A bench of Justice BV Nagarathna and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan granted bail to Syed Iftikhar Andrabi, a Jammu and Kashmir resident accused in a narco-terror case investigated by the National Investigation Agency, after he spent almost six years in custody awaiting trial. In doing so, the Court delivered one of its strongest recent reaffirmations of the landmark three-judge bench ruling in Union of India v. KA Najeeb, holding that constitutional courts cannot permit indefinite pre-trial incarceration under the guise of national security.

The Court unequivocally declared; “Even under the UAPA, bail is the rule and jail is the exception.”

The ruling assumes added significance because the bench simultaneously expressed “serious reservations” about the January 2025 judgment in Gulfisha Fatima v. State — the decision that denied bail to activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam in the Delhi riots larger conspiracy case. The Court also disapproved of the 2024 ruling in Gurwinder Singh v. Union of India, observing that both decisions appeared to dilute binding principles laid down by larger benches.

As reported by Live Law, the judgment contains unusually sharp observations on judicial discipline, prolonged incarceration, and the constitutional dangers posed by restrictive interpretations of UAPA bail provisions.

Court relies on NCRB data to highlight “overwhelming possibility of acquittal”

One of the most striking aspects of the judgment is the Court’s reliance on official National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics placed before Parliament by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs.

Referring to conviction data between 2019 and 2023, the bench noted that UAPA conviction rates across India ranged only between 1.5% and 4%. In Jammu and Kashmir, conviction rates remained below 1% throughout the period, touching a maximum of merely 0.89% in 2022 and standing at zero in 2019.

The Court observed that these figures expose the deeply troubling reality that undertrials are often incarcerated for years despite the overwhelming probability of eventual acquittal.

“For all India figures, we have 2% to 6% conviction, meaning thereby that there is 94% to 98% possibility of acquittal in such cases in the country. In so far as the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is concerned, the annual rate of conviction is always less than 1%. It means that at the end of the trial there is 99% possibility of acquittal in such cases.”

These observations, as per LiveLaw, form one of the strongest judicial acknowledgments in recent years of the structural imbalance between prosecution and liberty under anti-terror laws. The Court effectively questioned the legitimacy of incarcerating individuals for years while trials proceed at an extraordinarily slow pace despite minimal conviction outcomes nationally.

Reaffirmation of KA Najeeb and constitutional limits on UAPA

At the heart of the ruling lies a forceful reaffirmation of KA Najeeb, the 2021 three-judge bench judgment that recognised prolonged incarceration and delay in trial as independent constitutional grounds for granting bail under the UAPA.

The bench clarified that Section 43D(5) of the UAPA, which imposes stringent restrictions on bailm cannot be interpreted in a manner that extinguishes Article 21 protections.

Justice Bhuyan’s judgment noted that KA Najeeb was specifically intended to prevent anti-terror legislation from becoming a mechanism for punitive incarceration without trial.

“A plain reading of Najeeb will show that it was trying to prevent precisely this possibility from arising, when it cautioned that Section 43D(5) must not become the sole metric for denial of bail, causing wholesale breach of the constitutional right to speedy trial.”

The Court further held that the earlier judgment in National Investigation Agency v. Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali cannot be read as authorising indefinite detention merely because a prima facie case exists. Rejecting attempts to use Watali as a near-absolute bar on bail, the Court observed that such an interpretation would fundamentally undermine constitutional protections.

Sharp criticism of smaller benches diluting larger bench decisions

The judgment is also notable for its unusually direct criticism of smaller benches of the Supreme Court for progressively weakening larger bench precedents without formally referring matters to a larger bench.

The Court observed; “A judgment rendered by a bench of lesser strength is bound by the law declared by the bench of greater strength. Judicial discipline mandates that such a binding precedent must either be followed or, in case of doubt, be referred to a larger bench.”

It added; “A smaller bench cannot dilute, circumvent or disregard the ratio of a larger bench.”

Without expressly overruling Gulfisha Fatima or Gurwinder Singh, the Court made clear that the approaches adopted in those rulings were difficult to reconcile with KA Najeeb.

The bench also recorded concern over what it described as a trend of smaller benches “hollowing out” the constitutional force of larger bench decisions without openly disagreeing with them. These observations are institutionally significant because both Gurwinder Singh and Gulfisha Fatima were delivered by two-judge benches despite KA Najeeb having been decided by a larger three-judge bench.

“Serious reservations” over Delhi Riots bail judgment

The Court’s remarks on Gulfisha Fatima v. State are among the strongest judicial criticisms directed at a recent Supreme Court bail ruling. The bench specifically objected to the interpretation that KA Najeeb applies only in narrow or exceptional factual situations.

Justice Bhuyan observed; “We have serious reservations about judgment in Gulfisha Fatima. The judgment in Gulfisha Fatima would have us believe that Najeeb is only a narrow and exceptional departure from Section 43D(5). It is this hollowing out of the import of the observations in Najeeb that we are concerned with.”

The Court emphasised that KA Najeeb remains binding law and cannot be diluted by trial courts, High Courts, or benches of lesser numerical strength within the Supreme Court itself. The judgment also disapproved of aspects of the Gulfisha Fatima ruling that effectively curtailed the ability of accused persons to renew bail pleas for extended periods.

The Supreme Court’s January 2026 judgment in Gulfisha Fatima v. State arose from bail pleas filed by several accused in the 2020 Delhi riots “larger conspiracy” case prosecuted under the UAPA. A bench of Justice Aravind Kumar and Justice N V Anjaria granted bail to Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Mohammad Saleem Khan and Shadab Ahmed after nearly six years of incarceration, holding that their alleged roles were comparatively limited and ancillary. However, the Court denied bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, observing that prosecution material placed them on a “qualitatively different footing” as alleged “ideological drivers” and central conspirators in the riots case. The Court held that the statutory embargo under Section 43D(5) of the UAPA continued to apply against them because the prosecution had crossed the threshold of establishing a prima facie case. The judgment remains contentious because, despite acknowledging prolonged incarceration and delay in trial, the Court held that constitutional concerns under Article 21 had not yet overridden the statutory restrictions on bail for Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. Detailed report may be read here.

Court rejects “two-prong test” for bail

The Court further criticised the “two-prong test” evolved in Gurwinder Singh, under which courts were expected to deny bail once the prosecution established a prima facie case. According to the bench, this framework effectively transforms pre-trial incarceration into punishment itself.

Justice Bhuyan warned; “If this test is accepted, the State needs only satisfy a low prima facie threshold while the trial may continue for years, with the result that pre-trial incarceration begins to acquire a post-trial punitive character.”

The Court observed that KA Najeeb had specifically warned against precisely such outcomes.

“The more serious the accusation, the speedier the trial should be”

Reiterating the centrality of Article 21 protections, the bench observed that serious accusations demand faster trials, not greater tolerance for prolonged detention.

“Ideally, the more serious the accusations are, the speedier the trial should be.”

The Court also referred to its 2024 ruling in Sheikh Javed Iqbal v. State, which similarly followed KA Najeeb in granting bail due to prolonged delay in trial.

Background of the case

Syed Iftikhar Andrabi, a resident of Handwara in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir, was arrested by the NIA on June 11, 2020. The agency alleged that he was part of a cross-border narcotics syndicate that procured heroin from the Tangdhar border region and channelled proceeds to organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen.

He was prosecuted under provisions of the NDPS Act, Sections 17, 38 and 40 of the UAPA, and Section 120B of the IPC. A Special NIA Court rejected his bail application in August 2024. The Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court later refused bail on August 19, 2025, holding that the seriousness of the allegations outweighed the case for release despite the lengthy custody period.

Before the Supreme Court, it was pointed out that the prosecution had cited over 320 witnesses while only a handful had been examined so far — making the likelihood of early completion of trial extremely remote.

Senior Advocate Shadan Farasat appeared on behalf of Andrabi.

Bail granted subject to conditions

Allowing the appeal, the Supreme Court directed Andrabi’s release on bail subject to conditions imposed by the Special NIA Court. The Court directed him to surrender his passport and mark attendance at the Handwara police station once every fortnight.

A major intervention in UAPA bail jurisprudence

The judgment is likely to emerge as a major constitutional reference point in future UAPA bail litigation. By foregrounding the right to speedy trial, condemning prolonged incarceration, relying on NCRB conviction data, and cautioning against judicial dilution of larger bench precedents, the Court has attempted to restore constitutional discipline within anti-terror jurisprudence.

The ruling also sends a significant institutional message: that personal liberty cannot be indefinitely suspended through procedural delay, and that anti-terror legislation cannot become a constitutional vacuum where Article 21 protections cease to operate. At a moment when UAPA prosecutions increasingly raise concerns regarding prolonged detention, delayed trials, and the criminalisation of dissent, the judgment may mark an important judicial effort to reclaim constitutional safeguards from the expanding shadow of preventive incarceration.

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The post Supreme Court reasserts KA Najeeb, warns against “hollowing out” constitutional protections in UAPA cases; questions Umar Khalid bail verdict appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The team, formed by civil rights group Jan Hastakshep included Supreme Court senior advocate S.S. Nehra, former Hindu College professor Ish Mishra, retired IFS officer Ashok Sharma, senior journalist Anil Dubey, and senior advocate M.Z. Ali.

