quran had cancelled out the peaceable and pluralist verses from the Meccan period and the earlier Medinan period. This claim is not only historically unfounded — classical scholars disagreed significantly about the scope and application of abrogation, and many rejected broad claims of the kind that Baghdadi’s ideologues advanced — it is hermeneutically incoherent.

The Quran begins every chapter but one with the formula: In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate. These are not decorative formulas; they are programmatic statements about the character of the God in whose name the text speaks and about the spirit in which it should be read. The Quran describes the Prophet Muhammad as a mercy to all the worlds (21:107) — not to Muslims alone, not to those who agreed with him, but to all created beings. The divine names that recur most frequently throughout the Quran are those of mercy, compassion, and generosity. Any interpretive method that reads these data as subordinate to a handful of contextually specific verses of warfare is not merely making a legal error; it is inverting the entire ethical orientation of the text.

The most significant institutional expression of Islamic humanist hermeneutics in response to Baghdadi’s ideology was the Open Letter to al-Baghdadi, released in September 2014 and eventually signed by more than 120 leading Muslim scholars from across the world. This document was remarkable in several respects. It was written not in the language of Western liberalism but in the classical Arabic of traditional Islamic scholarship, engaging Baghdadi on his own terminological and textual ground. It was not a political declaration but a fatwa-length juridical refutation, working through the Islamic State’s specific claims in detail and demonstrating, with copious references to the Quran, the hadith, and the classical jurisprudential tradition, that each of those claims violated established Islamic legal and ethical principles.

The letter addressed, in turn: the impermissibility of declaring fellow Muslims apostates without meeting the stringent conditions of classical jurisprudence; the requirement that a legitimate caliph be chosen by a council of recognised scholars rather than self-appointed; the absolute prohibition on the killing of non-combatants, clergy, women, and children in armed conflict; the illegitimacy of enslaving people or selling them in markets; the obligation to treat members of other faiths with justice and respect; and the dangerous misuse of the abrogation argument to dismiss vast portions of the Quranic ethical teaching. The letter concluded by warning Baghdadi that he had transformed Islam into a religion of harshness and brutality and that his actions constituted a grave offence against the faith, against Muslims, and against all of humanity.

The letter was not without its limitations. Some critics noted that it represented the perspective of established religious institutions whose authority the Islamic State had already rejected, and that it was unlikely to persuade committed adherents of the ideology. Others pointed out that the letter did not challenge the underlying assumptions of Salafi theology as thoroughly as a fully humanist critique would require. Nevertheless, as a demonstration that the Islamic State’s theology was not — as its propaganda claimed — the authentic expression of mainstream Islamic scholarship, but rather its radical repudiation, the letter remains an invaluable document.

Strategies for Ideological Defeat

The defeat of Baghdadi’s ideological legacy requires a multi-dimensional strategy that operates simultaneously on theological, educational, political, social, and psychological registers. No single approach is sufficient; each is necessary but none alone is adequate to the scale of the challenge.

The foundation of any effective counter-strategy must be a sustained programme of theological deconstruction — systematic, rigorous, publicly accessible refutation of the specific doctrinal claims upon which Baghdadi’s ideology rested. The Open Letter to al-Baghdadi provides an excellent template, but its impact has been limited by its accessibility only to those already engaged with classical Islamic scholarship. What is needed is a programme of translation, popularisation, and dissemination that brings the scholarly refutation of takfirism, false caliphal claims, and hermeneutical distortion to the widest possible audience within the Muslim world.

This requires investment — financial, institutional, and reputational — in the production of counter-theological materials that are both academically rigorous and accessible to non-specialist audiences. Islamic universities, particularly institutions such as al-Azhar in Cairo, Deoband in India, and Zaytuna College in the United States, have a crucial role to play. So do national religious establishments in Muslim-majority countries, provided they command sufficient credibility among the populations they seek to influence. The message must come from voices that are recognisably part of the tradition — not from governments seeking to weaponise religion for political purposes, and not from Western actors whose interference is likely to be counterproductive.

Baghdadi’s ideology thrived in the conditions created by educational systems that prioritised rote memorisation of religious texts over critical engagement with their meaning, historical context, and ethical implications. Any sustainable strategy for preventing the recurrence of movements like the Islamic State must therefore include a fundamental rethinking of religious education across the Muslim world — and, indeed, in Muslim community institutions in Europe and North America.

Educational reform in this context means moving from indoctrination to inquiry: teaching the diversity of opinion within Islamic jurisprudence rather than presenting a single school’s positions as absolute truth; introducing students to the history of Quranic revelation and the classical tradition of contextual interpretation; developing critical thinking skills that enable young people to evaluate competing claims rather than simply accepting the authority of the most confident voice. The Quran itself repeatedly invites its readers to think, observe, and reflect; an educational system that produces uncritical receivers of a pre-packaged orthodoxy is not Quranic in its spirit, whatever its content.

