As this article is being written, the Supreme Court has taken suo moto cognizance of the media reports which brought to light the inhumane orders of the trial courts and a High Court order which ordered Dalit and Adivasi individuals, reportedly engaged in anti-mining protests, to clean police stations. The apex court also passed an order directing all courts across the State of Odisha to forthwith delete such or similar offending conditions from bail orders and to refrain from substituting them with any analogous requirements. The court also opined “Given these extenuating circumstances, we are of the considered view that no other State Judiciary also ought to be exposed to or replicate such caste-coloured and oppressive conditions, which have the potential to generate serious social friction.”

It is imperative that any discussion on environment, and analysis of jurisprudence, has to be done in the real material context. The material context here is that the power of the state and ruling establishment is brazen and unkind to the most vulnerable and downtrodden Indians. Such power, sometimes comes as grey hounds or sometimes comes in black robes. This contextual prism has to be used to view and understand the following discussion.

High Courts, in that sense, are not merely intermediate constitutional forums. They are where constitutional promises most frequently meet the citizen in distress. They hear, often as courts of first and last practical resort, disputes ranging from land, livelihood and liberty to forests, mining, displacement and police excess. Yet, despite carrying this enormous constitutional burden, their environmental jurisprudence rarely receives the sustained attention given to the Supreme Court. The volume and variety of cases before the High Courts make them a crucial site for studying how environmental law actually operates: what language judges use, who’s suffering is made visible, whose claims are treated with suspicion, and how courts balance ecological protection against notions of ‘development’, ‘state power and private capital’. It is with this lens that the following discussion turns to recent High Court decisions.

Some context is necessary before turning to the High Courts.

In Vanashakti v. Union of India (decided May 16, 2025),[1] a Bench of Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan struck down the Ministry of Environment’s 2017 notification and 2021 office memorandum (OM), both of which permitted ex post facto environmental clearances — that is, regularisation of projects that had commenced operations without first obtaining the clearance the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 requires.[2] The judgment held that the notification and OM were contrary to the precautionary principle and that the Ministry could not, by executive instrument, undo what the statute mandated.

A review petition followed. In November 2025, a three-judge Bench took up the review and split.[3] The majority, in an opinion by the Chief Justice with Justice K. Vinod Chandran concurring separately, recalled the original directions and read the law as permitting ex post facto regularisation in suitable cases. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, who had been on the original Bench, dissented. He called the majority’s approach “a step in retrogression,” and his point was simple and well made — the precautionary principle is the cornerstone; polluter pays is reparation. You cannot swap them around and call it balance. Justice Chandran, in his concurrence, pointed to earlier decisions in Common Cause, Alembic Pharmaceuticals, and Electrosteel,[4] where the Court had let projects stand despite clearance irregularities, subject to conditions. The original Vanashakti judgment, he argued, had missed these precedents, and the cost of enforcing it strictly would be enormous.

This difference between the judges at the Supreme Court, and the support one would find for both the arguments, is actually a mirror of how the polity has come to view environment and environment law. Whether ecological protection is a non-negotiable constitutional imperative that must be satisfied before economic activity proceeds, or whether it is one consideration among several, adjustable after the fact through compensatory mechanisms. And the fact that the Supreme Court itself is divided on this makes it worth asking a more granular question: what is happening in the High Courts below?

This article is the first in a three-part series examining how High Courts across different regions of India are contributing to, or departing from, the trajectory of environmental jurisprudence. This part looks at Central India: Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand. A region that is home to some of the country’s richest forests, its most significant mineral reserves, and its most vulnerable tribal populations.

This exercise is not being taken up with a premade assumption that the judiciary is doing a very bad job at protecting environment or interpreting the environment protection law. It is actually made with the contra assumption that the High Courts are being proactive, but it is made with a probing eye to see if there are any deviations, and if so, what do they reveal.

Parts II and III will extend this inquiry to Northern and Western India.

The Baseline

It is unfair to the judiciary and to this exercise to begin with all the environment-protection-dilution jurisprudence and rain only criticism on them. After all, the High Courts have consistently, albeit with exceptions, shown their inclination to protect the environment for the last few decades. It is only fair to begin with where they have held firm.

The Good Days

Madhya Pradesh

Vivek Kumar Sharma v. State of Madhya Pradesh[5] is a good place to start because it shows what the system looks like when it works properly. The MP High Court struck down a 2015 State notification that had exempted sixty-two tree species from the Forest’s Act thus facilitating their transit. The State’s case was that the exemption promoted agroforestry on private lands and had the backing of the Ministry of Environment. The state essentially meant that because those tree species now could be transported without much compliance, private persons will likely grow those trees. The court went and looked at what had actually happened on the ground. No study had been conducted on whether these species also grew in forests. Why would it matter? If these trees did grow in forests, timber mafia would cut down the trees and transport them without any fear of the Forest’s Act’s regulatory quagmire. The State’s own Chief Conservator of Forests, Indore Circle, had reported that the exemption was playing havoc with lush green trees in both forest and non-forest areas. Senior forest officials had flagged that the timber mafia was using the exemption to legitimise illegally procured wood. The court found all this in departmental correspondence that was already on record. Nobody in the State government had acted on it.

The court applied M.K. Ranjitsinh’s precautionary principle,[6] struck down the notification as manifestly arbitrary under Article 14, and refused to entertain the delay objection, holding that environmental questions affecting every citizen’s life cannot be barred by limitation. And it noted, with visible frustration, that but for the PIL petitioners, the court would have been completely aloof of the ground reality. It means the entire regulatory apparatus of the State of Madhya Pradesh had failed to flag what a few public-spirited citizens could demonstrate through departmental correspondence that was already on record. The court stated as follows, observing the faulty manner in which the notifications were issued:

The arbitrary manner in which notifications came to be issued in quick succession from the year 2005 onwards points out clinchingly of the immense pressure of the timber mafia on the State authorities, with the environment and forest as its mute victims. The issuance of impugned notification mechanically, without studying and examining the fundamental aspect of impact of such exemptions on the existing forest cover of the State provokes the conscience of this Court, which has been compounded by dissatisfactory answers given by the State in the present proceedings.

(See ¶ 104.)[7]

On precautionary principle too, the MP High Court had substantial reiterations to be made. It termed the principle one of the “basic features of environmental jurisprudence.” The court stated as follows:

…(the principle) mandates that Courts must lean towards that interpretation of any statutory position, which furthers and advances the precautionary approach towards the environment, forests, and natural resources. Whilst doing so, the Court must be mindful that the State cannot treat the environment, natural resources and forests, as part of its sovereign wealth under its commercial use, rather all these resources are held as a trustee on behalf of the general public.

In a similar vein, the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Indore Bench took suo moto cognisance in late 2025 based on a newspaper report that 5,961 industries in the State were operating without valid permission from the M.P. Pollution Control Board.[8] The court issued notices to the Chief Secretary, the Principal Secretary for Housing and Environment, and the Pollution Control Board. The court’s willingness to act on a newspaper report, to hold the executive accountable for systemic regulatory failure, represents environmental activism of a substantive kind.

Chhattisgarh

The Chhattisgarh High Court has displayed the same instinct: in In Re: Karkhano Ke Avshesh Aag Ke Havale (21 March 2024), the Bilaspur Bench, in a suo moto PIL prompted by a Navbharat report on the burning of industrial waste behind the Sirgitti police station, summoned the State machinery to demonstrate compliance with the Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Rules, 2016, and the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016, and ultimately had the District Magistrate convene meetings of regulators and industrial units to translate the Rules into operational practice.[9]

 Jharkhand

Jharkhand provides the fullest contemporary picture of this baseline activism. Three judgments delivered in 2026 by a Division Bench of Chief Justice M.S. Sonak and Justice Rajesh Shankar deserve particular attention.