The team visited Noida on April 24 and spoke to workers across multiple industrial units, shopkeepers and other affected residents on the issue.

According to the statement released by the team, investigators have found no evidence to support allegations circulated by sections of the administration and media that foreign elements were behind the protests.

Instead, the team reported how, the anger among the workers had been building for years over low wages, rising inflation and comparisons with higher minimum wages in neighbouring Delhi and Haryana. The agitating workers told the team that factories relocating from Delhi and Gurugram to Noida continued paying lower wages after shifting operations, despite higher pay scales prevailing in those regions.

The fact-finding group said that this dissatisfaction intensified after workers learned that wages at units in Haryana –barely 170 kilometres away–had increased significantly following a hike in minimum wages there. This comparison, combined with stagnant wages in Noida for 10 years, reportedly triggered the initial sit-in protest at a garment-manufacturing unit in Sector 83 earlier this month. According to the Fact-finding team’s statement, protests spread across industrial clusters in Sectors 59, 60, 62, 83 and 84, eventually drawing tens of thousands of workers onto the streets. The team also alleged that police action escalated tensions and that more than 1,000 workers were detained, with some families not informed of their whereabouts for several days.

The team of investigators noted that the state government’s subsequent actions, including issuing notices to 43 contractors, cancelling licences of 10 contractors and announcing a 21 per cent wage increase, indicated acknowledgement of the irregularities in wage practices rather than evidence of any external conspiracy.

Significantly, a trade union leader who had worked in a multinational company, also told the team that two decades ago, wages were not an issue in NOIDA and Greater NOIDA because wages here were higher than in other states. However, conditions have changed over the past 20 years.

Disparate wages: While wages increased in Delhi and Haryana, they did not increase in Uttar Pradesh, and companies arbitrarily set their own minimum wages. This difference also significantly increased exploitation. He added that most of NOIDA industries operate with only contract labour, with companies hiring workers through contractors who provide no security or other benefits.

The team concluded that the unrest reflected long-standing labour grievances rooted in wage stagnation and rising living costs, and called for implementation of revised minimum wages, linking wages to inflation, and withdrawal of cases against workers involved in the protests.

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The event started with a formal speech by Suhail Ahmed Maroor who also read out the Preamble of the Constitution aloud for the audience present to repeat it. Followed by Yaseen Malpe who asserted that the Karnataka’s Muslims (about 13% of the state’s population as per Census 2011) played a significant role in the 2023 mandate by ensuring voter participation from within the community, and thereby ousting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from power. Now, he said, the convention representing the Muslims community seeks clarity on the promises made, not just assurances.

The convention’s report, formally submitted to the Chief Minister, Deputy Chief Minister, Ministers and MLAs/MLCs, promised to reach Leader of the Opposition (LOP), Rahul Gandhi as well. The convention positions itself as an exercise in constitutional responsibility and democratic accountability, not confrontation.

The convention held aimed to:

• Review key promises made to Muslims and minorities by the Congress during and after the 2023 Assembly election (Manifesto promises)
• Acknowledge steps taken, but highlight gaps in delivery and pending implementation.
• Seek a time‑bound, credible roadmap on unresolved commitments.
• Assert/remind the Congress party about the promises made through 10 demands.

The 10 key promises / issue areas

1. Action against communal hate organisations

• Manifesto promise: Firm action against individuals and organisations spreading communal hatred.
• Concerns raised: Despite that promise, RSS and affiliates are said to hold large numbers of public programmes, processions and rallies, including in sensitive areas near mosques, with limited preventive action. At the same time, civil society and student groups reportedly face more difficulty getting permissions for peaceful gatherings, leading to a perception of selective administration.
• Demand: Consistent, visible enforcement against habitual hate offenders, fake‑news networks, moral policing, cattle vigilantism, economic boycotts and organised intimidation, beyond just FIRs. 

2. Hijab Government Order – assurance vs formal withdrawal

• Background: The Hijab Government Order of February 5, 2022 is described as one of the most painful symbols of exclusion for Muslim girls in Karnataka. In December 2023, the CM publicly said his government would withdraw the order and that women should be free to wear what they want.
• Impact cited: Rights’ groups report is quoted, documenting rights impacts (education, dignity, privacy, expression, non‑discrimination) and noting that 1,010 Muslim girls aged 16–18 dropped out of college, partly due to the hijab policy.
• Finally, in May 2026 the order was withdrawn allowing religious symbols including the hijab be worn in schools and colleges.
• Question: Though the Convention and the Muslim community welcomed this step with open arms, the question arose as to why it took the ruling party about 3 years to withdraw the order. 

3. Cattle slaughter law – promise of repeal vs “no proposal”

• Law: Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Act, 2020.
• The report notes the Act’s impact on farmers, traders, butchers, transporters, leather and hide workers, small eateries and Muslim meat traders.
• Congress had politically opposed this law and promised to repeal “unjust and anti‑people” BJP‑era laws within one year.
• However, in July 2023, the Animal Husbandry Minister stated in a written reply there was no proposal to repeal the Act, which media flagged as inconsistent with the party’s earlier stance.
• Demand: A legislative correction that aligns practice with the manifesto promise- review and repeal/replace the 2020 Act. 

4. Restoration of 4% Muslim/Category 2B reservation

• Issue: The previous BJP Government scrapped the 4% OBC quota for Muslims (Category 2B) and redistributed it to Vokkaliga and Lingayat categories.
• In 2023, senior Congress leaders, including the DCM, publicly promised that a Congress government would restore the 4% in the very first Cabinet meeting.
• Media and roundtables repeated this as a categorical assurance.
• Concern: It was flagged that this key reservation promise remains unresolved, despite being one of the clearest pre‑poll commitments.
• Demand: Full restoration of the 4% Category 2B reservation, backed by an explicit Cabinet and legislative decision. 

5. Repeal of the anti‑conversion law

• Law: Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act, 2022 (“anti‑conversion law”).
• On June 15, 2023, the Cabinet decided to repeal this law and stated a repeal Bill would be introduced in the July 2023 session. According to media reports cited, the government later did not table that Bill in the Budget Session, leaving the law in force.
• The report calls this “announcement without completion”: a Cabinet decision that never became legislation.
• Demand: Introduce and pass the repeal Bill so the law is actually taken off the statute book. 

6. ₹10,000 crore annual minority welfare commitment

• Manifesto promise: Raise annual allocations for minorities (Muslims, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, others) to ₹10,000 crore.
• Current status: PRS budget analysis cited in the report shows ₹4,762 crore allocated for minority welfare in 2026–27- less than half the promised figure and under 1% of the total budget.
• The report released notes positive steps, such as upgrading 117 Maulana Azad Model and Urdu schools to Karnataka Public Schools with ₹600 crore, plus 100 more schools with ₹400 crore.
• Concern: Welcome but not at the scale implied by the ₹10,000 crore promise; welfare expansion remains significantly below commitment.
• Demand: Move towards the full ₹10,000 crore annual allocation, with clear focus on education, livelihoods, infrastructure, scholarships and institutions. 

7. Waqf protection and administration

• Context: Waqf properties – mosques, madrasas, health centres, orphanages- are described as major religious and charitable assets of the community.
• The report refers to “systemic failure” in Waqf administration, citing encroachment, illegal sale/transfer, undervalued leases, misuse, weak legal action, and staff shortages.
• It acknowledges initiatives like UMEED digitisation and repair grants as positive but limited steps.
• Demand:

• Stronger measures against encroachment and illegal alienation.
• Better litigation capacity, tribunal strength, administrative staffing.
• Strategic development of under‑utilised Waqf assets, not only minor repairs. 

8. Reservation ceiling, caste survey and social justice architecture

• The report links Muslim issues to broader social justice architecture in Karnataka:

• The need to table and implement caste survey data.
• Addressing the 50% reservation ceiling through mechanisms like Ninth Schedule and OBC internal reservation.

• The argument: Without a clear framework on data, ceilings and internal categories, promises on Muslim reservation (2B) and OBC justice cannot be sustainably implemented.
• Demand:

• Make caste survey data public and act on it.
• Explore constitutional routes to adjust reservation ceilings and internal reservations in line with social realities. 

9. Education – progress but not a full pipeline

• There are some visible positive steps: Maulana Azad Model Schools, Urdu school upgrades, hostels, scholarships, women’s colleges, coaching and loans.
• Core point: Minority education still functions as disconnected schemes, not a “school‑to‑employment pipeline”.
• Gaps identified: Staffing, utilisation, course coverage, scholarship adequacy, hostel capacity, professional pathways and competitive exam success.
• Demand:

• Treat minority education as an integrated education and human capital strategy, from school to jobs, not fragmented welfare. 

10. Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and voting rights

• The report treats Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as a crucial democratic issue: Ensuring Muslim voters are not wrongly deleted or left out before damage is done.
• Concern: Without close monitoring and corrective mechanisms, SIR could result in disenfranchisement in Muslim‑concentrated areas.
• Demand: Proactive steps to protect voting rights, including transparency, grievance redressal and timely corrections before elections.