The curriculum must also reclaim the humanist heritage of Islamic civilisation — the extraordinary flowering of science, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and art that characterised the Abbasid period and the Andalusian Golden Age. Baghdadi’s ideology required the erasure of this heritage because it demonstrated, powerfully and concretely, that Islamic civilisation had been at its most creative, most influential, and most admired by the world when it was engaged in open intellectual exchange rather than self-imposed isolation. Reclaiming that heritage as constitutively Islamic — not as a historical accident that needs to be apologised for or explained away — is an important part of the counter-narrative.

The Islamic State was, among other things, a phenomenon of social media. Its sophisticated multilingual propaganda machine — producing magazines, films, and social media content in English, French, German, Russian, and numerous other languages — enabled it to reach radicalised or radicalisation-vulnerable young people in Birmingham, Brussels, and beyond with a message that was emotionally compelling, aesthetically sophisticated, and attuned to the specific psychological vulnerabilities of its target audience. Defeating that propaganda requires counter-narratives that are equally sophisticated, equally emotionally intelligent, and equally attuned to those vulnerabilities.

Effective counter-narratives must be produced by credible, authentic Muslim voices — not by government information agencies or Western media institutions whose messages will be dismissed by precisely the audience they need to reach. Former members of extremist organisations who have genuinely renounced their involvement and can speak with authority about the gap between the utopia promised by recruitment narratives and the grim reality of life within the Islamic State are particularly valuable voices. So are Muslim scholars, activists, artists, and community leaders who can articulate a vision of Islamic identity that is simultaneously faithful to the tradition and fully engaged with the realities of contemporary life.

The content of effective counter-narratives must also address the specific appeals that extremist recruitment messages make: the promise of belonging and brotherhood, the sense of cosmic significance, the claim to be on the right side of history, the expression of righteous anger at real injustices. Counter-narratives that simply assert that the Islamic State is un-Islamic, without addressing the underlying emotional needs that its recruiting exploits, are unlikely to succeed. Young people need not just theological refutation but alternative sources of meaning, belonging, and purpose.

Ideology does not operate in a vacuum, and counter-ideology alone cannot defeat extremism that is rooted in genuine political grievances. The sectarian marginalisation of Sunni communities in post-2003 Iraq, the Assad government’s mass violence against civilian populations in Syria, the experience of discrimination and social exclusion among Muslim minorities in Western Europe — these were real phenomena, and Baghdadi’s organisation exploited them with considerable skill. Any serious counter-strategy must therefore include advocacy for the political reforms and social investments that address the grievances that extremist movements feed upon.

This means, in the Iraqi and Syrian contexts, advocacy for genuinely inclusive political arrangements that protect the interests of all communities rather than reserving power for one sect or party. It means insisting on accountability for the atrocities committed not only by the Islamic State but by all parties to those conflicts, including state actors. It means supporting civil society organisations, independent media, and cultural institutions in Muslim-majority countries that provide alternatives to both authoritarian governance and extremist ideology. And it means, in Western contexts, opposing the rhetoric and policies of Islamophobia that reinforce the isolation and alienation of Muslim communities and thereby strengthen the recruiting narratives of radical movements.

Sunni-Shia reconciliation is not merely a pious aspiration; it is a strategic necessity for the defeat of extremist movements that depend upon sectarian hatred for their recruitment and their theological justification. The systematic demonisation of Shia Muslims that characterised Baghdadi’s ideology — and that drew upon a tradition of Wahhabi polemics stretching back several centuries — cannot be defeated without a sustained programme of inter-sect dialogue, historical honesty about the origins and instrumentalisation of sectarian divisions, and mutual recognition of the shared ethical commitments that transcend sectarian boundaries.

This is not a project that can be completed quickly, and it cannot be imposed from outside. It requires the willingness of scholars, community leaders, and ordinary believers from both traditions to engage in the difficult, sometimes painful work of confronting historical grievances without allowing those grievances to determine the future. Platforms for intra-Islamic dialogue, jointly sponsored by Sunni and Shia institutions, can play an important role in this process — as can the development of shared theological statements that affirm the common ground of Islamic ethical commitment even in the absence of full doctrinal agreement.

Extremist movements are structurally dependent on patriarchal control: the suppression of women’s agency, the instrumentalisation of women’s bodies as markers of group honour, and the exclusion of women from theological and political authority. Baghdadi’s organisation exemplified this dependence in its most extreme form, reviving the institution of sexual slavery, imposing totalising restrictions on women’s freedom of movement and dress, and excluding women entirely from any role in governance or scholarship.

The Islamic feminist scholarship that has developed powerfully over the past three decades — represented by scholars such as Amina Wadud, Fatima Mernissi, Kecia Ali, and many others — provides both a theological refutation of these practices and an alternative vision of gender relations within an Islamic framework. This scholarship demonstrates, through rigorous engagement with the primary sources, that the Quranic vision of gender relations is characterised by equity, complementarity, and mutual respect rather than by the hierarchy of domination that patriarchal readings have historically imposed. Amplifying these voices, supporting institutions that train women as scholars and religious leaders, and insisting on women’s full participation in the theological work of counter-extremism are all essential elements of a comprehensive humanist response.