The first, Jharkhand Human Rights Conference v. State of Jharkhand, decided on February 26 , 2026,[10] closed a Public Interest Litigation that had been pending since 2012 on the management of bio-medical waste. The Court’s narrative of those fourteen years is instructive starting from a 2012 record of “serious deficiencies” in Ranchi, Dhanbad and Jamshedpur; a 2013 finding that the State did not have basic consolidated data on healthcare institutions generating bio-medical waste; photographic evidence of sharps and microbiological material dumped on public roads; state-wide expansion of the proceedings through the State and District Legal Services Authorities; sustained dissatisfaction through 2014 and 2015; supervision of Common Bio-Medical Waste Treatment Facilities at Lohardaga, Ramgarh and Adityapur; and a suo moto intervention at RIMS, Ranchi, in 2024. The Bench recorded that by the time it closed the proceedings, Jharkhand had moved from a single functional treatment facility to six operational CBWTFs, with a seventh under construction.[11] The Court did not, however, make it look like that this was its own work. It explicitly framed the case as one in which “sustained judicial oversight has contributed to a more responsive and coordinated regulatory framework,” cautioned that “constitutional courts cannot assume the role of a continuing administrator where a statutory mechanism is already in place,” and issued a careful set of nineteen coordination-and-enforcement directions that operationalise the 2016 Rules without supplanting them.

The second, Court on Its Own Motion v. State of Jharkhand (February 16 , 2026),[12] arises from a national highway alignment that had been proposed to cut through the Core Zone of a wildlife sanctuary and an Eco-Sensitive Zone. After repeated dissatisfaction with the pace of the NHAI and the State, the Bench directed for a fresh proposal for an alternative alignment passing through plain and rolling terrain and not through the Core Zone or ESZ, and pressed the State to file an animal-passage plan. The order is short and unremarkable in its own terms; what is remarkable is the assumption running through it, that an executive statement about wildlife corridors made in court must mean what it says, and that two years of non-compliance with such a statement is not an acceptable place for the proceedings to rest.

The third, Anand Kumar v. State of Jharkhand (April 16, 2026),[13] was a PIL by a retired Range Forest Officer challenging two notifications of the Jharkhand State Pollution Control Board that had reduced the minimum distance for stone mining and stone crushers from forest and forest-land boundaries from 500 metres to 250 metres. The State produced a 2015 “Expert Committee” NOC, but the Court read it carefully. Of the five members of the committee, only one was an environmental engineer; the rest were bureaucrats from Mines and Industries Departments and a state industrial agency. The NOC, on its face, did nothing more than refer to siting norms in other States — Orissa, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Bihar — and on that basis proposed a 50 percent reduction in the buffer zone for Jharkhand. There was no comparative analysis of forest density, topography, or ecological sensitivity. The Bench held that this was an exercise vitiated by non-application of mind and by exclusion of relevant considerations, that the precautionary principle “tilts the balance of convenience considerably towards imposing restrictions on the grant of consents within 500 metres of forests and forest lands,” and that the harm to the ecology is “often irreversible.” Until final disposal, the position prevailing before the impugned notifications stands restored: 500 metres for stone mining, 400 metres for stone crushers, and the one-kilometre eco-sensitive zone around national parks and wildlife sanctuaries laid down by the Supreme Court in T.N. Godavarman.[14] The Court’s reasoning is significant for two reasons. First, it draws openly on the precautionary principle of Ranjitsinh, treating it as decisive rather than ornamental. Second, it refuses to defer to the “Expert Committee” label without examining whether the committee was, in any meaningful sense, expert.

The fourth Jharkhand decision in this group, Hemant Kumar Shikarwar v. State of Jharkhand (May 7 , 2026),[15] extends the same approach to enforcement. The petition concerned illegal stone mining and non-compliant stone crusher units around the Siwane River in Hazaribagh district. Drawing on an independent report by the District Legal Services Authority, the Bench documented abandoned water-filled mining pits, damage to roughly a hundred hectares of cultivable land, and disruption of the river’s ecological balance. What is notable is the structural relief that follows. The Bench directs monthly District Level Task Force meetings, an exhaustive review of every Environmental Clearance, Consent to Establish, Consent to Operate, Explosive Licence and mineral-dealer registration in the area, suspension of mining operations until compliances are verified, the Hazaribagh Wildlife Sanctuary one-kilometre buffer, technology-driven enforcement through Wi-Fi-enabled CCTV and GPS tracking, criminal prosecution under §§ 21 and 22 of the MMDR Act, and the application of the polluter-pays principle to recover environmental compensation.[16] The polluter-pays principle is invoked, but it is invoked in its proper register — as a tool of reparation imposed on identified violators, not as a substitute for prevention.

It is worth pausing here on a different kind of Jharkhand case. In Jharkhand Int Nirmata Sangh v. State of Jharkhand (January 15, 2026),[17] a Division Bench of Justices Sujit Narayan Prasad and Arun Kumar Rai rejected a writ petition by brick kiln operators who had been required to obtain environmental clearance and Pollution Control Board consents for soil extraction and brick manufacturing. The petitioners’ argument was that the removal of soil for brick-making has no adverse environmental impact and that, in any event, the District Mineral Foundation Trust contribution under the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 was not attracted because brick earth is not a “mineral” in the operative sense. The Court rejected both contentions on the simple ground that “soil is also a part of environment and if the soil is being extracted for the purpose of brick kiln the same certainly have the environmental impact.” Brick earth, the Court noted, is listed as a minor mineral in Schedule 2 of the Jharkhand Minor Mineral Concession Rules, 2004, and the manufacturing process cannot be artificially separated from the extraction. It refused to allow the absence of obvious smoke or effluent to be confused with the absence of environmental impact.

The High Courts of this region are, on the whole, capable of vigorous, principled environmental adjudication. The question that follows, then, is when and why does this rigour falter?

What about the bad days?

If the above discussion is affirmative of the proactive role the High Courts have come to play in the development of environmental jurisprudence, the following discussion exposes some cracks. The cracks are at their clearest when one looks at the High Court of Chhattisgarh’s engagement, over fourteen years, with the Hasdeo coal belt. Three judgments form a sequence: Mangal Sai v. Union of India (May 11, 2022), Amrit Lal Bhagat v. State of Chhattisgarh (September 1, 2025), and the Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti appeal (April 2026). The legal context shifts slightly from one to the next while the result does not.

A chain of deviations

In Mangal Sai,[18] a Division Bench of Chief Justice Arup Kumar Goswami and Justice R.C.S. Samant disposed of five connected writ petitions filed by 156-odd tribal residents of Charpara Tara, Salhi, Hariharpur and Fattehpur villages in Surguja and Surajpur districts. The petitioners challenged the acquisition of about 1252 hectares of land for the Parsa coal block under the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957, by Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd. and its mine developer-operator. The grounds were familiar: that the Parsa block was in dense forest, that the PESA Act, 1996 had not been followed, that the gazette notifications under §§ 4(1) and 7(1) of the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957 (CB Act) were not properly served, that some Gram Sabha resolutions were fake. The Court held that gazette notifications had in fact been published; that, the CB Act not requiring personal service of generally addressed notifications, the want of personal service did not vitiate them; that some villagers had filed late objections, which the Coal Controller had considered; and that there was “gross delay” in approaching the Court — the petitions, filed in 2022, challenged notifications of 2017 and 2018. On this basis the petitions were dismissed, with no examination of the underlying ecological objections to mining in dense forest, and no consideration of whether the delay rule should yield where the consequences of the executive action are irreversible.

In Amrit Lal Bhagat,[19] delivered just seven months before the Hasdeo Aranya appeal and from the very same Court, a single Bench dismissed a petition by thirty-eight named residents of Mudagaon and Saraitola villages in Raigarh district. The petitioners had challenged the Stage II forest clearance granted by the Ministry of Environment in respect of 214.869 hectares of forest land for an open-cast coal mining project allotted to a State-owned generation company. Their grievance was that the diversion proceedings had been completed in violation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 — without the participation of the petitioners and without recognition of the community forest rights of their Gram Sabhas. The Court framed the threshold issue narrowly. “In absence of a resolution of the Gram Sabha authorizing the institution of the present proceedings,” the petitioners did not have the requisite locus standi, and in any case had an alternative remedy under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010. The petition was dismissed as not maintainable.[20]

The logic here repays close attention. Community forest rights are, the Forest Rights Act says, vested collectively in the Gram Sabha. From that the Court derives a procedural conclusion: only the Gram Sabha, by formal resolution, can litigate to defend those rights. Individual residents who are members of the Gram Sabha and whose lives are directly affected by the diversion of community forest land may not approach the High Court without such a resolution. To require a Gram Sabha resolution before a writ challenge can even be heard is to interpose the very body whose capacity to deliberate and resolve the question may itself have been compromised by the State action under challenge — particularly where, as the Mangal Sai record indicates, allegations of fake Gram Sabha resolutions in the same coal belt had already been before this Court.