The convention and the report frames its demands as a call for:

• Clear timelines (Monsoon Session 2026, Budget 2027, before May 2028).
• Legislative and budgetary follow‑through, not just statements.
• A “constructive partnership” between government and the Muslim community, grounded in measurable outcomes and institutional accountability.

The convention’s tone today was not confrontational. It was constitutional – a community reminding a government that votes create accountability, not just mandate.

The harder question now is not whether Congress will respond. It’s whether the Muslim community will, by 2028, still be waiting for the same ten answers – with a fresh set of promises attached. Because if the pattern holds, the next round of “acceptable” leaders is already being prepared to deliver those promises.

And the round after that is already being quietly planned. 

(The author is Editor in chief, NewsHamster (NH), a portal that majorly covers Bengaluru and Karnataka related stories.)

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The post A Reminder Congress Didn’t Ask For: Karnataka Muslim convention demands accountability from the Congress 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

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The extraordinary public support that poured out in his favour at a time when widespread speculation suggested that the Congress high command might consider alternative candidates for the Chief Ministership revealed that his legitimacy had moved beyond mere organisational arithmetic. His popularity emerged through two political strategies that liberal politicians often hesitate to adopt openly. On the one hand, he cultivated a partially anti-neoliberal political language regarding state expenditure, public welfare, and social protection, reassuring ordinary people that welfare measures, subsidies, pensions, and social support systems would not be dismantled in the name of fiscal discipline. On the other hand, he sharply distanced himself from sectarian caste calculations and the overt pressure politics of dominant community organisations that have historically exercised influence over both the UDF and LDF. This combination gave him credibility among sections of the middle class, lower middle class, youth, minorities, and welfare-dependent populations who increasingly fear both aggressive neoliberal restructuring and majoritarian politics.

At the national level too, as the Indian National Congress intensified its confrontation with the Modi government, Satheesan appeared to internalise that oppositional spirit. He did not soften his criticism of the Modi apparatus of power, centralisation, federal pressure tactics, and the expanding ideological influence of Hindutva politics. Unlike many regional leaders who tactically maintain ambiguity, he often spoke in direct political terms, which contributed to his image as a confident opposition leader capable of confronting centralised authority.

However, the challenges before him are enormous. Electoral promises regarding welfare expansion, social protection, employment generation, rising living costs, healthcare, public education, infrastructure, and development will now have to move from rhetoric into governance. He will have to negotiate the pressures exerted by the Modi government through financial control, administrative leverage, central agencies, and the increasingly aggressive posture of the BJP’s Keralam unit. At the same time, he will face an extremely vigilant and politically experienced LDF opposition and its frontal organisations, which will not tolerate any dilution of welfare commitments or visible capitulation to central pressure. Internal dissensions within the Congress and coalition management will remain another continuing challenge.

Despite the several pitfalls and political failures of the previous Left Democratic Front government that eventually contributed to its defeat — issues that the party and its cadre are now reportedly examining with seriousness — one important strategic direction evolved during that period should not be abandoned. The attempt to balance anti-neoliberal welfare politics with large-scale infrastructure expansion, public investment, and calibrated capital inflow represented a significant and imaginative political-economic experiment within the constraints of contemporary federal India. Keralam’s future cannot lie either in crude market fundamentalism or in a stagnant developmental conservatism incapable of generating employment, technological growth, and infrastructural modernisation. The challenge before the new government is therefore not to dismantle that developmental balance, but perhaps to refine it more democratically, transparently, and efficiently while preserving Keralam’s welfare commitments, social indicators, and relatively egalitarian social ethos. More than anyone else, a liberal leader like V. D. Satheesan would recognise that the contributions of the LDF are not something to be discarded or forgotten, but to be critically examined, reassessed, and refined in pursuit of better future outcomes.

Yet the ultimate challenge before V. D. Satheesan lies elsewhere. However progressive his instincts may be, he still operates within the structural and ideological limits of the liberal-democratic framework represented by the Indian National Congress and the United Democratic Front. There are institutional compulsions, entrenched interest groups, coalition pressures, electoral calculations, and inherited political taboos that no leader within that framework can easily transcend. Keralam’s liberal politics functions within a relatively ossified structure in which welfare commitments, development aspirations, market compulsions, caste-community negotiations, coalition management, and Centre-State dependencies are held together through delicate balancing acts rather than through deeper structural transformation.

This creates a fundamental contradiction. A leader may articulate socially progressive positions, defend secularism, support welfare expansion, and even criticise aggressive neoliberalism, but the political system itself imposes limits on how far such positions can be translated into policy. The compulsions of attracting investment, maintaining fiscal discipline under neoliberal federalism, accommodating dominant social blocs, and surviving within coalition arithmetic often restrict the possibility of more radical redistributive or democratic interventions. In that sense, the problem is not merely individual leadership, but the narrowing horizon of liberal politics itself under contemporary capitalism.

He is known to be a voracious reader with wide exposure to literature, political thought, and contemporary debates, and this has enabled him to establish a rapport with writers, artists, public intellectuals, and progressive cultural figures in a manner rarely seen among liberal political leaders today. He often identifies himself broadly with a Nehruvian-Left democratic orientation. More important than ideological labels, however, is his ability to resonate with progressive currents within Keralam’s public sphere that continue to value secularism, civil society freedoms, environmental concerns, democratic dissent, and human rights. This cultural credibility may become politically significant in a period when Keralam itself faces difficult questions regarding development, ecological vulnerability, minority rights, and the future of democratic public culture.

At the same time, the excessively celebratory tone adopted by sections of the media may itself become a source of future difficulty for him. Keralam’s media culture has a tendency to rapidly construct heroic political narratives around leaders during moments of transition, often inflating expectations beyond what any government can realistically deliver within existing structural constraints. Such overflowing adulation can quickly turn into impatience, scrutiny, and disappointment once governance confronts the inevitable realities of fiscal limitations, bureaucratic inertia, coalition pressures, environmental conflicts, and public dissent. In that sense, media-driven personalisation of political success may unintentionally weaken the very leadership it seeks to glorify by transforming complex structural challenges into questions of individual performance and charisma. Satheesan’s real political brilliance will lie in how carefully he navigates this slippery path.

Beyond electoral politics, Keralam itself faces a new developmental crossroads. Questions of ecological sustainability, environmental vulnerability, urban expansion, climate-related disasters, public transport, digital infrastructure, and the future of welfare-oriented development demand serious attention. The expectation is not merely administrative continuity, but innovation in governance and a new developmental imagination suited to Keralam’s changing social realities.

At this moment, however, he deserves congratulations for achieving what many considered politically improbable. Against considerable odds, he succeeded in sustaining public expectations and translating them into an extraordinary mandate. He now carries the aspirations of millions of ordinary Malayalis who look towards the new government with hope — for improved living standards, humane governance, welfare assurances, and a development model capable of combining social justice with infrastructural transformation. Whether he will ultimately live up to these expectations remains to be seen, but the scale of the trust placed in him is itself politically significant in an age marked everywhere by democratic fatigue and public cynicism.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post V.D Satheesan and the Challenges Before a Liberal Leader in Keralam appeared first on SabrangIndia.

CJP stated in the complaints that the alleged hate speeches violated constitutional guarantees under Articles 14, 15 and 21 and attracted offences under provisions relating to promotion of enmity between groups, criminal intimidation, statements conducing to public mischief, deliberate acts intended to outrage religious feelings, and incitement to violence.

The complaints concern speeches delivered in Chandivali and Malad Malvani in Mumbai, Kalyani in Nadia district of West Bengal, and Junnar in Pune district.

Complaint against Nitesh Narayan Rane over Chandivali speech: May 12, 2026

In a complaint dated May 12, 2026, addressed to Shri Nikhil Gupta, Additional Director General (Law & Order), Maharashtra, Addl. Commissioner of Police, West Region, Mumbai, and Senior Police Inspector, Sakinaka Police Station, Mumbai, CJP sought registration of an FIR against BJP MLA and Maharashtra Cabinet Minister Nitesh Narayan Rane for allegedly delivering a divisive communal speech during a Hindu convention held in Chandivali, Mumbai on May 3, 2026.

CJP stated in the complaint that Rane utilised dehumanising language against Muslims, spread conspiracy theories regarding “Love Jihad,” “Land Jihad,” “Corporate Jihad,” and “Ghazwa-e-Hind,” and openly encouraged social and economic boycott of Muslims. The complaint alleged that the speech attempted to create fear and hostility by portraying Muslims as an existential threat to Hindus and India.

According to CJP, Rane repeatedly referred to Muslims as “green snakes” and urged the audience to confront them. The complaint reproduces the speech transcript, including the following statements:

“[They] should come to Maharashtra. This writhing of green snakes (referring to Muslims) must stop. That is why the saffron flag has been unfurled in Maharashtra, remember this.”

“And therefore, while moving around as a Hindu, do so with self-confidence. Move with courage. If any green snake is writhing here, take guidance from Tai and then give me a call.”

The complaint further stated that Rane repeatedly described India as a “Hindu Rashtra” and suggested that Muslims were attempting to convert India into an Islamic nation through organised conspiracies.