The ultimate socio-political answer to Baghdadi’s theology of divine sovereignty enforced by violence is the construction of societies in which political participation is inclusive, governance is accountable, the rule of law protects the rights of all citizens, and peaceful avenues for political reform are genuinely available. This is not to claim that liberal democracy as currently practised in Western societies is the only or the ideal form of Islamic political organisation. It is to insist that the conditions under which extremist ideologies flourish — the closure of peaceful avenues for reform, the concentration of power in unaccountable hands, the systematic exclusion of minority communities — are themselves forms of political injustice that must be addressed if the ideological appeal of violent alternatives is to be diminished.

The promotion of the rule of law, accountable governance, and human rights in Muslim-majority societies is therefore not an imperialist imposition but a demand of Islamic humanism itself — grounded in the Quranic principles of justice (adl), consultation (shura), and the protection of human dignity (karamah) that mainstream Islamic political thought has consistently affirmed. Organisations such as the Cordoba Foundation and scholars such as Abdullahi An-Naim have argued persuasively that these principles are not merely compatible with contemporary human rights standards but that they provided their historical antecedents.

Beyond the Caliphate of Apocalypse

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi built his authority on a theological architecture of extraordinary ambition and equally extraordinary moral depravity. Drawing upon the Qutbist doctrine of divine sovereignty, the classical language of Islamic jurisprudence, the apocalyptic traditions of Islamic eschatology, and the sectarian passions of a post-invasion Iraq torn apart by violence and humiliation, he constructed a movement that for a few terrifying years held territory, governed populations, and inspired violence across the globe.

That architecture was, however, built on doctrinal sand. Its literalism was selective; its historical claims were false; its genealogical pretensions were unverified; its jurisprudential reasoning was condemned by the overwhelming weight of mainstream Islamic scholarship; and its treatment of human beings as disposable instruments of a theological project was a direct violation of the Quranic affirmation of human dignity that constitutes the deepest ethical commitment of the faith. The Open Letter to al-Baghdadi demonstrated that the most powerful rebuttal to this theology was not a Western political argument but a Quranic verse wielded by scholars who knew the tradition from the inside and could demonstrate, with precision and authority, that Baghdadi had not revived Islam — he had betrayed it.

The physical caliphate was destroyed through military force, and Baghdadi himself died in humiliation rather than in the glorious martyrdom his eschatology had promised him. But the ideology he articulated remains alive — online, in the minds of isolated and alienated young people, in the prison networks of detained fighters, in the successor organisations that have already reconstituted themselves in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and sub-Saharan Africa. Defeating that ideology requires more than drones and special operations forces. It requires what has been argued throughout this paper: a revival of Islamic humanism, a recovery of the tradition of mercy, reason, pluralism, and human dignity that constitutes the ethical core of the Quranic revelation.

The Quran’s own vision of the human person — as the vicegerent of God on earth (2:30), honoured above much of creation (17:70), endowed with reason, moral agency, and the capacity for both justice and injustice (76:3, 90:10, 91:7-10) — is the ultimate theological rebuttal to Baghdadi’s vision of the human being as an instrument of divine violence. A theology that sees the face of God in the dignity of every human person (5:32, 49:13, 95:4), that understands the caliphate not as a vehicle for domination but as a trust of justice and service (4:58, 38:26, 57:25), and that reads the Quran not as a warrant for perpetual war but as a call to mercy, wisdom, and peace (16:125, 21:107, 41:34, 5:8, 8:61) — such a theology is not merely a counter-narrative to extremism. It is the authentic Islamic tradition that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sought to destroy and that must be reclaimed.

The ghost of the caliphate of apocalypse can only be finally exorcised by a more compelling vision — one that sees Islam not as a religion of fear and compulsion but as a religion that, in the Prophet Muhammad’s own words, was sent as a mercy to all the worlds (21:107). Building that vision, in mosques and madrasas, in classrooms and digital spaces, in the courts of law and the chambers of government, in the patient, sustained work of scholarship, education, and community (3:104, 16:90, 39:9, 58:11, 49:10) — that is the work of Islamic humanism. It is more difficult than declaring a caliphate, and more demanding than detonating a bomb. But it is the only work that will endure (13:17, 28:77, 41:33).

Bibliography

Fatima Mernissi. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Open Letter to al-Baghdadi. Signed by 126 leading global Muslim scholars, 2014. https://rissc.jo/open-letter-to-al-baghdadi/

Sayyid Qutb. Milestones. Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1990.

Robert G. Rabil. The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency. London: Hurst Publishers, 2015.