The contrast with how the same High Court has handled coal-related petitions by non-tribal individuals is instructive. In Ratan Kumar Jain v. State of Madhya Pradesh (now Chhattisgarh),[21] a Division Bench of Chief Justice Yatindra Singh and Justice Sunil Kumar Sinha entertained writ petitions filed in person by a Korea-district journalist challenging the illegal felling of trees by South Eastern Coalfields Limited at Chirmiri, with no question raised about his personal locus to challenge the operations of a public-sector coal company in his neighbourhood. The Court used the occasion to deliver one of the more memorable passages on environmental protection in the region: “Environment, trees are not devil; they are entitled to much better protection: after all, we have borrowed them from our children and have a pledge to return them back — if not in a better position then at least in the same position as we had got them.” The petitioner — a single individual, with no Gram Sabha resolution — was nominated to an independent monitoring committee. The doctrinal question is not whether Ratan Jain got the law of locus right and Amrit Lal Bhagat got it wrong, or vice versa. The doctrinal question is whether the same threshold of standing is being applied to the same kind of grievance. The honest answer, reading these cases together, is that it is not.

Hasdeo Aranya

The Hasdeo case carries forward the same logic. It is no different than any case with forest conservation on one side and the mining industry on the other. A healthy sprinkle of forest rights is what complicated, rightly so, the issue. The Hasdeo Aranya forest is called the lungs of Chhattisgarh. It is old-growth forest, ecologically and culturally significant, home to tribal communities who depend on it for subsistence. Coal sits beneath it.

What was the case?

After bureaucratic processes which included a sub-committee on Forest Advisory cautioning about the risks of large-scale mining, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) granted in-principle approvals for mining in the Hasdeo forest.[22] Later, the Chhattisgarh government passed orders diverting forest land for non-forest use in 2012. Both the MoEF and State government orders were set aside by the NGT.[23] However, the Supreme Court granted an interim stay. On the strength of such interim stay, and a new legislation on coal mining and block allocation, the permission for Phase I mining of the coal was given to Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam, the Rajasthan state-owned electricity company.[24]

Parallelly, proceedings for individual and community forest rights were being conducted wherein three community rights were granted to Ghatbarra village in 2013.[25] On January 8, 2016, the District Level Committee issued a notice stating that the Community Forest Rights earlier granted to Village Ghatbarra were cancelled.[26] It was the case of petitioners that they were not given a fair hearing before the Community Forest Rights (CFR) were cancelled.

The writ petition was filed, first challenging this 2016 notice by the DLC, and later amended their prayer to challenge the later orders by the MoEF for Phase II mining too.

The State’s reason for cancellation, recorded in the DLC’s notice of 08.01.2016, was chronological: the diversion order had been passed on March 28, 2012, whereas the three community forest rights in favour of Ghatbarra were recognised on September 3, 2013. The diversion preceded the recognition; therefore, on the State’s logic, the recognition was either erroneous or could not survive the prior diversion.

Two things ought to have given the court pause here, and neither was addressed. First, the chronology argument inverts the scheme of the Forest Rights Act, 2006. Section 4 (5) of the Act bars eviction or removal of forest dwellers from forest land under their occupation till the recognition and verification process is complete.[27] The Act treats forest rights as pre-existing rights that the statute recognises, not as rights that the statute creates from the date of the recognition order.[28] On that reading, a 2013 recognition order documents rights that were always there, including in March 2012 when the diversion was approved. The State’s chronology, in other words, proves too little — it assumes the rights began in 2013, which is precisely what the Act denies.

Second, even if one were to accept the State’s premise, the cancellation of recognised rights triggers, at a minimum, the obligation to hear the rights-holders before extinguishing what the statute has acknowledged. The DLC’s notice of January 8, 2016 did not afford that hearing. The single judge’s view — that no opportunity needed to be given — sidesteps both the substantive point about when the rights came into existence and the procedural point about how recognised rights may be withdrawn.

One of the arguments by the State before the Hasdeo Aranya case was that since coal has already been mined out the subject lands, they cannot be considered as forests. If they cannot be considered as forests, no forest rights can be claimed. The Chhattisgarh government argued that the Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh does not have legal sanctity to represent the villagers.

Single Judge’s reasoning for Dismissal

The single judge dismissed the petition[29] on the following grounds:

(i) Diversion order (2012) is prior to CFR granting order (2013) and yet, the diversion was not challenged then or in this Writ Petition.

(ii) None of the petitioners showed that they have forest rights conferred on them or that they are aggrieved persons or that any Gram Sabha resolution has been passed to continue on with the petition.

(iii) The residents can be compensated in terms of money, if the forest rights have not been conferred according to the FRA, 2006.

The judge, after listing the grounds, stated as follows:

It wasn’t necessary for the respondents to provide the petitioners with an opportunity while taking a decision to withdraw the forest rights conferred on the villagers of Ghatbarra.

What is the issue with the Single Judge’s reasoning?

The issue with the single judge’s reasoning is not that he failed to be an activist judge. A writ petition is not a PIL, and the judge was right to treat it as such. The issue is narrower and harder to defend: even within the four corners of an ordinary writ petition under Article 226, the cancellation order of 2016 was open to challenge on its own terms. The petitioners had asked for it to be set aside on the ground that no hearing was given before community forest rights, once recognised, were withdrawn. That is a self-contained natural justice claim. It does not require the court to expand standing, revisit the 2012 diversion, or assume a PIL posture. It requires the court to ask one question: can a statutory right recognised under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 be cancelled without affording the rights-holders an opportunity of hearing? The single judge’s answer that “it wasn’t necessary for the respondents to provide the petitioners with an opportunity” is what merits scrutiny.

The court held that the petitioners had not established they were directly aggrieved persons with subsisting legal rights. These are tribal villagers. They are challenging the destruction of their ancestral forest. They claim community forest rights under a statute that was enacted specifically to recognise and protect those rights. The PIL jurisdiction exists because Justices Bhagwati and Krishna Iyer understood that marginalised people cannot always demonstrate ‘standing’ in the way that a property-owning litigant can.[30] While this was not a PIL, to turn a procedural requirement against the very people the Forest Rights Act was written for is to use a doctrine against its own purpose. One cannot read this stiffness charitably.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court, in the same year, in Vivek Kumar Sharma, held that environmental challenges cannot be defeated by limitation. To be hot and cold on locus of petitioners in sensitive environmental matters is not rooted in some deep philosophical underpinning. It is simply a choice that the court in one case makes to allow and makes in another to disallow on the basis of locus.

And then the Single Judge observed that monetary compensation could suffice for the loss of the forest. The appellants said what needed to be said, i.e., no amount of money restores an old-growth forest. The cultural rights, the subsistence, the biodiversity, the watershed function — none of it comes back with a cheque.

This is the polluter-pays principle being used to replace the precautionary principle, something that Justice Bhuyan’s Vanashakti dissent warned against.

The Appeal in Hasdeo Aranya

The Division Bench dismissed the writ appeal in April 2026.[31] The respondent mining company continued to press locus standi, res judicata, and finality. The Division Bench agreed, holding that the petition was a collateral assault on concluded proceedings and that monetary compensation arguments, “though conceptually appealing,” could not override the legal framework once statutory clearances had been granted and acted upon. The Division Bench stated as follows:

Courts, while sensitive to environmental concerns, are also required to balance competing public interests, particularly where projects have attained substantial completion and involve larger public utility considerations.