CJP also stated in the complaint that Rane attempted to create fear among Hindus by claiming that Muslims would prevent Hindu religious practices if their population increased.

The complaint reproduces the following statements:

“You won’t be able to perform puja in your home. This saffron flag won’t be able to fly here. You won’t be able to apply the Tilak on your forehead.”

“Mothers and sisters won’t be able to apply vermilion (Sindoor) on their heads.”

According to CJP, the speech also included references to alleged communal incidents in Palghar and Virar to reinforce hostility against Muslims. The complaint additionally highlighted Rane’s remarks calling for economic boycott of Muslims:

“So, when we are dealing with them, buying from them, or giving them jobs—first, if someone is sitting at a shop, even if the shop’s signboard says ‘Jay Shri Ram,’ sometimes Abdul is sitting inside.”

“First tell him, ‘Recite the Hanuman Chalisa for me first.’ If you recite the Hanuman Chalisa only then will I buy from you, otherwise I won’t.”

“Therefore, if jobs are to be given or purchases are to be made, it should only be for Hindus—this should be the stance of all of us.”

CJP stated in the complaint that these remarks amounted to explicit encouragement of discrimination and exclusion of citizens based on religion and constituted a direct appeal for economic boycott of Muslims.

A copy of complaint dated May 12, 2026 can be accessed here

Complaint against Nitesh Rane over Malad Malvani speech during Ram Navami Yatra

In another complaint dated April 28, 2026, addressed to Maharashtra Police authorities, CJP sought registration of an FIR against Nitesh Narayan Rane over a speech delivered during the Ram Navami Yatra held in Malad Malvani, Mumbai, on March 26, 2026.

According to CJP, the speech promoted communal hostility, issued direct threats of violence, and attempted to alienate Muslims by declaring India a “Hindu Rashtra” and describing the locality as belonging exclusively to “saffron-clad” Hindus.

CJP stated in the complaint that Rane used references to “Pakistan” as a dog-whistle against Muslims and openly threatened those opposing Hindutva ideology.

The complaint reproduces the following portions of the speech:

“Perhaps some people here in Malvani have forgotten that this is our Hindu Rashtra, this is not someone’s Pakistan. If anyone tries to remove that saffron flag, we will not let their cylinder come up again. If anyone again looks at our saffron flag with dirty eyes, then their eyes will be taken out and played with like marbles.”

CJP alleged that these remarks amounted to open threats of violence and intimidation. The complaint further stated that Rane specifically directed slogans toward a mosque in the locality, thereby attempting to provoke confrontation and disturb communal harmony. The reproduced statement reads:

“That voice must reach the big mosque.”

According to CJP, such statements sought to intimidate the Muslim community and portray them as outsiders within the constitutional framework of India. The complaint also alleged that Rane invoked the authority of a “government with a Hindutva ideology” to suggest political backing for aggressive communal mobilisation.

A copy of complaint dated April 28, 2026 can be accessed here

Complaint against Hari Mishra in West Bengal over hate speech during election campaign in Nadia

In a complaint dated May 6, 2026 addressed to the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police in Nadia district, West Bengal, CJP sought registration of an FIR under Sections 196, 197, 299, 302, 352 and 353 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 against BJP leader Hari Mishra for a speech delivered during an election campaign in Kalyani, Nadia district, on April 23, 2026. CJP stated in the complaint that Mishra spread anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and falsely claimed that Hindu festivals could not be celebrated in Muslim-majority areas.

The complaint reproduces portions of the speech including:

“In any area where the Muslim population is above 30-35%, Saraswati Puja will not happen. In places like Malda and Murshidabad… you first have to take permission from the nearest mosque. A situation worse than Bangladesh is going to happen on the soil of West Bengal.”

CJP further alleged that Mishra falsely claimed that the Constitution of India did not function in parts of West Bengal. The reproduced transcript includes:

“The Constitution of India does not work in many parts of Malda and Murshidabad. In about 25-30% of the areas in Malda and Murshidabad, the Constitution, rules, laws, and regulations of India do not apply.”

The complaint also referred to statements linking demographic change with political exclusion: “The day Muslims reach above 40-45%, not a single Hindu MP, MLA, counselor, or chairman will remain in West Bengal.”

According to CJP, these remarks sought to portray Muslims as a threat to democratic institutions and communal coexistence and were intended to create fear and polarisation during the election period.

A copy of complaint dated May 6, 2026 can be accessed here

Complaint against Harshu Thakur in Junnar, Pune over speech delivered at Virat Hindu Sammelan

In a separate complaint dated May 6, 2026, addressed to the Additional Director General (Law & Order), Maharashtra, the Superintendent of Police, Pune Rural, and the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Junnar Division, CJP sought registration of an FIR against Harshu Thakur over a speech delivered at the Virat Hindu Sammelan held in Junnar, Pune district, on April 19, 2026. CJP stated in the complaint that Thakur spread anti-Muslim rhetoric through references to “Forest Jihad,” “Love Jihad,” and “Land Jihad,” while also making statements encouraging militarised responses and targeting Islamic institutions and burial practices.

The complaint reproduces the following statements:

“Wherever there is open land, there are graves. If you start funding madrasas, then only terrorists will be produced there. Mulla-Maulvis give them training on how to trap girls in ‘Love Jihad’ and how to carry out ‘Land Jihad’. They are taught how to make bombs.”

CJP further highlighted remarks targeting Muslim men and encouraging women to arm themselves:

“All these ‘Abduls’ are the same. Every Hindu woman just needs to be given a weapon.”

The complaint also alleged that Thakur attempted to frame Muslims as inherently violent while encouraging religious segregation and hostility.

A copy of complaint dated May 6, 2026 can be accessed here

Judicial precedents on which CJP relied upon

In the complaints submitted before police authorities in Maharashtra and West Bengal, CJP also relied upon multiple judicial precedents of the Supreme Court concerning hate speech, communal targeting, and the constitutional obligation of authorities to act against inflammatory rhetoric. Referring to the Supreme Court judgment in Firoz Iqbal Khan vs Union of India [W.P. (Civ.) No. 956 of 2020], CJP highlighted the Court’s observations that “the edifice of a democratic society committed to the rule of law under a regime of constitutional rights, values and duties is founded on the co-existence of communities. India is a melting pot of civilisations, cultures, religions and languages. Any attempt to vilify a religious community must be viewed with grave disfavour by this Court as the custodian of constitutional values.”

CJP stated that the speeches delivered by Nitesh Rane, Hari Mishra, and Harshu Thakur collectively portrayed Muslims as conspirators, outsiders, extremists, and demographic threats, thereby directly undermining constitutional values of equality, fraternity, and peaceful coexistence. The complaints further referred to Pravasi Bhalai Sangathan v. Union of India [AIR 2014 SC 1591], where the Supreme Court observed that “hate speech is an effort to marginalise individuals based on their membership to a group,” and warned that such speech can lay the groundwork for discrimination, ostracism, violence, and even genocide. CJP stated that the repeated references to “Love Jihad,” “Land Jihad,” “Forest Jihad,” “Corporate Jihad,” alleged demographic conspiracies, and calls for economic boycott sought to institutionalise fear and hostility against Muslims and therefore warranted immediate criminal action.

The complaints additionally cited the Supreme Court’s order dated April 28, 2023 in Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay v. Union of India [W.P. (C) No. 943 of 2021], wherein all States and Union Territories were directed to register suo moto FIRs against hate speech irrespective of religion whenever offences under Sections 153A, 153B, 295A, 505 IPC and related provisions are attracted.

Provisions related to hate speech under BNS, 2023

CJP further stated that the speeches attract multiple provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, particularly Sections 196, 197, 299, 302, 352 and 353. According to the complaints, the repeated targeting of Muslim religious institutions, educational spaces, and social identity through references such as “green snakes,” “Forest Jihad,” “Land Jihad,” and allegations that madrasas produce “only terrorists” amounted to promoting enmity between religious groups and acts prejudicial to communal harmony under Section 196 BNS.

CJP stated that the speeches also made imputations against the constitutional allegiance of an entire community by portraying Muslims and Islamic institutions as threats to the State, thereby attracting Section 197 BNS. The complaints further alleged that mocking Dargahs, Mazars, burial practices, Islamic scholars, and Muslim religious practices constituted deliberate insults to religion and religious beliefs under Sections 299 and 302 BNS.

CJP additionally argued that the repeated calls for mobilisation, warnings regarding demographic change, threats of violence, references to arming civilians, and calls for economic boycott amounted to intentional provocation intended to breach public peace under Section 352 BNS and dissemination of false information likely to create fear and communal unrest under Section 353 BNS.

The complaints maintained that the speeches delivered across Mumbai, Pune, and Nadia reflected a continuing pattern of inflammatory communal rhetoric aimed at deepening religious polarisation and normalising hostility against Muslims, thereby necessitating immediate registration of FIRs and preventive intervention by the concerned police authorities in compliance with constitutional obligations and Supreme Court directives.

Maharashtra DGP circulars cited by CJP

CJP also referred to circulars issued by the Director General of Police, Maharashtra, in February and April 2023 concerning preventive and penal action against hate speech.