The Amman Message. Issued by His Majesty Abdullah II of Jordan and affirmed by over 200 leading Islamic scholars, 2004. https://ammanmessage.com/

The Marrakesh Declaration. Issued by the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, 2016. https://www.abc-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Marrakesh-Final-04-12-18.pdf

Amina Wadud. Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

….

V.A. Mohamad Ashrof is an independent Indian scholar specializing in Islamic humanism. With a deep commitment to advancing Quranic hermeneutics that prioritize human well-being, peace, and progress, his work aims to foster a just society, encourage critical thinking, and promote inclusive discourse and peaceful coexistence. He is dedicated to creating pathways for meaningful social change and intellectual growth through his scholarship…..

Courtesy: New Age Islam

The post Extremist Theology: From Syed Qutb’s ‘Milestone’ to al-Baghdadi’s ‘Caliphate’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Not even the book, in fact. Just the title: Shivaji Kon Hota? (शिवाजी कोण होता?). This is in Marathi. The English translation is Who was Shivaji?

Now, who’d have a problem with this title, right?

Wrong.

Because those whose sense of self worth and identity is as fragile as it is testosterone-driven, feel offended all too quickly. In this case, by the use of the ‘ekeri’ for Shivaji.

Let me explain. Unlike in English, in Marathi we have three forms of address:

• the ekeri (एकेरी) or informal singular (for example, tu / तू), used with close friends, younger people, children, those lower in the social hierarchy, some relations (such as siblings, cousins, mother, grandmothers, grandaunts, uncles and aunts);
• the anekeri (अनेकेरी) or respectful singular or plural (tumhi / तुम्ही), used with elders, strangers, in formal situations, those higher in the social hierarchy, some relations (father, grandfathers and granduncles)
• the aapani prayog (आपणी प्रयोग) or respectful singular or inclusive plural (aapan / आपण), which is both ‘you’ in a highly formal context or ‘we’, which includes both the speaker and the listner.

Now, Shivaji Kon Kota? uses the ekeri or informal singular, and a man claiming to be Sanjay Gaikwad, member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly from Buldhana rang up Mr Prashant Ambi, an activist, at 12:52 AM on April 22, 2026, and issued a threat to his life. Mr Gaikwad represents the Shiv Sena (the Eknath Shinde-led party). Not only did he use filthy language and abuses on the call, he also reminded Mr Ambi of the fate of the author of the book, in effect issuing a death threat.

The author of Shivaji Kon Hota? is Govind Pansare, a towering personality in Maharashtra. He was a leader of the Communist Party of India, a public intellectual, rationalist and trade unionist. On February 16, 2015, he and his wife were shot at when they were returning from a morning walk in Kolhapur, where they lived. His wife survived, but Pansare succumbed to his injuries on Feburary 20. He was 81. His biography of Shivaji has run into numerous editions and sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its first publication in 1988.

The assassination of Govind Pansare bore striking similarities to the killing of Dr Narendra Dabholkar in Pune in 2013. A Hindu extremist organisation, Sanathan Santha, was suspected to have been behind both assassinations. Unsurprisingly, with the right wing in power at both state and centre, the investigative agencies have not been able to nail the killers.

Mr Prashant Ambi is an activist who prints and sells inexpensive copies of Pansare’s Shivaji Kon Hota? He had the presence of mind to record the conversation and the courage to make it public. You can listen to the conversation (in Marathi) here:

In this time of easy rage-baiting on social media, it is perhaps too much to expect Mr Gaikwad to have actually read the book which he claimed to have insulted his icon. But the question is still worth asking: Why did Pansare use the informal singular for Shivaji? Why did he call him simply ‘Shivaji’, rather than ‘Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’?

Since Pansare is no longer around to answer this, we can only speculate. I can think of two reasons.

One, as I said above, in Marathi, one of the uses of the informal singular is for people we are intimately close to, like our mother. The use of the informal singular is, in such cases, not an expression of disrespect, but its opposite – an expression of deep affection and respect that does not stand on ceremony. Strikingly, the bhakti-era poets of Maharashtra, such as Tukaram, use the informal singular when addressing the diety Vitthal (Vishnu in his Krishna avatar), who they endearingly call ‘Vithoba’.

Two, Pansare, though trained as a lawyer, was a genuinely good historian. He looked at his subject without blinkers, as a rationalist, on the basis of historical evidence.

Soon after Pansare’s murder, we at LeftWord Books decided to bring out an English edition of the book. Translated by Uday Narkar, the book has an Introduction by historian Anirudh Deshpande (no relation of mine) and an Afterword by economist Prabhat Patnaik. Without a doubt, Who was Shivaji? is a masterpiece of popular history writing. We published the book for its secular and rationalist telling of the life of one of the great figures of Indian medieval history, of course, but also as a tribute to its slain author, a man of immense humanity, empathy, courage and perseverance, a towering public intellectual, a comarde deeply loved by workers, and all those who believe in a humane future for all.