Now, this is not some isolated observation by a Division Bench of the Chhattisgarh High Court. Its doctrinal substance comes from the Supreme Court itself — from the judgment in Vanashakti II, in which the apex court stated as follows:[32]

It can thus be seen that this Court clearly held that where the adverse consequences of ex-post facto approval outweigh the consequences of regularisation of operation of an industry by grant of ex-post facto approval and the industry or establishment concerned otherwise conforms to the requisite pollution norms, ex-post facto approval should be given in accordance with law, in strict conformity with the applicable rules, regulations and/or notifications.

The doctrinal tools used here — locus, delay, finality, monetary compensation — are the same tools available to any court. In Vivek Kumar Sharma, every one of them was considered and rejected. In Hasdeo Aranya, every one of them was accepted. In Anand Kumar and Hemant Shikarwar, the Jharkhand Bench reached for the same tools and used them, in the precautionary direction, against the State. The difference is not the law. The difference is coal.

Shanti Construction and the Procedural Double Standard

The Orissa High Court’s decision in Shanti Construction v. State of Odisha[33] raises a different kind of problem.

A construction company got temporary permission to excavate 2,000 cubic metres of earth for a railway project. It excavated about 2, 60, 580 cubic metres — 130 times the permitted quantity — from government land, including jungle category land. The NGT directed recovery of Rs. 1,20,10,000 as environmental compensation.

The High Court quashed the order. The Joint Committee’s inspection had been done without notice to the petitioner. The committee included regulatory bodies that were themselves accused of inaction. The quantification was sub-delegated to the Mining Officer without proper safeguards.

It is not wrong to be a stickler for rules and procedures, especially by authorities with penal powers. It is an important feature that the judiciary should imbibe itself with, surely. The NGT’s practice of farming out adjudicatory work to joint committees has real due process problems. No argument there.

But the company dug out 130 times what it was allowed to dig. That violation did not go anywhere. The court quashed the enforcement order and told the parties to pursue their rights before the appropriate authority. The enforcement was procedurally defective but the violation itself remains unaddressed.

The Odisha High Court in its order stated as follows:[34]

The NGT’s order of May 2, 2025 is vitiated by breach of natural justice by unlawful delegation of its judicial function to the joint committee without affording the petitioner a hearing. The alternative remedy of appeal does not preclude relief, since the order is tainted by fundamental unfairness.

A note of caution before drawing the comparison too tightly. The two cases are not perfectly parallel. Hasdeo Aranya was a constitutional challenge to executive decisions on forest diversion and rights cancellation; Shanti Construction was judicial review of a quasi-judicial NGT order said to be tainted by a natural justice defect. The doctrinal lenses differ, and a court reviewing tribunal action does have a sharper supervisory role on procedural fairness than a court reviewing a policy-laden executive choice. That much should be conceded.

What survives the concession, however, is the asymmetry in how the same threshold doctrines — i.e., alternative remedy, hearing, finality — are weighted against environmental stakes. In Shanti Construction, the existence of an alternative statutory appeal did not deter the High Court from intervening, because the want of a hearing was treated as a fundamental defect overriding the alternative-remedy bar. In Hasdeo Aranya, and again in Amrit Lal Bhagat, the want of a hearing before cancellation of recognised forest rights — or the absence of formal Gram Sabha authorisation — did not produce a comparable response; finality, locus and alternative-remedy considerations carried the day.

A similar asymmetry appears in M/s Jindal India Thermal Power Ltd. v. State of Odisha (September 25, 2024),[35] where the Odisha State Pollution Control Board had revoked a 2×600 MW coal-based thermal power plant’s Consent to Operate for direct discharge of wastewater into the Kakudia Nallah, which feeds the Tikira river. The plant was ordered shut. By the time the writ came up for hearing, the company had produced affidavits of compliance during pendency. The High Court quashed the revocation order, observing that the Writ Petition need not be kept pending unnecessarily, and remarking only — almost in passing — that “damage to the environment cannot get a tacit community tolerance.” The same Court that demands strict due process from the NGT when the polluter is the petitioner, accepts compliance-during-pendency as adequate when it is the polluter’s licence at stake. The two postures are not inconsistent in any narrow doctrinal sense. They are different defaults.

Quiet Changes in Language

In M/s Balasore Alloys Ltd. v. Union of India (3 November 2023)[36], the petitioner, a chromite mining lessee in Kaliapani, Jajpur district, had been kept out of a 64.463-hectare forest portion of its leasehold because the Stage II forest clearance had not issued. The Court walked through the chronology — initial mining lease in 2000, splitting of the lease into forest and non-forest blocks, withdrawal of an earlier writ, a string of applications for compensatory afforestation land and Net Present Value payments, and intermittent inaction by the State. The High Court issued a writ of mandamus directing the opposite parties to “grant necessary Stage II forest clearance in respect of the subject mineral block over an area 64.463 hectares… by complying all the formalities as expeditiously as possible without creating further hindrances in the matter.” One looks at this judgment in vain for any examination of the present condition of the forest in question, the cumulative impact of chromite mining in the Sukinda valley, or the population that lives downstream of these leaseholds. The Court’s mandamus is, on its face, a mandamus to discharge a statutory duty without delay. It is also, in substance, a judicial accelerant to the grant of a forest clearance, framed entirely in the lessee’s rights.

The Odisha Citizens’ Action Forum PIL[37] shows a related pattern, and it is in some ways more telling than Hasdeo Aranya, because here the Court was not even pushed by a contest between an industry and a forest community. There was no displacement at stake. There was no felling of trees in real time. The petition, brought by a Bhubaneswar-based forum, was about something much more anodyne in its framing: that mining lessees in Odisha were not extracting iron ore at the volumes their leases obligated them to, and that the State was not enforcing Rule 12 (1) (ee) of the Concession Rules, 2016, which permits the State to step in and carry out the mining itself at the lessee’s cost when the lessee defaults on its statutory obligations. That is the sum of the grievance. The lessees are not mining enough.

Now, one would think that this is exactly the kind of complaint a State government, with a full apparatus of mining officials, geological surveys, and a Department of Steel and Mines, would be able to address on its own. The State knows how much each lessee has been allotted. The State has the production figures. The State has the rule that lets it act. If lessees are sitting on iron ore reserves and not extracting them, the State can issue notices, levy penalties, invoke Rule 12 (1) (ee) and have the National Mineral Development Corporation step in. None of this requires a writ court. It is plain administrative function. And yet the High Court, instead of asking the obvious threshold question of why a constitutional court is being moved to do what an executive department is paid to do, took up the petition, called for affidavits, and eventually directed the State to invoke Rule 12 (1) (ee) and route the underutilised mines to NMDC.

The Court’s framing is what makes the case worth dwelling on. Iron ore reserves are described as having “potential capacity to meet the requisite requirements in the indigenous market.” The 2015 amendments to the MMDR Act[38] are described as a “radical shift” from executive fiat to a transparent auction regime. The Make in India initiative is invoked. Bhushan Power and Steel Ltd. v. State of Odisha[39] is cited at length for the proposition that the auction regime aims at eliminating discretion, attracting private investment and securing for the Government an enhanced share of the value of mineral resources. Article 39(b)[40] is mentioned, but only to ground a duty of “optimum, continuous and sustainable utilization” of minerals. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of resource governance.

This is not a case where the Court refused to consider environmental concerns because they were not raised. They were not raised, and that is precisely the point. The petition was framed to push for more extraction, and the Court accepted the frame without interrogating it. A High Court hearing a PIL is not a passive forum. It can, and routinely does in other contexts, expand the scope of the petition, call for the State to file additional reports, ask uncomfortable questions about cumulative impact. The Madhya Pradesh High Court did exactly this in Vivek Kumar Sharma when it went looking through departmental correspondence on its own. The Jharkhand High Court did the same in Anand Kumar when it unpacked the composition and reasoning of the so-called Expert Committee whose recommendation underlay the impugned buffer-zone notification. Here, the Orissa High Court did the opposite. It accepted, at face value, that the constitutional concern in the matter was underutilisation, and on that basis it issued a direction that the State further activate iron ore mining across blocks where production was low. There is no sign in the judgment that the Court asked whether some of these blocks were not being mined for reasons that might actually deserve protection: a pending forest clearance issue, an unresolved claim under the Forest Rights Act, environmental compliance defaults that might justify slowing down rather than speeding up extraction. The premise was that the mines must be mined.