According to the complaint, Circular No. DGP 20/Petition No.940/2022/54.2023 dated February 2, 2023 highlighted the Supreme Court’s order dated January 13, 2023 directing police authorities to take suo motu action whenever speeches attract offences under Sections 153A, 153B, 295A and 505 IPC.

The circular had directed all Unit Commanders to follow the Supreme Court order and entails “measures to be taken to maintain law and order due to agitations, morchas, speeches etc.”

It gives detailed instructions on what steps are to be taken when any morchas are to be held:

“2. All the Unit Commanders should hold a meeting with the concerned organisers before such a morcha and fix the route of the morcha with appropriate terms and condition. A combined meeting of all social groups should be taken to convey clearly to all that they should maintain peace and keep law and order during the morcha. Preventive action against Anti-social elements should be taken. Those elements who help in maintaining peace and harmony should be encouraged. Audio Video recording of the morcha should be done. Police Head Quarters should ensure adequate supply of equipment’s, like Lathi, Helmets, etc. to police men deployed for morcha bandobast. If any law-and-order situation arises, offences should be registered immediately and arrest should be made. Intelligence machinery should be activated to collect advance information about morcha, agitation and efforts should be made to pre-empt any communal incidents.”

Supreme Court directions on preventing/prosecuting hate speakers

CJP further referred to multiple Supreme Court orders concerning hate speech and preventive policing. According to the complaints, on February 3, 2023, the Supreme Court issued directions regarding a proposed event by Sakal Hindu Samaj in Mumbai and directed that if permission was granted for the event, it would be subject to the condition that no hate speech would be delivered.

The court also outlined directives with respect to taking preventive action in such cases:

“We also direct that the Officer(s), in case, permission is granted and, in case, the occasion arises for invoking the power under Section 151 of Cr.P.C. as aforesaid, it shall be the duty of the Officer(s) concerned to invoke the said power and to act as per the mandate of Section 151 of the Cr.P.C.” 

Even in 2024 itself, while on January 17, the Supreme Court bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta had expressed their anguish at the petitioners being forced to approach the Supreme Court multiple times against individuals and organisations even after there being guidelines for tacking and taking action against hate speeches. During the said hearing, the Supreme Court issued an order directing the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police at Yavatmal, Maharashtra and Raipur, Chhattisgarh to take ‘appropriate steps’ to ensure that no incitement to hate speech occurs at the rallies scheduled in the said districts in the coming few days of January.

The said order was passed following the concerns raised by the petitioners over delivery of potential hate speeches at rallies planned by Hindu Janjagruti Samiti and Bharatiya Janata Party Legislator T Raja Singh in the month of January.

CJP stated that the court had outlined directives with respect to taking preventive action in such cases:

“We would require the authorities to be conscious that no incitement to violence and hate speech are permissible. The concerned District Magistrates and Superintendent of Police of Yavatmal, Maharashtra and Raipur, Chhattisgarh will take necessary steps, as may be required. If necessary and deemed appropriate, police/administration will install CCTV Cameras having recording facility, so as to ensure identification of the perpetrators in the event of any violence/hate speech.”

Background: Profile of Nitesh Rane and previous complaints filed by CJP

CJP stated in its complaints that the speeches delivered in Chandivali and Malad Malvani were not isolated incidents but formed part of a continuing pattern of inflammatory speeches allegedly delivered by Nitesh Rane across Maharashtra. According to CJP, the organisation had previously filed complaints dated March 7, March 18, and March 28, 2025 concerning speeches delivered by Rane in Sindhudurg, Pune, and Ratnagiri districts.

The complaints related to events including:

• “Hindu Rashtra Adhiveshan” in Kundal on February 8, 2025
• “Shivjanmostav” event in Sawantwadi on February 19, 2025
• Public felicitation programme at Nanijdham, Ratnagiri on February 20, 2025
• Religious gathering in Wagholi, Pune on February 5, 2025

CJP stated that across these events, Rane repeatedly invoked terms such as “Love Jihad” and “Land Jihad,” portrayed Muslims as a collective threat, and made statements capable of inciting hostility, fear, and social boycott against the Muslim community. The complaints further stated that such rhetoric, particularly when delivered by a sitting Cabinet Minister, was inflammatory, unsupported by evidence, and violative of constitutional protections.

FIRs and ongoing legal scrutiny against Nitesh Rane

Under the judicial oversight of the Bombay High Court in Aftab Siddique & Ors. v. The State of Maharashtra (2024), multiple FIRs have already been registered against Nitesh Rane in connection with alleged hate speech cases. CJP reproduced details of these FIRs in its complaints and stated that they reflected a continuing pattern of communal speeches delivered by Rane in different parts of Maharashtra.

Mankhurd Police Station (C.R. No. 152/2024)

Registered against Nitesh Rane under Sections 153A, 503, 504 and 505 IPC. According to the complaint, this case originated from speeches perceived as threatening to the Muslim community and capable of inciting public disorder.

Ghatkopar Police Station (C.R. No. 521/2024)

Registered against Nitesh Rane and Subhash Ahir under Sections 153A, 504, 506 and 188 IPC in connection with inflammatory speeches delivered in Mumbai suburbs.

Kashimira Police Station (C.R. No. 259/2024)

Registered against Nitesh Rane and Geeta Jain in relation to the Mira-Bhayander incidents under Sections 153A, 153B, 143, 504 and 506 IPC along with Section 37(1) read with Section 135 of the Maharashtra Police Act.

Malwani Police Station (C.R. No. 298/2024)

Originally registered against Bhagwan Thakur, with Nitesh Rane later added as an accused under Sections 153A, 504 and 506 IPC in relation to speeches targeting specific religious communities.

CJP further pointed out that Nitesh Rane’s October 2024 election affidavit reportedly disclosed 38 FIRs registered against him, including 20 cases relating specifically to allegations of hate speech.

Related

Free and Fair Elections: CJP’s 2025 fight against hate and voter intimidation

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Law as Resistance: A year of CJP’s interventions against a rising tide of hate

The post CJP files complaint against BJP MLA & Minister Nitesh Rane and right-wing leaders over alleged hate speeches in Maharashtra and West Bengal appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Citizens for Justice and Peace is providing legal aid in this case.

Details of the proceedings

Court examines how the Tribunal opinion became ex-parte: At the outset, counsel appearing for the Foreigners Tribunal authorities prayed for time to file an affidavit in the matter. The Bench then asked what the case concerned. Appearing for the petitioner, Senior Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta submitted that the writ petition challenges an ex parte opinion passed by the Foreigners Tribunal in 2018.

Seeking clarification, the Bench asked what exactly was meant by the opinion being “ex-parte.”

Senior Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta explained that the petitioner had initially appeared before the Tribunal but was unable to continue contesting the proceedings because he could not afford the advocate’s fees. As a result, although appearance had been entered before the Tribunal, the matter eventually proceeded ex-parte.

The Bench then specifically asked whether legal aid had been provided at any stage. In response, Senior Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta also submitted that no legal aid had been extended to the petitioner despite his financial condition. He further informed the Court that the absence of legal aid constitutes one of the central grounds in the present writ petition. According to him, legal aid could have been made available, but there was no effort on the part of the authorities or the system to ensure representation after it became clear that the petitioner was unable to sustain private legal counsel.

The Court then asked till what stage the petitioner had participated in the Tribunal proceedings. Senior Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta clarified that although appearance had been entered before the Tribunal, no written statement had ultimately been filed.

State introduces allegation of “pushback” during hearing: The Bench then turned to counsel appearing for the Foreigners Tribunal authorities and asked whether the State’s case was that the petitioner had simply neglected to file the written statement.

In response, counsel for the Tribunal authorities stated before the Court that it was “not a case of neglect,” and further alleged that the petitioner had been “pushed back” and had thereafter “again entered India.”

The statement appeared to take the petitioner’s side by surprise. Senior Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta immediately responded that this was entirely new information to him and had never previously surfaced in the proceedings or records available to the petitioner. The Bench remarked to him that he was “a veteran in the field.”

Senior Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta clarified that no allegation regarding any pushback had ever been disclosed earlier and that this was the first time such a statement had been made in court. He submitted that nothing on record available to him suggested that the petitioner had been pushed back and had subsequently re-entered India.

Following this exchange, counsel for the Tribunal authorities reiterated the request for time to place the State’s stand on affidavit.

Court questions why notice had not been issued earlier: The Bench then asked whether notice had formally been issued in the writ petition. Senior Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta explained that notice had not yet been issued because, during the earlier hearing, the State had sought time to address the question of delay by filing an affidavit. In the meantime, however, interim protection against deportation had already been granted by the Court.

The Bench also enquired whether the petitioner continued to remain in detention. Senior Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta informed the Court that, to his knowledge, the petitioner remained lodged in the detention camp. When asked since when, he submitted that the petitioner had been in custody since May 25, 2025, on the basis of the 2018 Foreigners Tribunal opinion. He further reminded the Court that the present writ petition had been filed pursuant to liberty granted by the Supreme Court to challenge the Tribunal’s opinion.

Notice issued; Court observes fresh hearing may be considered

After hearing the parties, the Bench observed that notice ought now to be formally issued so that the State would be required to place its stand on affidavit.