Of Pansare’s book, Anirudh Deshpande writes: “Shivaji Kon Hota? questions the way in which dominant Maratha historiography has enforced modern, i.e., colonial and post-colonial, religious categories on a past where people lived and did things differently compared with the age of modernity. Readers will not fail to notice the ease and humility with which the late Govind Pansare has raised and answered these questions. He does not claim originality, but only the ability to rationally re-interpret the facts of Shivaji’s career, for facts do exist — despite the claims of contemporary intellectual fashion to the contrary. Shivaji Kon Hota? shows how, with the help of reason, anyone can interrogate the past. We need not be scientists and historians to discover and understand ourselves by questioning the familiar tropes of history.”

I am happy to share a free PDF of Govind Pansare’s short biography of Shivaji:

If you’d like to have a hard copy, you can purchase it from the LeftWord website here.

Postscript. Please share this post if you can – to spread the word about the criminal intimidation by a person who is supposed to be a people’s representative, and to share Comrade Pansare’s immensely popular and readable book.

Courtesy: https://sudu26.substack.com/

The post Who was Shivaji? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

These controversies have been decades old. Early in the 2000s, the Shivaji Maharaj statue committee being headed by Babasaheb Purandare raised public ire as he was sought to be presented as a ‘Maharaj in Brahminical colours’. Another time, the decorative arch prepared during Ganeshotsva (Ganesh Festival) showing Shivaji stabbing Afzal Khan with a dagger provoked hate sentiments among sections of society. In contrast, in the early 2000s, a Handbook of History prepared by the educatinist-activist Teesta Setalvad recounted –with solid historical sources–the incident of Shivaji not being crowned by Brahmins as he was not a Kshatriya attracted violent protests from the far Hindutva right.

Currently two controversies have come up. One was the statement of Bageshwar Dham baba at a recent RSS function in Nagpur. Incidentally Dhirendra Krishna Shastri, the Baba, is resorting to blind faith techniques to attract a large following. In his bid to attract such a blind following, he takes out a chit to show the credentials of the people by using some tricks. He has attracted followers among the powerful and influential. Recently retired Chief Justice of India, BR Gavai visited him with his family to seek his blessings. Shyam Manav, working against blind faith has observed that during the central rule of BJP, blind faith has been given legitimacy and such ‘Baba’s have proliferated’.

Anyway, at this RSS function, this charlatan Baba stated that Shivaji Maharaj was tired of wars so he went to his Guru Samarth Swami Ramdas, put his crown on his feet and requested him to take over his kingdom. There were two gross fallacies in this statement. First, Ramdas was not Shivaji’s guru, this is a make believe Brahminical version of the Shivaji narrative. The matter had even gone to the Court which gave the verdict that Ramdas was not Shivaji’s Guru. There is no mention of such an incident in Shivaji’s life. This outrageous statement was made in the presence of RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat, union Minister Nitin Gadkari and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, none of whom objected!

When a hue and cry was raised, the ‘Baba’ apologised saying that he draws his inspiration of Hindu Rashtra from Shivaji’s Hindvi swaraj among other things. This again is far from the truth. Shivaji’s Hindvi swaraj was area specific, Hind being a geographic term rather than a religious term. Shivaji’s life exemplifies this. He respected all religions. His army had nearly 12 generals who were Muslims, Siddi Sambal, Ibrahim Gardi, Daulat Khan were among them. He had also got a mosque made in his fort of Raigad for his Muslim officers and subjects. His confidential secretary was Maulana Haider Ali. He had a deep respect for women. After one of Shivaji’s military campaigns, his chieftains had brought the beautiful daughter in law of Muslim ruler of Bassein as a ‘gift for him’. Shivaji was outraged and objected to this conduct, returned the woman to her family home with due respect. The Brahminical version based of Shivaji on the basis of which Dhirendra Shastri made his recent remarks is the narrative which only the far right RSS promotes.

The other controversy relates to BJP ally Eknath Shinde Shiv Sena MLA from Buldhana, Sanjay Gaikwad. Shiv Sena MLA Sanjay Gaikwad triggered a controversy by threatening to “chop off the tongue” of a publisher of the 1988 book ‘Shivaji Kon Hota?‘ (Who was Shivaji?) by Govind Pansare. Gaikwad objected to the alleged disrespectful, singular reference to Shivaji Maharaj in the title and content, accusing it of distorting history. He called up the distributor of the book Prashant Ambi threatening him that he will meet the same fate as Govind Pansare. Rationalist Govind Pansare was shot at during a morning walk in Kolhapur, in February 2015 and succumbed to his injuries a few days leader. Far right Hindutva groups were responsible for the shooting—Narendra Dabholkar a few years previously, MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh thereafter were three more rationalists who met a similar fate. In a recorded phone call, Gaikwad allegedly used abusive language and threatened Kolhapur-based publisher Prashant Ambi, telling him that he would “meet the same fate as Pansare”.