When a court starts with the question ‘has this lessee complied with its conditions’ instead of ‘should extraction happen here given what we know about this ecosystem,’ the answer is mostly predetermined.

What Comes Through

A few things come through when you look at all of this together.

Locus standi and delay are being applied selectively. Same doctrine, opposite results, depending on what is being challenged. The law has not changed between Vivek Kumar Sharma and Hasdeo Aranya, between Ratan Jain and Amrit Lal Bhagat, between Anand Kumar and Mangal Sai. The economic interest has.

The fait accompli has become its own justification. Phase-I is done, so Phase-II must follow. The project is built, so the clearance must be regularised. The compliance came during pendency, so the revocation must be quashed. This rewards the very non-compliance it is supposed to prevent. The Vanashakti review relied partly on this logic too: the cost of undoing what had been built without clearance became the reason not to undo it.

Money is being treated as a substitute for ecology, without anyone checking whether the money actually does anything. Where the polluter-pays principle survives in its proper form — as in Hemant Shikarwar — it is imposed on identified violators after a finding of breach. Where it is abused — as in the Hasdeo Aranya disposal — it replaces the precautionary principle and lets the breach itself stand.

And there is a diagnostic that is quite reliable: look at whether the judgment engages with ecological evidence. Vivek Kumar Sharma is full of it. Forest survey reports, departmental findings, species data. Anand Kumar interrogates the composition of the Expert Committee and the substance of the NOC. Hemant Shikarwar relies on an independent DLSA report of abandoned pits and degraded farmland. Jharkhand Human Rights Conference works from photographic evidence of dumped sharps. The Hasdeo Aranya dismissal does not engage with the ecological significance of the forest at all. Balasore Alloys does not weigh the chromite footprint in the Sukinda valley. The Orissa iron-ore PIL does not so much as look up at the forest cover. Courts have only come up with pro-environment jurisprudence when they looked at hard evidence.

Looking Ahead

This present exercise is neither a whistle nor some big breaking, to project some kind of institutional takeover. It is simply a neutral probe, with utmost respect for and faith in the rich jurisprudence that countless movements have collectively achieved via a progressive judiciary.

The Indian Environmental Law Regime is not a simple one. It is filled with exceptions, absolutisms, resulting paradoxes, rectifying reviews, and much more. The Vanashakti split is proof of that complexity. The precautionary principle is the cornerstone, and a court cannot be seen backtracking on it. That position finds its fullest expression in Vivek Kumar Sharma, in the Jharkhand Bench’s 2026 quartet, and in the Chhattisgarh High Court’s suo moto responsiveness on industrial waste. It finds its starkest negation in Hasdeo Aranya, in the locus-standi disposal of Amrit Lal Bhagat, and in the quieter accommodation of mining capital in the Orissa lease cases.

The cracks appear when the economic interests are large and state-backed; when the affected communities are Adivasi/tribal, rural, and litigation-poor; when the extraction has progressed far enough to create a fait accompli; and when the environmental harm is diffuse and long-term and falls on people without political voice. Where these conditions converge, courts, sometimes, seem to reach for the procedural exit, sidestepping the petitioner environmental question.

Whether these cracks hold in Northern and Western India is what the next two parts will try to find out.

Note:

The 3-part series is based on strong empirical standing. Part I deals with substantive high court pronouncements coming from resource rich Central and Eastern India- Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. Part II (Western India) deals with the high courts of Bombay, Karnataka and Goa. Finally, Part III (Northern India) reflects on judgments from Delhi, Punjab & Haryana, Uttarakhand and Allahabad.

 (The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)

[1]Vanashakti v. Union of India, decided 16 May 2025 (Supreme Court of India, Bench: Oka & Bhuyan, JJ.). Striking down MoEFCC Notification S.O. 804(E) dated March 14, 2017 and Office Memorandum dated July 7, 2021.

[2]The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, §§ 3, 6 read with the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006 (S.O. 1533(E), dated September 14, 2006).

[3]Vanashakti Review – Order on Review Petition (Nov. 2025), three-Judge Bench, majority opinion by the Chief Justice of India with Vinod Chandran, J., concurring; Bhuyan, J., dissenting.

[4]Common Cause v. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 499; Alembic Pharmaceuticals Ltd. v. Rohit Prajapati, (2020) 17 SCC 157; Electrosteel Steels Ltd. v. Union of India, (2021) SCC OnLine SC 1247.

[5]Vivek Kumar Sharma v. State of Madhya Pradesh, W.P. No. 16931/2021, decided by the High Court of Madhya Pradesh, Indore Bench (Division Bench), March 1, 2025.

[6]M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, (2024) SCC OnLine SC 570 (recognising Articles 14 & 21 protection against the adverse effects of climate change and reaffirming the precautionary principle).

[7]Vivek Kumar Sharma, supra n. 5, ¶ 104.

[8]In Re: Functioning of 5,961 Industries without Valid Consent – Suo Moto W.P. (PIL), High Court of Madhya Pradesh, Indore Bench (2025).

[9]See, inter alia, In Re: Suo Moto PIL based on news item “Karkhano Ke Avshesh Aag Ke Havale,” WPPIL 106 of 2023, High Court of Chhattisgarh, order dated 21 March 2024 (hazardous waste burning at Sirgitti industrial estate, Bilaspur); Jharkhand Human Rights Conference v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 1385 of 2012, decided February 26, 2026 (biomedical waste management).

[10]Jharkhand Human Rights Conference v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 1385 of 2012, judgment dated February 26, 2026, Neutral Citation No. 2026:JHHC:5689-DB (Sonak, C.J. and Rajesh Shankar, J.).

[11]Jharkhand Human Rights Conference, supra n. 10, ¶¶ 18–24 (continuing mandamus from 2012 to 2026; expansion of treatment infrastructure from one CBWTF to six operational facilities across Ramgarh, Lohardaga, Dhanbad, Pakur and Deoghar).

[12]Court on Its Own Motion v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 3935 of 2020, Order dated February 16, 2026 (Sonak, C.J. and Rajesh Shankar, J.) (proposed national highway realignment to avoid Core Zone of wildlife and Eco-Sensitive Zone; animal-passage plan directed).

[13]Anand Kumar v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 3950 of 2024, order dated April 16 , 2026 (Sonak, C.J. and Rajesh Shankar, J.).

[14]In Re: T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India, (2022) 10 SCC 544, ¶ 56.1 (one-kilometre eco-sensitive zone around protected areas), as modified by order dated April 26, 2023.

[15]Hemant Kumar Shikarwar v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 290 of 2013, judgment dated May 7, 2026, Neutral Citation No. 2026:JHHC:13668-DB (Sonak, C.J. and Rajesh Shankar, J.).

[16]Hemant Kumar Shikarwar, supra n. 15, ¶ 79 (directions including monthly District Level Task Force meetings; review of all statutory permissions; CCTV and GPS-based monitoring; criminal prosecution under MMDR Act §§ 21–22; environmental compensation on the polluter-pays principle).

[17]Jharkhand Int Nirmata Sangh v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (C) No. 617 of 2021, judgment dated January 15, 2026, Neutral Citation No. 2026:JHHC:1169-DB (Sujit Narayan Prasad and Arun Kumar Rai, JJ.) (brick kiln operators’ challenge to environmental clearance and CTO requirement dismissed; District Mineral Foundation Trust payments held attracted).

[18]Mangal Sai v. Union of India, W.P. (C) No. 302 of 2022 and connected matters, decided May 11, 2022 by the High Court of Chhattisgarh at Bilaspur (Arup Kumar Goswami, C.J. and Rajendra Chandra Singh Samant, J.) (challenge by 156+ petitioners from Salhi, Hariharpur, Fattehpur and Tara villages to acquisition of land for Parsa Coal Block under the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957, dismissed on grounds of delay and merits).