The Court accordingly issued notice in the matter, making it returnable by June 15, 2026. The Bench also directed that the interim protection against deportation shall continue.

Significantly, while dictating the order, the Court observed that if the petitioner succeeds in making out a case for remanding the matter to the Foreigners Tribunal for a fresh hearing, such a course should be considered immediately.

The observation assumes significance in light of the petitioner’s argument that the Tribunal proceedings culminated in an ex parte opinion after he became unable to afford legal representation and despite no legal aid being provided.

Background of the Case

The writ petition challenges the ex-parte opinion dated June 13, 2018, passed by the Foreigners Tribunal, Chirang, declaring Abdul Sheikh @ Abdul Gafar to be a foreigner who had allegedly entered India after March 25, 1971.

According to the petition, the petitioner had initially contested the proceedings through counsel but could not continue because of severe financial constraints. The petition states that the ex-parte nature of the opinion was therefore not the result of deliberate non-participation, but the petitioner’s inability to continue private legal representation.

The petition further records that the petitioner was detained in 2019 and released in 2021 pursuant to prevailing directions governing prolonged detention of declared foreigners. It states that he was again taken into custody on May 25, 2025.

The present challenge before the High Court has been filed after the Supreme Court, while disposing of earlier proceedings in December 2025, clarified that the petitioner would remain at liberty to challenge the Foreigners Tribunal opinion.

The petition attributes the delay in filing the present challenge to prolonged detention, financial hardship, lack of legal aid, restricted access while in custody, and the practical difficulty of preparing legal proceedings without direct communication with the detenue.

The matter will next be heard on June 15, 2026.

Details of the previous proceedings may be read here.

Related:

“They were once sent back, awaiting deportation”: State’s new claim deepens uncertainty over fate of Abdul Sheikh and Majibur Rehman

Gauhati HC defers final hearing in Majibur Rehman and Abdul Sheikh petitions; Questions state on justification for continued detention

CJP scores big win! Citizenship restored to Mazirun Bewa, a widowed daily wage worker from Assam

Victory in Dhubri FT: Jarina Bibi declared Indian after years of ordeal

Assam’s New SOP Hands Citizenship Decisions to Bureaucrats: Executive overreach or legal necessity?

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Long before the current anxieties around Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercises emerged, CJP had already been deeply involved in questions surrounding identity documentation, citizenship verification and exclusionary administrative processes. Our first intensive and continuing interventions are in the north-eastern state of Assam, where a peculiar blend of exclusivist xenophobic politics shaped policy and actions that have together targeted legitimate Indians in the quagmire of having ‘to establish documented citizenship.’ Read about CJP’d continuing journey through 2025 here.

Subsequently, two years down the line, 2019-2020, during the months and years of fear generated by the CAA-NRC debates, CJP organised extensive documentation and awareness campaigns across several states, helping communities understand legal processes, preserve records, obtain missing documents and resist panic-driven misinformation. The organisation’s interventions consistently focused on ensuring that vulnerable populations—especially minorities, migrants, women, Adivasis, Denotified Tribes (DNTs), informal workers and economically marginalised groups—were not pushed outside the constitutional framework through procedural barriers.

Detailed reports may be read here, here, here and here.

It is from this history of engagement that CJP, together with Vote for Democracy (VFD), began conducting a series of detailed SIR awareness and training sessions in Maharashtra. In 2025, with the elections to the Bihar State Assembly, the State’s most recent efforts to push large sections of Indians to potential disenfranchisement by exacting an unrealistic ‘citizenship test’ began. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise that subsequently travelled to Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh has defied statutory law (Representation of People’s Act, 1951), Constitutional precedents (Article 14, 15 and 21) and the basic principles of due process and natural justice.

Tragically, this SIR exercise has been preceded by the most significant erosion of autonomy and integrity of a constitutional body like the Election Commission of India (ECI), casting a cloud on the very integrity of the election process under Articles 324-326 of the Indian Constitution. Vote for Democracy (VFD), a citizens’ platform guided by experts has analysed and exposed this deterioration of fair and free elections from the parliamentary elections of April-June 2024. VFD’s reports may be read here, here, here and here.

These trainings were never intended to legitimise or endorse a hurried and deeply problematic SIR exercise. In fact, the position adopted by CJP and VFD has remained unequivocal: the current SIR model, as implemented across multiple states, raises profound constitutional concerns because of the manner in which it transfers the burden of proof onto ordinary citizens while creating conditions ripe for exclusion and disenfranchisement. The purpose of the trainings, therefore, was not compliance for its own sake. It was protection.

As the CJP-VFD booklet on SIR itself clearly states, the trainings are meant “strictly to arm you with the tools to defend your rights and navigate this unconstitutional hurdle, not to legitimise it.”

The booklet may be read here and here.

At a time when fear, misinformation and confusion were spreading rapidly among communities, the trainings sought to communicate one essential message: panic helps exclusionary systems thrive. Knowledge, preparation and collective solidarity followed by determined interventions and action, are what protect democratic rights.

The Maharashtra trainings

Over the course of several months, CJP conducted three major SIR-focused training and awareness programmes in Maharashtra:

• March 21: Training session with Bombay Catholic Sabha
• April 16: Joint awareness and training session with a Community-Based Organisation (CBO), Agripada, South Mumbai
• April 30: Community training programme with Jan Haqq Sangharsh Samiti

These were not routine seminars or technical workshops. They became spaces where fear, uncertainty and lived experiences surfaced openly.

Participants included community organisers, women’s groups, migrant workers, social activists, minority organisations, students, religious leaders, local volunteers, housing rights advocates, DNT representatives, trade union workers, and ordinary residents increasingly worried about how SIR-style exercises could impact their ability to remain on electoral rolls.

Across all three programmes, a striking reality emerged repeatedly: for many people, the fear was not abstract. It was deeply personal. The idea that decades-old documents could suddenly determine one’s legitimacy as a voter –and thereafter a citizen– triggered anxieties rooted in poverty, displacement, migration, illiteracy, gender discrimination and bureaucratic neglect accumulated over generations.

In fact, for a joint delegation meeting with the CEO of Maharashtra, Chokkalingam in early March 2026, of which CJP was a crucial part, was revelatory. The officer unambiguously stated that the 2003 Guidelines would not be followed but also admitted that ‘no fresh guidelines had yet been issued’ by the ECI, Delhi. Emphasising that the current exercise would be one in determining that ‘only Indians’ figure on the electoral roll, Chokkalingam explained the amendments made to Section 3 of the Indian Citizenship Act, 1955 that distinguished between a) those born before 1987, b) those between 1987 (July 1) and 2004 and those c) those born after that date in terms of what sorts of documentary proof were required to ‘establish’ Indian citizenship. For a) simply being born in India was proof enough, for b) in addition to his/her own birth in India, it was required to establish that at least one of the parents was Indian; and for c) it was important to establish that neither mother nor father was an ‘illegal immigrant.’

The Bihar and West Bengal Experience: Why these trainings became necessary

The Maharashtra sessions were built directly upon the extensive field experiences documented by CJP and VFD teams in states where SIR-related exercises had already generated serious problems. These include Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. Assam has, meanwhile only so far had a Special Revision (SR) of its rolls, not an SIR.

Ground reports from Bihar and West Bengal revealed patterns of confusion, mass anxiety, arbitrary notices, technological mismatches, documentation hurdles and administrative opacity. These findings eventually culminated in the publication of the detailed handbook Inside the Special Intensive Revision (SIR): Deadly Deadlines, Mechanical Disenfranchisement, and the Ground Reality of Claims and Objections Period & SIR Notices/Hearings.

The booklet combined investigative analysis, field documentation, legal guidance and practical training material. It explained the structure of the SIR process, the roles of electoral officers, the significance of legacy electoral rolls, the functioning of notices and hearings, appeal mechanisms, acceptable documents, and the methods through which exclusion was being operationalised on the ground.

Most importantly, it documented how the current SIR framework represented a dramatic departure from earlier electoral revision exercises.

The 2003 SIR process, for example, had been conducted over nearly six months, relied on existing electoral rolls and EPIC cards as foundational documents, and emphasised facilitative house-to-house verification. Enumerators were not expected to function as citizenship adjudicators. This time round, 2025-2026, with the ECI acting like the weaponised (read unconstitutional) arm of an exclusivist regime, hurried and arbitrary adjudications on citizenship have become the order of the day.

The present model, therefore, has increasingly transformed electoral verification into an exercise marked by compressed timelines, mechanical scrutiny, opaque software systems, and retrospective documentary burdens. CJP and VFD’s field reports documented how software-driven mismatches involving spelling variations, transliteration differences, age-gap calculations and data-entry inconsistencies generated large numbers of “unmatched” or “suspicious” entries.

The Maharashtra trainings therefore emerged not from speculation, but from documented experiences already unfolding elsewhere.

What happens when the poor are asked to prove their existence?