Govind Pansare, the CPI leader and rationalist activist wrote this book, after painstaking research and titled in Marathi, Shivaji Kon Hota (Who was Shivaji). Addressing him in singular form. This form is used for most intimate persons. Gaikwad is objecting to that as an insult to Shivaji. The book was published in 1988 and since then has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has been translated in many languages. In fact, this book is a basic introduction to the iconic Shhivaji Maharaj. The contents reveal historical facts the concern of Shivaji for raiyats (poor farmers) and respect for all religions. His grandfather Maloji Rao Bhosle had prayed at a Sufi saint (Shah Sharif) Dargah, as he had no children. Later when he got two sons, he named them Shahji and Sharifji. Shivaji was son of Shahji Bhosle.

Shivaji built his kingdom by attacking the neighbouring Hindu Kings like Chandra Rao More. In his fight with Afzal Khan, the general of Adil shah of Bijapur, he was given the iron claws by a Muslim bodyguard, Rustom-e-Jaman. Interestingly Afzal khan had performed a Yagna through local Brahmins to defeat Shivaji. In addition, his secretary was Krishnaji Bhaskar Kulkarni. Interestingly Shivaji’s humane values were matchless. He did kill Afzal Khan but later he also built a tomb for Afzal Khan, which is present even today. The likes of Gaikwad and Hindu nationalist narratives omit these aspects of Shivaji in their bid to serve political propaganda: to present him as an anti-Mulim King, which he was not. In Maharashtra and now all over India the propaganda being promoted by the far right is that Shivaji was an anti-Muslim ruler. This narrative falls flat if we study the life and work of Shivaji. His main concern was the poor peasants for whose protection he stopped the atrocities of middlemen, to a great relief for the poor peasants.

Therefore, the Brahminical tendencies interpret and propagate Maharaj as anti-Muslim, distorting the whole truth; this is what Gaikwad is aiming at. Dhirendra Shastri and RSS combine want to project this interpretation of Shivaji to promote their agenda of a Hindu Rashtra, while his Hindvi was not synonymous with Hindu Rashtra.

The most interesting part of the whole controversy is that most booksellers are facing the demand for this book in increasing numbers. At the same time, the Human rights groups are organizing the mass reading of the book, a very healthy response to this vilification of a great ruler!

Related:

Shivaji in ‘secular’ Maharashtra

The post Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj: An inclusive ruler appeared first on SabrangIndia.

His speech in the Constituent Assembly is significant because it forcefully argues that a good constitution cannot function well if it is handled by bad people. Similarly, even a bad constitution can yield good results if it is used by good people.

In other words, much more than formal rules and procedures, the social location, interests, and intentions of those who interpret or implement them are important—a point which is often missed by liberal scholars but not by Dr. Ambedkar.

The first meeting of the Constituent Assembly, with the aim of drafting the Constitution, was held on December 9, 1946, and it continued to function for around three years, with B. R. Ambedkar, as Chairman of the Drafting Committee, bearing a major share of the responsibility. When the work of drafting the Constitution was completed, Dr. Ambedkar delivered his closing speech on November 25, 1949, a day before the Constitution was formally adopted. November 26 was later celebrated as Constitution Day to mark this historic event.

Giving his closing speech in the Constituent Assembly, Babasaheb put it: “… however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot. The working of a Constitution does not depend wholly upon the nature of the Constitution.”

In his speech, Dr. Ambedkar argued that rules, laws, or the Constitution are not sufficient in themselves, nor do they guarantee justice, however well they may be framed. Beyond the law, the persons who interpret and implement it are the critical factor.

In the context of the Constitution, Ambedkar takes a critical sociological view and said that mere having good rules are not enough, if the person interpreting or implanting it has a bad intention. His argument is directly linked with his political movement to fight for the proportionate and effective representation for Dalits and other marginalised castes and communities.

The opponents of affirmative action, including reservation, often invoke the logic of meritocracy. However, anti-reservationists are not willing to accept the fact that merit is often defined through caste interests.

For example, the skills acquired by rich, upper-caste males are taken as the benchmark and imposed on the rest of society, ignoring the geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the country, as well as the social and economic backgrounds of the people. Unlike such Brahminical logic, B. R. Ambedkar argued for bringing every caste and community within the process of decision-making so that they could not only make laws but also interpret and implement them in their own interests.

Dr. Ambedkar was of the view that if power is not shared and remains concentrated in a few hands, the interests of marginalised castes and communities are bound to be compromised. The same logic extends to the field of law, where mere formal rules cannot ensure justice for marginalised castes; rather, they must be in a position to interpret and implement them to ensure justice in society.