[19]Amrit Lal Bhagat v. State of Chhattisgarh, W.P. (C) No. 2361 of 2025, decided 1 September 2025 by the High Court of Chhattisgarh at Bilaspur (Arvind Kumar Verma, J.), Neutral Citation No. 2025:CGHC:44375.

[20]Amrit Lal Bhagat, supra n. 23, ¶¶ 16–17 (dismissing the petition as not maintainable for want of express Gram Sabha authorisation and pointing the petitioners to the alternative remedy under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010).

[21]Ratan Kumar Jain v. State of Madhya Pradesh (now Chhattisgarh), W.P. No. 4520 of 2000 and W.P. (C) No. 5354 of 2009, decided 5 December 2012 by the High Court of Chhattisgarh at Bilaspur (Yatindra Singh, C.J. and Sunil Kumar Sinha, J.).

[22]Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980; Stage-I and Stage-II forest clearances accorded by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change for the Parsa East & Kanta Basan (PEKB) and Parsa coal blocks in the Hasdeo Arand region.

[23]Sudiep Shrivastava v. Union of India & Ors., Order of the National Green Tribunal, Principal Bench, dated March 24 , 2014; subsequently stayed by the Supreme Court.

[24]Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Act, 2015, read with the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Rules, 2014 and allocation orders to Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd. (RVUNL).

[25]Recognition under §§ 3(1)(i) and 5 of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 in respect of Village Ghatbarra (resolution of the Gram Sabha and order of the Sub-Divisional Level Committee, dated 3 September 2013).

[26]Notice / Order of the District Level Committee, Surguja, dated January 8, 2016 purporting to cancel the Community Forest Rights of Village Ghatbarra.

[27]The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, § 4(5).

[28]See generally Orissa Mining Corp. Ltd. v. Ministry of Environment & Forest, (2013) 6 SCC 476 (Niyamgiri); and Banwasi Seva Ashram v. State of U.P., (1986) 4 SCC 753, on the pre-existing nature of forest dwellers’ rights.

[29]Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti v. State of Chhattisgarh, W.P. (C) before the High Court of Chhattisgarh at Bilaspur (Single Judge), order of dismissal.

[30]Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India, (1984) 3 SCC 161; S.P. Gupta v. Union of India, 1981 Supp SCC 87, on relaxed standing in public interest matters.

[31]Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti v. State of Chhattisgarh, Writ Appeal, decided by the Division Bench of the High Court of Chhattisgarh in April 2026.

[32]Vanashakti Review (Nov. 2025), supra n. 3, majority opinion (extract on conditions for ex post facto regularisation).

[33]M/s Shanti Construction v. State of Odisha, W.P. (C) before the High Court of Orissa at Cuttack (decided January 2026), arising from the order of the National Green Tribunal, Eastern Zonal Bench, dated May 2, 2025.

[34]Shanti Construction, supra n. 36, extracted from the High Court’s order quashing the NGT’s direction.

[35]M/s Jindal India Thermal Power Ltd. v. State of Odisha, W.P. (C) No. 8822 of 2024, order dated September 25, 2024 (Dr. S.K. Panigrahi, J.) (consent to operate, revoked by the Odisha State Pollution Control Board for direct discharge of wastewater into the Kakudia Nallah feeding the Tikira river, restored).

[36]M/s Balasore Alloys Ltd. v. Union of India, W.P. (C) decided November 3 , 2023 by the High Court of Orissa (Dr. B.R. Sarangi, A.C.J. and M.S. Raman, J.) (mandamus issued directing grant of Stage II forest clearance for chromite mining over 64.463 hectares in Kaliapani, Jajpur District).

[37]Odisha Citizens’ Action Forum v. State of Odisha, W.P. (PIL) before the High Court of Orissa at Cuttack, concerning enforcement of Rule 12(1)(ee) of the Mineral (Other than Atomic and Hydro Carbons Energy Minerals) Concession Rules, 2016.

[38]Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2015 (Act 10 of 2015).

[39]Bhushan Power & Steel Ltd. v. State of Odisha, (2017) 2 SCC 125.

[40]Constitution of India, art. 39(b) (Directive Principles – distribution of material resources of the community to subserve the common good).

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Strengthening indigenous communities means protection of the environment 

The post Cracks in Indian Environment Jurisprudence: An examination of High Courts of central India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

That belief is fragile. It can endure for generations and yet weaken quietly, not through dramatic rupture but through gradual shifts in political culture. Institutions may survive, elections may continue, constitutions may remain unchanged, yet the moral foundations of citizenship can erode. The outward form of democracy remains while its inner ethic changes. Secularism is often the first casualty of that transformation, because it is the principle that prevents the majority from confusing its cultural identity with the nation itself.

Secularism is often misunderstood as hostility to religion. In many plural societies, it has meant something more demanding: not the exclusion of religion from public life, but the refusal of the state to privilege one faith as the defining essence of the nation. Religious traditions may shape festivals, language, and collective memory. Public life may remain visibly religious. Yet the political order must preserve equal standing among communities. The state may engage with religions, but it cannot derive its legitimacy from any one of them.

The secular state did not emerge solely from abstract philosophy. It was born from historical exhaustion. Across Europe, centuries of confessional conflict taught societies that political order could not survive if sovereignty belonged to a single religious truth. The memory of the Thirty Years’ War, sectarian massacres, and religious empire produced a practical conviction: citizenship had to supersede creed. Secularism was therefore not conceived as irreligion, but as a political settlement after the discovery that sacred certainty could destroy civil peace.

In India, this insight emerged through a different tragedy. The Partition of India revealed that when religion became the basis of statehood, centuries of coexistence could collapse into mass displacement and violence. The republic that followed chose a radically different path. It refused to define the nation through a single faith despite the overwhelming numerical presence of one religious majority. Citizenship, not belief, became the formal basis of belonging.

That choice was historically remarkable. India was not a homogeneous nation-state but a civilizational mosaic of languages, castes, sects, tribes, and regions. The republic’s founders wagered that diversity could endure not by assimilation but by constitutional equality. Secularism in India, therefore, differed from the Western model of strict separation between church and state. Religion remained visible in public life, and the state often engaged with religious institutions. The principle was not exclusion but equal dignity among communities within a common civic order.

A Shared Inheritance

Indian Muslims are not a peripheral chapter in the story of India; they are among its principal authors. Across centuries, they have helped shape the country’s civilizational fabric through architecture, language, music, governance, scholarship, and commerce. The plural culture that defines much of the subcontinent emerged through sustained exchange among communities, and Muslims were central to that process. To narrate India without this inheritance is to tell only part of its story.

In independent India, this legacy evolved into nation-building. In science and public life, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam embodied the aspirations of a modern republic, shaping India’s missile and space programmes while inspiring generations. In education, Abul Kalam Azad laid the foundations of modern higher learning, while Zakir Husain deepened that vision through scholarship and public service. Leaders such as Rafi Ahmed Kidwai strengthened the early administrative and political architecture of the republic.

In business and industry, Azim Premji transformed Wipro into a global enterprise while redefining corporate philanthropy through education. Yusuf Hamied expanded access to affordable medicine through Cipla, making life-saving drugs widely available and reshaping public health equity.

The republic’s constitutional and institutional foundations also bear this imprint. M. Hidayatullah upheld constitutional continuity during uncertain times, while jurists such as A. M. Ahmadi and M. C. Chagla strengthened the judiciary and the republic’s legal philosophy. Fathima Beevi broke historic barriers as the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court judge. In diplomacy and public life, Asaf Ali represented India in its formative years, while Idris Hasan Latif rose to the highest ranks of national defence.

The symbolic and political foundations of the nation also reflect this shared authorship. Surayya Tyabji contributed to the design of India’s national flag, while her husband, Badaruddin Tyabji, belonged to a distinguished constitutional tradition. The freedom movement was shaped by powerful voices such as Mohammad Ali Jauhar and Shaukat Ali, whose activism was deeply shaped by their mother, Abadi Bano Begum—one of the earliest and most forceful women’s voices of anti-colonial resistance. Alongside them, the reformist and aristocratic legacy associated with the Begum of Awadh represents another important strand of India’s layered political history.