A significant portion of the Maharashtra trainings conducted by CJP focused on helping participants understand the broad range of documents that may potentially be relied upon during SIR-related verification processes. Methods of accessing documents that may exist and be available with local authorities, understanding and tracking legacy and linkages to those voters/citizens who are available and verifiable in the baseline document –the electoral role between 2002-2004—were also granularly shared. CJP’s experiences pan-India across states and regions, intervening on multiple fronts has created a rich knowledge base of accessing documents from levels of the bureaucracy and this is being widely shared. The trainings repeatedly stressed an important point: people often panic because they assume that the absence of one “perfect” document automatically disqualifies them. However, the indicative list itself demonstrates that identity and eligibility can be established through multiple forms of documentary evidence.

Participants were carefully guided through the list of acceptable or supporting documents referenced in the handbook and subsequent judicial interventions. These include: identity cards or pension payment orders issued to government employees or pensioners; identity cards or certificates issued by government authorities, banks, post offices, LIC or PSUs prior to July 1, 1987; birth certificates; passports; matriculation or educational certificates; permanent residence certificates; forest rights certificates; OBC, SC or ST caste certificates; NRC records where available; family registers prepared by state or local authorities; land or house allotment certificates; Aadhaar cards; and Class 10 admit cards or pass certificates.

Throughout the trainings, facilitators repeatedly emphasised that even one among these documents, when supported with supplementary records and consistent identity details, could help establish a person’s identity and continued existence within the social and administrative framework of the country. The sessions therefore focused heavily on practical strategies: how to organise documents chronologically, how to retrieve old records, how to preserve photocopies and acknowledgements, and how to identify alternative supporting papers where primary documents were unavailable.

Yet, as the discussions during the trainings revealed, the ground reality surrounding documentation is far more complicated than official lists often assume. For large sections of the population, documents are not simply lying safely preserved in family cupboards waiting to be produced before authorities. Instead, documentation histories are fragmented by poverty, migration, environmental disasters, displacement, gender discrimination and bureaucratic neglect accumulated over decades. Many participants explained that births in their communities took place at home and were never formally registered. Others spoke of losing papers during drought-induced migration, floods, demolitions, fires or repeated changes in residence. Several older participants described how schools they attended no longer exist, making retrieval of school leaving certificates or mark sheets almost impossible today.

Women repeatedly raised concerns about documentary inconsistencies arising from early (pre 18 or 21 years) marriage-related surname changes, spelling variations and shifts in residence. Some women who were married young explained that they had voted for the first time from their husband’s homes, bypassing any formal electoral linkage with their natal families. This now makes tracing documentary continuity with parental records extremely difficult though not impossible.

Similarly, members of Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs), migrant workers and daily wage earners pointed out that even obtaining caste certificates, residence proofs or duplicate records often requires multiple visits to government offices—something many cannot afford without losing crucial daily income. For homeless persons, tenants, informal workers and highly mobile populations, stable address-based documentation itself becomes a challenge.

The trainings therefore highlighted a critical contradiction at the heart of documentation-heavy verification exercises: while the State increasingly demands layered documentary proof, millions of people have historically lived at the margins of formal documentation systems themselves. In this context, the sessions sought not only to explain which documents may help, but also to collectively confront the deeper structural inequalities that determine who is able to preserve paperwork, who is visible within administrative systems, and who remains vulnerable to exclusion.

Documents Decide Everything: The fear communities brought into the trainings

One of the most powerful aspects of the Maharashtra sessions was the extent to which people spoke openly about the fragility of their documentary histories. Again and again, participants raised concerns that exposed the enormous disconnect between bureaucratic expectations and lived realities.

The missing birth certificate problem: Perhaps the most recurring concern involved birth certificates.

Large sections of older generations, particularly from rural, working-class and poor communities, were born at home and never formally registered with civil authorities. Institutional births were inaccessible, expensive or culturally uncommon for decades. Women participants repeatedly spoke about how neither they nor their siblings had any birth records because births took place with the assistance of local midwives rather than within hospitals.

The statistics themselves reveal why this remains such a massive issue. Birth registration in India became widespread only relatively recently. Even official data shows significant historical gaps in registration coverage.

For many participants, the sudden expectation that decades-old birth records must now exist produced profound anxiety.

Maharashtra’s histories of drought, migration and loss: Participants also described how environmental and economic crises had repeatedly destroyed family records.

Several communities had lived through devastating droughts across parts of Maharashtra, forcing migration, distress movement and repeated displacement. Others recalled losing documents during floods, cyclones, fires or long-term housing instability. Some participants referred to records lost during the tsunami years or during forced relocations connected to urban redevelopment and informal settlement demolitions. For poor families surviving through cycles of migration and precarious labour, preserving fragile paper records over decades was often impossible.

Yet the current SIR-style expectations assume stable homes, continuous paperwork, formal institutional access and uninterrupted documentation histories.

When the school itself no longer exists: Another major issue that surfaced repeatedly was the problem of accessing school records. Many older government schools, village schools and informal educational institutions no longer exist in their original form. Buildings were demolished, records disappeared, administrations changed, or archives were never digitised.

Several participants explained that even when they knew they had once studied in a particular school, obtaining school leaving certificates or mark sheets today had become practically impossible because the institution itself had shut down or records were destroyed years ago.

For individuals from poor families who studied intermittently or dropped out early to begin work, educational documentation is often fragmentary or inaccessible. Yet these very records are increasingly treated as crucial identity markers.

The invisible burden on Denotified tribes and marginalised communities: The trainings also foregrounded concerns specific to Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs), whose histories of exclusion from stable settlement patterns, education systems and formal state recognition continue to shape their present vulnerabilities.

Participants pointed out that many DNT communities remain structurally under-documented because generations lived outside formal administrative frameworks. Accessing caste certificates, residence records or historical proofs often requires repeated interactions with distant bureaucratic offices.

For daily wage earners, every visit to a government office means losing a day’s income. The trainings repeatedly emphasised that documentation burdens are never socially neutral. They fall most heavily on those already living precariously.

Women and documentary disruption: Women’s experiences emerged as one of the most significant dimensions of the discussions. Across communities and religions, women described how marriage routinely disrupted documentary continuity. Changes in surname after marriage frequently resulted in inconsistencies across different identity documents.

Many older women explained that they had married before turning 18 and had voted for the first time from their husband’s residence rather than from their natal home. This makes establishing documentary linkage with parental records extraordinarily difficult decades later.

Minor spelling variations across ration cards, Aadhaar cards, voter IDs, educational certificates and marriage-related records further complicate verification. The Maharashtra trainings paid particular attention to these gendered documentary realities because women are often expected to “prove” continuity across names, addresses and households shaped by patriarchal social structures.

Electoral revision cannot become citizenship surveillance

Throughout the sessions, CJP and VFD repeatedly stressed a crucial constitutional principle: electoral revision cannot be converted into a mechanism of suspicion against already-enfranchised citizens.

The handbook itself notes that the present SIR framework reverses long-standing democratic presumptions by effectively treating registered voters as suspect unless they can repeatedly prove their eligibility through documentary evidence.

This is particularly alarming because millions of people currently on electoral rolls have already voted in multiple elections over decades.

The trainings therefore focused heavily on rights awareness:

• understanding notices,
• organising documents,
• preserving acknowledgements,
• seeking written orders,
• attending hearings with support persons,
• filing appeals,
• resisting arbitrary deletions,
• and documenting procedural violations.

Participants were also trained on how to search older electoral rolls, including the 2002–2004 rolls increasingly treated as “legacy data” within SIR processes. The sessions explained the functioning of Booth Level Officers (BLOs), Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs), appeal processes, and the importance of procedural safeguards.

Rights groups and CBO’s were trained on and encouraged to, by the CJP team, to organise collectively and voice concerns with the offices of the state election commission so that specific concerns and anxieties of the varieties of stake holders—genuine voters, be they migrants from other states, women, minorities, DNTs, displaced persons—could be readily addressed by an otherwise opaque SEC.

CJP’s memorandum to the Maharashtra CEO

Parallel to these trainings, CJP and VFD formally approached the Maharashtra State Election Commission and the Chief Electoral Officer of Maharashtra with a detailed memorandum raising concerns about possible disenfranchisement and procedural opacity.

The memorandum urged authorities to ensure:

• accessible and searchable electoral rolls,
• properly trained personnel,
• multilingual assistance systems,
• protection against algorithmic exclusion,
• public transparency,
• a publicised social audit of the draft revised polls and the final ones (this has been mentioned as a mandatory and healthy requirement in the ECI’s own 2023 Handbook of Guidelines on Electoral Rolls;
• and safeguards against arbitrary deletions.

Importantly, the memorandum emphasised that electoral revision must reduce fear rather than produce it. It warned that when documentation burdens are imposed without adequate support structures, the people who suffer first are always those already pushed to the margins: minorities, migrants, tenants, women, informal workers, DNTs and economically vulnerable populations.

Beyond Documentation: Building collective confidence

What distinguished these Maharashtra trainings was that they did not treat documentation as merely technical paperwork. They recognised documentation as deeply tied to dignity, memory, class, caste, migration, gender and survival.

For many participants, the sessions became spaces where people realised they were not individually “failing” because documents were missing or inconsistent. Rather, their experiences reflected structural realities shared by millions across India.