To illustrate B. R. Ambedkar’s argument, let us take the analogy of a car. A new car is not a guarantee of safe driving if it is handled carelessly. Conversely, even if a car has some technical faults, there is a greater chance that the journey will be safe if the driver is experienced and careful. In the context of law, Ambedkar is not merely satisfied with having a good constitution; rather, he is concerned about the misuse of a good constitution in the hands of bad people. But even if the constitution is not perfect, if those implementing it have good intentions, there is a greater possibility of bringing about justice in society.

Although Dr. Ambedkar, in his speech, disagreed with the Indian communists and socialists over their “condemnation” of the Constitution, Babasaheb’s sociological understanding of law comes very close to the Marxist critique of law. While liberal jurisprudence emphasizes rules and procedures and the idea of providing a level playing field to everyone seeking justice in a court of law, Marxist philosophers foreground the political dimension of law. Radicals argue that, in the absence of a genuine level playing field in society—where a few monopolise wealth and shape culture, religion, and other institutions to perpetuate their dominance—the judiciary and law cannot remain neutral zones of freedom and rational deliberation.

While the class character of society is central to Marxist thinking, it does not get displaced in Dr. Ambedkar’s analysis. While Ambedkar was a firm supporter of state socialism and of the state taking greater responsibility for people’s welfare, he strongly disagreed with the communists over their support for the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Dr. Ambedkar, on the other hand, was a strong advocate of bringing about equality and reconstructing an egalitarian order through democratic and constitutional means.

Having acknowledged these differences, Ambedkarite scholars and Marxists converge on the point that, unlike liberal scholars, they do not ignore the social reality and deep-seated inequalities that exist beyond the formal and legal structures of the state. While class and property relations are central to classical Marxist analysis, Dr. Ambedkar’s primary focus is on the caste-based graded inequality of Indian society. While Dr. Ambedkar does not ignore class contradictions in society, he, unlike Marxist scholars, explains class inequality through a caste-based analysis.

Since caste-based inequality remains deeply entrenched in society and the post-Independence state did not go much beyond providing formal equality to the lower castes and other marginalised communities, Dr. Ambedkar was acutely aware of the continuing presence of upper-caste hegemony from society to politics and from culture to the economy. That is why he was concerned that a good law in itself is not a guarantee of justice unless marginalised castes and communities are in a position to interpret and implement it in their own interests. These sociological insights of Dr. Ambedkar are crucial not only for understanding our judicial system but also for analysing other institutions of the state.

[The author is the author of the recently published book Muslim Personal Law: Definitions, Sources and Contestations (Manohar, 2026).]

Related:

Caste Shadow on Ambedkar Jayanti: From campus censorship to temple exclusion

On his 135th birth anniversary, we ask, would Ambedkar be allowed free speech in India today?

A principled PM, a determined law minister: Nehru, Ambedkar & Opposition in Indian Politics

The post Understanding power through caste: Dr. Ambedkar’s contribution to the sociology of law appeared first on SabrangIndia.

“What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

Lenin stated this fact in context of Marxism but this has a universal connotation. Such whittling down has been common to the ideas, contribution and sacrifices of Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh. The latest contributor to this venture is a self-acclaimed liberal, Bhagwan Josh. He contributed an article, ‘Why Bhagat Singh was not a Marxist thinker’ (The Tribune, March 23, 2026).[1] He ended his derogatory piece with the words: “The fact remains that Bhagat Singh was hanged not for his revolutionary ideas but for committing a murder of a British officer.” It is notable that The Tribune chose to publish it on the 95^th anniversary of the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, Rajguru and Sukhdev. This act also reveals what has happened to even a publication, which had previously remained supportive of the revolutionaries when they were alive.

Bhagwan Josh, not confident of his current take on Bhagat Singh, goes hunting for names like Antonio Gramsci, Bipin Chandra and Harish Puri to add weight to his diatribe. Gramsci and Bipin Chandra are not alive to clarify but Professor Harish Puri needs to share with his fans like me whether he too believes that Bhagat Singh was not a revolutionary. Thanks to Harish Jain who responded by penning ‘Why Bhagat Singh defies easy labels’ (The Tribune, March 26, 2026) in which Bhagwan Josh in one of his earlier Punjabi works, (Bhagat Singh da Markasvad) located “Bhagat Singh within the distinct Leninist current that was emerging in Punjab between 1928 and 1931 an intellectual formation grounded in study, debate and ideological seriousness and set apart from what he saw as the more pragmatic and often anti-intellectual strands within Indian communism”.[2]

A serious problem with armchair Professors is that they live in ivory towers but believe that they and only they are authorised to explain ground realities. Bhagat Singh was not a thinker because he was unable to produce in his writings, “the perfunctory references to the sources or books from which these notes and quotes were taken have left a rather perplexing question mark with regard to the authentic source. That is, from which editions of which books, by which particular authors, were these taken?” They do not know that Bhagat Singh was not a doctoral candidate in some university but chose to work to liberate his motherland from the colonial subjugation. According to British official documents, he was in jail for 716 days, consulted/read approximately 302 books and was well versed in English, Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi. When he was not in jail, he was both a researcher and a journalist. He followed the Gramscian dictum (without reading him) that “It is necessary to think and study even under the most difficult conditions…to keep the risk of intellectual degradation at bay”.