Regional Muslim polities also contributed significantly to institutional and social development. The Nizam of Hyderabad presided over one of the most influential princely states. At the same time, the Begums of Bhopal created an enduring legacy of education, reform, and public welfare that shaped modern institutional culture.

In arts and culture, A. R. Rahman carried Indian music to global audiences, while Bismillah Khan elevated the shehnai into a classical concert instrument. Mohammed Rafi defined the emotional grammar of Hindi film music across generations. In cinema, Dilip Kumar redefined screen acting, while Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan became defining figures of modern popular culture. Shabana Azmi, Waheeda Rehman, Naseeruddin Shah, and M. F. Husain further enriched India’s artistic imagination.

In literature and journalism, Qurratulain Hyder explored memory and migration; Khwaja Ahmad Abbas bridged journalism and cinema; M. J. Akbar shaped political commentary; while Rahi Masoom Raza, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, and Javed Akhtar expanded the moral and literary imagination of modern India.

Sport reflects the same shared legacy. Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, Mohammad Azharuddin, Zaheer Khan, Mohammed Kaif, and Syed Mushtaq Ali shaped Indian cricket across generations. In hockey, Aslam Sher Khan, Mohammad Shahid, and Zafar Iqbal strengthened India’s global standing. Sania Mirza and Syed Modi extended that excellence into international sport.

The significance of these contributions lies not in isolated achievement but in their cumulative pattern—stretching across institutions, disciplines, and generations. Taken together, they show how Indian Muslims have helped build the republic’s scientific capacity, strengthen its democratic institutions, and enrich its cultural and intellectual life. Their presence is not episodic but structural, running through the very architecture of modern India.

The Slow Erosion of Equality

The crisis begins when the majority community ceases to see itself as one part of the nation and comes to regard itself as the nation’s authentic owner. At that point, the distinction between citizenship and cultural inheritance collapses. The nation is no longer understood as a legal community of equals but as the historical possession of one tradition. Minorities retain formal rights, yet their belonging becomes conditional. They are tolerated as residents rather than recognised as equal co-authors of the republic.

This process rarely announces itself as a rejection of democracy. It often advances through democratic means. Elections provide legitimacy. Popular majorities empower governments that claim to restore the historical rights of the majority community. Electoral success is then invoked as proof that the state should reflect the majority’s civilisational identity. Political disagreement becomes cultural betrayal. Opposition is framed not as dissent from government but as disloyalty to the nation itself.

The challenge in India lies less in formal dismantling than in a shift of national self-understanding. Public ceremonies, educational narratives, historical memory, and political rhetoric increasingly align the state with one civilisational story. The constitutional framework remains, yet its symbolic centre changes. A republic founded on equal citizenship risks becoming culturally graded.

Democratic decline seldom begins with the destruction of institutions; it begins with their moral repurposing. Courts may continue to function, universities may continue to teach, and elections may continue to be held. Yet the ethos that animates them shifts. Institutions begin to internalise the assumptions of majoritarian power. Bureaucracies enforce selectively. Public media amplify one narrative. Silence becomes political, because institutions that should resist instead learn to accommodate.

This transformation is not only legal but atmospheric. A society need not revoke rights to alter belonging. It can create insecurity through rhetoric, targeted policing, selective prosecution, and vigilante enforcement. Citizens remain equal before the law on paper, yet feel perpetually scrutinised. Their citizenship remains legal, but no longer emotionally secure. Fear becomes ambient, shaping how people move, speak, worship, and participate.

Memory, Myth, and Majoritarian Power

Such transformations affect institutions beyond minority rights. Universities, media, courts, and civil society depend on the principle that criticism is compatible with citizenship. When the majority’s identity fuses with the nation, dissent becomes suspect. Journalists are portrayed as enemies, scholars as subversive, activists as foreign agents. Institutions survive but lose independence because they are measured against loyalty to the majority’s historical self-image.

A central mechanism of this shift is the rewriting of memory. The majority is encouraged to see itself as historically wronged even while politically dominant. Ancient invasions, medieval empires, colonial humiliation, and modern political contests are woven into one narrative of civilisational injury. Historical complexity gives way to moral drama. The majority becomes the eternal victim whose dominance appears as delayed justice.

This politics of grievance is powerful because it converts dominance into victimhood. Once the majority believes itself threatened, measures that weaken minorities appear defensive. Restriction becomes protection. Exclusion becomes restoration. Citizens are invited to feel simultaneously powerful and aggrieved—heirs to greatness and victims of history.

Majoritarian politics thrives on mythic time. It collapses centuries into a single emotional present. Old conquests become current injuries. Long-dead rulers become contemporary enemies. Memory is mobilised not to understand the past but to authorise the present. In such narratives, reconciliation appears as surrender and pluralism as weakness.

Economic and technological changes intensify this dynamic. Urbanisation dissolves traditional forms of belonging. Economic inequality produces resentment. Social media accelerates the spread of rumours and symbolic conflicts. Political movements fuse cultural nationalism with development, welfare, and strong leadership. Citizens are offered not only economic aspiration but a story of civilisational recovery. The nation becomes an emotional project, and secular restraint begins to appear rootless or unpatriotic.

India and the Global Future of Plural Democracy

What makes secular decline especially dangerous is normalisation. It proceeds through repetition. What once provoked outrage gradually becomes ordinary. Inflammatory speech, selective policing, communal targeting, and symbolic exclusion cease to shock. Citizens adapt. Institutions accommodate the acceptable range of shifts. Democracy may preserve elections while losing the plural ethos that confers moral legitimacy on elections.

This crisis extends far beyond India. Across Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and parts of Africa, majoritarian identities increasingly seek political expression as cultural entitlement. Immigration, demographic change, and economic anxiety create fertile ground for narratives of belonging and exclusion. The stranger becomes a political symbol. Citizenship becomes conditional on cultural conformity.

The global significance of India lies in scale and example. It is the world’s largest democracy and among its most diverse societies. If such a polity can sustain equal citizenship across profound civilizational differences, it strengthens the case for plural democracy everywhere. If it yields to cultural majoritarianism, it reinforces a darker proposition: that deep diversity ultimately requires one dominant identity to govern all others.

This pattern can be seen elsewhere. In Hungary, Turkey, Israel, and the United States, democratic legitimacy has increasingly been invoked to narrow constitutional pluralism. The challenge is no longer whether people can vote. It is whether majorities, after winning, can remain faithful to equality.

Secularism, therefore, matters not as a technical doctrine but as an ethical discipline. It asks the majority to accept restraint. It demands that numerical power not become moral entitlement. It insists that the stranger, the minority, and the dissenter are not outsiders but co-owners of the nation. That discipline is difficult because majoritarian politics offers emotional rewards: belonging, grievance, pride, and historical redemption.

The deeper crisis is moral. Secular democracy depends on a simple but demanding idea: that people can share a political future without sharing a single faith. It asks citizens to value equal rights above inherited hierarchy. It requires the state to treat difference not as a threat but as a condition of freedom.

A secular republic is not secured by courts alone, nor by constitutions, nor by ceremonial declarations of tolerance. It survives only when citizens accept a discipline more difficult than victory: the discipline of sharing power with those they did not choose, do not resemble, and may not fully understand.

When that ethic erodes, democracy may continue procedurally, but its soul changes. Citizenship survives in law but weakens in experience. Belonging becomes graded. The republic becomes a homeland for some and a conditional residence for others.

The siege of secularism is therefore not merely the rise of religious politics. Religion has always shaped public life. The deeper transformation occurs when the state ceases to mediate among communities and begins to embody one community’s historical self-image. At that point, the republic no longer belongs equally to its citizens. It becomes the inheritance of the majority, while others inhabit it by permission.