The trainings therefore consistently emphasised solidarity and collective defence:

• helping elderly persons retrieve records,
• assisting women facing name mismatches,
• supporting migrant workers unable to attend hearings,
• guiding daily wage earners through documentation processes,
• and ensuring that vulnerable communities do not face bureaucratic intimidation alone.

At a time when administrative processes increasingly risk producing fear and invisibility, these sessions attempted to restore confidence in constitutional rights and democratic participation.

A democratic intervention against fear

Ultimately, the SIR trainings conducted by CJP across Maharashtra were not merely legal awareness programmes. They were democratic interventions against fear.

They sought to remind people that the right to vote is not a favour granted conditionally by shifting bureaucratic systems. It is a constitutional guarantee rooted in the promise of universal adult franchise. They also sought to expose a harsh reality: when democratic participation becomes dependent upon perfect documentation histories stretching across decades, exclusion ceases to be accidental. It becomes structural.

For precisely this reason, the trainings insisted that preparation—not panic—must guide public response. Because behind every “missing document,” “mismatched name,” or “unavailable legacy record” is not simply a paperwork problem, but a human history shaped by poverty, migration, patriarchy, displacement, disaster and institutional neglect.

And it is these histories that CJP’s Maharashtra trainings sought to bring into the centre of the conversation—so that democracy is not reduced to an exercise in mechanical verification, but remains anchored in constitutional inclusion, human dignity and collective rights.

Related:

Inside the SIR: A voter roll exercise turning into a test of survival

Demystifying the SIR Notice: A systemic hurdle, not a final verdict

CJP Assam: A journey without parallel, evolving & expanding rights jurisprudence

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As reported by Live Law, the new order immediately nullifies the earlier 2022 government directive and expressly allows students to wear symbols and articles associated with religious or customary practice, including the hijab or headscarf, turban (Pete), sacred thread or Janeu (Janivara), Shivadhara, Rudraksha and other similar faith-based items. The government clarified that such symbols would be permissible so long as they do not interfere with institutional discipline, safety, identification of students, classroom functioning or public order.

The state government has framed the move as an attempt to balance constitutional values of equality, secularism and inclusion with the need to maintain institutional discipline. According to reports published by The Times of India, the order emphasises that educational institutions are constitutional spaces meant to cultivate scientific temper, rational thinking, fraternity, dignity, equality and mutual respect among students. The preamble to the order states that “secularism, in constitutional sense, does not mean opposition to personal beliefs,” but instead requires equal respect for all faiths, institutional neutrality and non-discriminatory conduct by the State and educational authorities.

The government further observed that institutional discipline and uniformity can be preserved “without mandatorily prohibiting limited traditional and practice-based symbols that students commonly wear.” Referring to provisions under the Karnataka Education Act, 1983 and Rule 11 of the Karnataka Education Institutions (Classification, Regulation and Prescription of Curricula etc.) Rules, 1995, the order states that limited faith-based practices may be accommodated so long as they do not disrupt teaching, safety or order within educational institutions.

Importantly, the circular also provides explicit protections against exclusion and humiliation of students. It states that no student wearing permitted symbols can be denied admission, attendance, participation in classroom activities, examinations, competitions or academic progress solely on that basis. The order further directs that no student shall be compelled to remove such symbols and that no institution or authority may forcibly remove them. School Development and Monitoring Committees (SDMCs), College Development Committees (CDCs), governing bodies and institutional heads have additionally been instructed not to humiliate, demean or subject students to insulting behaviour because of their attire or faith-based practices.

The order does, however, carve out a narrow exception for examinations, clarifying that dress code regulations prescribed for national or state-level examinations may continue to apply wherever required by examination authorities. At the same time, the government stressed that implementation of the new policy must remain free from communal or religious discrimination and be uniformly applied across institutions.

The circular also invokes the inclusive social philosophy of 12th century reformer Basavanna, quoting the phrase “Iva Nammave” (“They are ours”) and directing educational institutions to adopt this principle while dealing with students from different communities and backgrounds.

The reversal comes against the backdrop of the highly contentious hijab controversy that erupted in Karnataka in early 2022 after several Muslim students were denied entry into classrooms for wearing hijabs. The previous BJP government had issued the February 5, 2022 order mandating strict adherence to prescribed uniforms in educational institutions, effectively banning the hijab inside classrooms. The move triggered state-wide protests, counter-mobilisations by saffron scarf-wearing groups, intense political polarisation and legal challenges before the Karnataka High Court and later the Supreme Court.

In March 2022, the Karnataka High Court upheld the government order, holding that wearing the hijab was not an “essential religious practice” protected under Article 25 of the Constitution. Subsequently, a split verdict by a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India in October 2022 resulted in the matter being referred to a larger bench, where the constitutional challenge to the hijab restrictions continues to remain pending.

The government’s latest move also appears to have been influenced by more recent controversies surrounding religious attire and symbols in educational spaces. According to The Times of India, the decision followed public outrage over an April 24 incident in which a student’s sacred thread was allegedly cut during an examination. Separately, the Karnataka High Court had recently issued notice to the state government in a public interest litigation challenging the action of Karnataka Examination Authority officials who allegedly prevented students wearing sacred threads from appearing in the Common Entrance Test (CET) 2025.

Defending the policy shift, Karnataka School Education Minister Madhu Bangarappa stated that the government order formally recognised long-standing religious and customary practices followed by different communities. He reportedly said that practices such as wearing the sacred thread, Shivadhara, turban, traditional attire, Jain customary clothing and hijab had now been properly specified and protected under the new order. He added that students from Class 1 to Class 12 should not face any obstacles for wearing such permitted symbols in educational institutions under the Education Department.

Karnataka Health Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao also defended the decision, stating that “limited customary practices are being allowed and nobody should be hurt because of this.”

The opposition BJP, however, sharply criticised the withdrawal of the hijab ban and accused the Congress government of engaging in appeasement politics. Leader of Opposition R. Ashoka alleged that the Congress government was reviving the hijab issue for electoral considerations and described the move as “anti-Hindu.” According to report carried by The Quint, BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya also criticised the decision, claiming that it institutionalised religious identity inside classrooms and undermined the idea of schools as spaces of equality and shared citizenship.

Despite the political backlash, the Karnataka government has maintained that the order seeks to protect constitutional freedoms while preserving institutional discipline and social harmony. The revised guidelines now apply across government, aided and private schools and pre-university colleges in Karnataka, marking a significant departure from one of the most contentious educational and religious policy decisions in recent years.

Detailed reports may be read here and here.

Related:

“How does dictating attire empower women?” Supreme Court partially stays Mumbai College’s Hijab Ban

Karnataka: Muslim girl asked to not wear hijab to school, after students protested wearing saffron shawls

Extremists assaulted Muslim woman; hijab stripped of in broad daylight in Bengaluru and Muzaffarnagar

Ex-Muslims observe ‘No Hijab Day’

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Chief Minster (CM), Himanta Biswa Sarma made the announcement while addressing the media after the first Cabinet meeting in his second term holding the post. Sarma took oath as Chief Minister for the second consecutive term on May 12, 2026. Results of the elections came in on May 4.

At his press meet Himanta Said the decision was taken to present the UCC in the House on the last day of the present session of the Assam Assembly on May 26. The Assam Cabinet approved the draft UCC on the May 13 and he said that we will present the UCC in the House on the last day of the first Assembly session as soon as the members take oath.

Explaining the intended law, he said the UCC will exclude tribal booth Hills and plains people from the scope of the UCC and clarified that said the UCC will not affect any religious customs. Specifically, the proposed UCC will focus on a total of four issues,” he added, “These include the minimum age of marriage, Polygamy, the rights of women in property and live in relationships.”

He added that if someone asks whether the UCC requires worship or prayers, how to hold a Chaklong wedding, etc., there should be no such questions, which is why the UCC is not concerned with religious observances or religious traditions. “The government has no say in how worship has to be done or prayers have to be offered.

He may be heard https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1891XEALmG/

A special session of the Assam Assembly is scheduled to be held from May 21–26, 2026. Newly elected MLAs will take oath during the session. The proposed bill that was approved in the Cabinet Minister’s meeting on May 12 will be tabled on May 26, the concluding day of the session.

According to the brief by Sarma, the proposed legislation aims to address:

i) Legal age of marriage

ii) Polygamy

iii) Inheritance rights

iv) Live-in relationships

v) Compulsory registration of marriage and divorce

With this move, Assam will become the third state after Uttarakhand and Gujarat to table a UCC Bill. All three are states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

It is noteworthy—and can certainly be asserted—that this decision, taken during the very first cabinet meeting of the BJP’s third government in Assam (and Himanta’s 2.0 administration), was specifically aimed at targeting a particular community.

On a previous occasion as well, the Himanta government had raised issues such as “Love Jihad” in the Legislative Assembly, specifically targeting the Muslim community.

Meanwhile, Himanta Biswa Sarma has previously stated that banning polygamy and “deceitful religious conversions” is part of Assam’s move toward a UCC-like framework. This echoes recommendations of the Justice (Retd.) Rumi Kumari Phukan Committee, which examined the legal viability of such a measure.

Related:

Assam Government to table ‘Love Jihad’ and polygamy bills, CM Sarma says parents of male accused will also face arrest

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