Bhagat Singh was not reading books for the purposes of writing a doctoral proposal for enrolling at Oxford or Cambridge but for understanding the world and India so that he could challenge the mightiest imperial power and replace it with a system in India where ‘men do not exploit men’. This is what a thinker does. I am sure if Bhagat Singh had met Professors like Bhagwan Josh there would have been no need commemorating his Martyrdom Day, he would have retired as a teacher-receiving pension from the British masters!

Bhagwan Josh makes another problematic claim: “But what sort of Marxism did Bhagat Singh imbibe from his readings? Did this Marxism help him in any way to get some insight into the contemporary politics of Indian nationalism, working class movements and the immediate historical social reality around him? A mastery of Marxism that is merely an exercise in the appropriation of textual discourse must remain a ‘Brahmanical Marxism’…”

This from a Professor who — we are told, has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)! Can such an armed academic be so ignorant of the written word, so oblivious of facts available in the public domain? This does not bode well for future of JNU. Bhagat Singh who died at the age of 23 years, authored the following major documents, Universal Love (Hindi 1924), Youth (Hindi 1925), Religious Riots and their Solution (Punjabi 1927), Religion and our Freedom Struggle (Punjabi 1928), The Issue of Untouchability (Punjabi 1928), Satyagrah and Strikes (Punjabi 1928), Students and Politics (Punjabi 1928), New leaders and their Duties (Punjabi 1928), Lala Lajpat Rai and the Youth (Punjabi 1928), What is Anarchism part 1, 2, 3 (Punjabi 1928), The Revolutionary Nihilist of Russia (Punjabi 1928), Ideal of Indian Revolution (English 1930), Why I am an Atheist (English 1930), The First Rise of Punjab in the Freedom Struggle (Urdu 1931), Introduction to Dreamland (English 1931), and Young Political Workers (English 1931).

The Manifesto of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and the Manifesto of Hindustan Socialist Republican Army were written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra and finalised after consultation with Bhagat Singh.

Shame on those who call this ‘Brahmanical Marxism’. Bhagat Singh developed Marxism in the context of Indian realities. Marx said that future generations would come and prove us wrong; this is how Marxism as a science survives.

Bhagwan Josh also declares the Ghadar movement as a failed movement and declares that Bhagat singh “instead of learning a lesson from its tragic failure, he blindly followed the example of the Ghadarites”. This sweeping conclusion reveals on whose side Professor the worthy stands while evaluating two among the greatest milestones in the glorious anti-colonial history of Indian freedom struggle in the 20^th century. Failure does not mean that any resistance was faulty or not required. To hail the victor is, in fact, a typical Brahmanical characteristic. Bhagwan must be glad to know that he is not alone in holding such a debased idea. The most prominent ideologue of RSS, MS Golwalkar while denigrating the tradition of martyrdom had similarly, brazenly stated:

“There is no doubt that such man who embrace martyrdom are great heroes and their philosophy too is pre-eminently manly. They are far above the average men who meekly submit to fate and remain in fear and inaction. All the same, such persons are not held up as ideals in our society. We have not looked upon their martyrdom as the highest point of greatness to which men should aspire. For, after all, they failed in achieving their ideal, and failure implies some fatal flaw in them.” [‘Martyr, great but not ideal’, Bunch of Thoughts, the collection of writings of MS Golwalkar.]

Last but not the least, Bhagwan Josh indulges in peddling another falsehood when states that 1857 Mutiny (which in fact was a nation-wide liberation war which continued for more than 3 years), was defeated by British forces and Sikh troops. There are abundant contemporary documents which conclusively prove that Punjab and Sikhs played significant role in 1857 liberation war. These were not only Sikh ruling families in Punjab who supported the British but also well-known rich families amongst Hindus and Muslims who joined the British campaign against the 1857 rebellion. This reality was no different from the rest of India, where rulers of Gwalior, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota, Bhopal, Dhar and many more native states joined hands with the British in crushing the great War of Independence.

If Bhagat Singh is simply a murderer, Professor Bhagwan Josh why do you bother with him? The fact is that he with his comrades continue to be synonymous with Indian revolution, and this troubles those intellectually subservient to imperialism who then come forth to denigrate them.

Marxism survives as so will Bhagat Singh’s heritage.

March 27, 2026

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.

[1] https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/why-bhagat-singh-was-not-a-marxist-thinker/

[2] https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/why-bhagat-singh-defies-easy-labels/

Related:

Denigration of martyrs like Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev – a peep into RSS archives

78th Martyrdom Anniversary of Gandhi & Identity of his Assassins: Sardar Patel

November 26: How RSS mourned the passage of India’s Constitution by the Constituent Assembly

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