That is why the future of secularism remains a central question of the twenty-first century. It determines whether democracy can truly sustain equality amid big differences, or whether every plural society eventually yields to the oldest political instinct: that the majority alone owns the nation, and the rest belong only by grace.

…

Moin Qazi is an Indian author and development leader who advanced dignity-centred, community-led change. A pioneer of microfinance and grassroots institutions, he fused ethics with social innovation. With deep interdisciplinary scholarship, he bridged policy, justice, and lived realities. His legacy affirms ethical leadership and people’s agency as drivers of India’s progress…

Courtesy: The New Age Islam

The post The Faultlines In Secularism appeared first on SabrangIndia.

From the moment C. Joseph Vijay assumed power in Tamil Nadu, a well-oiled machinery of disinformation has been in overdrive. What distinguishes this particular misinformation wave from routine political spin is its structural character— it is not merely spontaneous enthusiasm from supporters, but an organised, multi-layered ecosystem comprising TVK-aligned influencer pages, meme networks, WhatsApp forwards, and, most alarmingly, mainstream commercial media houses that appear to have abdicated their basic editorial responsibility.

This is not simply a first-time entrant indulging in political cheerleading. This is a calculated attempt and systematic erasure of the DMK government’s policy legacy and its reattribution to a new administration that has, in many cases, not issued a single order, notification, or Government Order to justify the credit it is claiming. Interestingly, when the Modi 1.0 government came to power, a similar tool-kit was used by the Union government to appropriate previous government schemes through re-naming!

Case 1: The Phantom Government Order — Chairs in Revenue Offices

On May 16, 2026, a story swept across Tamil Nadu’s commercial media landscape: the Vijay-led TVK government had, in an act of compassionate governance, directed revenue department offices across the state to place chairs for citizens — so that the public would be made to sit before being attended to by officials. The story was framed as a landmark humanising reform, a signal of a “people’s government” in action.

TVK’s social media network amplified this with characteristic efficiency. Influencer pages shared it. Meme pages celebrated it. The news channels carried it.

There was one problem. The Government Order (GO) cited carried a date of May 15, 2025 — a full year before the TVK government came to power. It was a GO passed by the MK Stalin-led DMK government.

No correction was issued by most outlets. No clarification trended. The narrative had already done its work — lodging itself in public memory as a Vijay government initiative. The commercial media, which holds fact-checking as its foundational professional obligation, did not merely fail in that duty — it actively participated in the misattribution. Whether by editorial negligence or deliberate complicity, the outcome is the same: the public was deceived.

This is a textbook case of policy laundering — taking a prior government’s documented action, stripping it of its original context and authorship, and presenting it as fresh governance by a new regime.

Case 2: The TNPSC/SSC/IBPS Coaching Claim — Erasing the Naan Mudhalvan Legacy

The second case follows an identical pattern, and is arguably more egregious given the scale of the scheme being misappropriated.

Within days of the new government’s formation, news began circulating — again across both commercial channels and TVK’s social media architecture — that CM C. Joseph Vijay had directed the government to provide free coaching and training for competitive examinations including TNPSC, SSC, IBPS, and related government job entrance tests. The story was framed as a bold initiative to support Tamil Nadu’s youth in their aspirations for public sector employment.

The truth, however, is not merely different — it is extensively documented.

Naan Mudhalvan, launched under former Chief Minister MK Stalin, is one of the most significant skilling and career development schemes in Tamil Nadu’s recent history. Under this flagship programme, students have been receiving structured coaching for UPSC Civil Services, TNPSC, SSC, IBPS, and other competitive examinations for over three years. The results are not anecdotal — students trained under the Naan Mudhalvan Scheme have successfully cleared Civil Services examinations, with selections to the IAS, IPS, and allied services standing as verifiable testimony to the programme’s reach and effectiveness.

Naan Mudhalvan, a flagship skill development and competitive examination coaching scheme, was launched by Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on March 1, 2022, implemented jointly by the Department of School Education and the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation (TNSDC), with the goal of skilling 10 lakh students annually by bridging the gap between academic learning and industry requirements. The scheme is not a vague or symbolic initiative — it has a dedicated institutional vertical for civil services aspirants. Under the Naan Mudhalvan Competitive Exams Vertical, 1,000 candidates are shortlisted every year through a screening test, receiving ₹7,500 per month for 10 months, along with access to full-time residential coaching at the All India Civil Services Coaching Center in Chennai and the Anna Centenary Civil Services Coaching Academies in Coimbatore and Madurai. The scheme also supports candidates beyond the preliminary stage: those who clear the UPSC Mains receive a financial assistance of ₹25,000, and those who advance to the Interview stage receive ₹50,000.

The results of this sustained, three-year institutional investment are not anecdotal. They are on public record. In the UPSC Civil Services Examination 2024, three Tamil Nadu candidates figured in the national top 50 ranks — B. Sivachandran at AIR 23, S. Subash Karthik at AIR 29, and R. Monica at AIR 39 — all three of whom were trained under the Naan Mudhalvan Competitive Exams Vertical. In total, 50 aspirants cleared the UPSC that year through the scheme, of whom 18 underwent full-time residential coaching and two cleared the examination in Tamil medium. Monica, who secured AIR 39, spoke directly about the scheme’s role in her success: “I first got trained in the Naan Mudhalvan scheme. They gave me an incentive, which was very useful. They also promised me financial assistance for attending the interview.” Sivachandran, who became Tamil Nadu’s state topper, was one of 19 candidates from the scheme to clear UPSC CSE 2024, with his success under the initiative making him a role model for future aspirants in the state. As per a report in DT Next.

The Naan Mudhalvan scheme, managed by the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation under IAS officer Innocent Divya, has so far impacted over 28 lakh students across the state. The scheme’s official portal — naanmudhalvan.tn.gov.in — carries all selection lists, scholarship notifications, and programme documentation publicly, with official PDFs dated and verifiable going back to 2023. As per a report in OneIndia.

None of this infrastructure, institutional memory, financial commitment, or track record was created after May 2026. It belongs, in its entirety, to the MK Stalin government’s tenure. To attribute it to a new administration that has yet to issue a single Government Order or policy notification on the matter is not a compliment to the new government — it is a theft of credit from the old one, executed in broad daylight, with the media as a willing accomplice.

CM C. Joseph Vijay has issued no Government Order, no Executive Directive, no administrative notification, and no new policy framework for any such initiative. The infrastructure, the funding, the institutional arrangements, and the track record all belong to the DMK government’s tenure.

Yet the story was spread — relentlessly, as the pattern demands — without a single outlet pausing to ask: Where is the GO? What is the budget allocation? Which new institutions have been created? What is the implementation timeline?

These are not difficult questions. They are the minimum threshold of journalism. Their absence reveals something important about the current media environment in Tamil Nadu.

Case 3: The Bus Driver Mobile Ban — 2022 Law, 2026 Headlines

On May 19, 2026, established commercial media outlets ran a breaking news graphic announcing that the Tamil Nadu government had ordered a ban on government bus drivers using mobile phones while on duty. Drivers keeping phones in their uniform pockets was prohibited. Violations would attract strict disciplinary action. It was presented as a fresh government directive.

The order is real. The government that passed it is not the current one.

This is a law that came into force in February 2022 — under Chief Minister MK Stalin’s government. Asianet News Tamil reported it in full on 7 February 2022, with identical content: a ban on government bus drivers using mobile phones while on duty, strict action for violations, issued by the Transport Department. The order is over four years old.

Established media outlets broadcast it on 19 May 2026 as current news — without a date check, without source verification, without the basic editorial step of asking whether this directive already existed. Whether this was careless journalism or deliberate reattribution is a question these outlets owe their audiences an answer to. Either way, the effect is the same: a four-year-old Stalin-era public safety order is laundered into the TVK government’s early governance record.

This is not an isolated lapse. It is the third documented instance — within the first two weeks of the TVK government — of existing policy being stripped of its origin and recycled as new. The chairs in revenue offices. The Naan Mudhalvan coaching scheme. And now, a bus driver mobile ban from 2022.

When media outlets with state-wide reach operate this way, are they making errors or making choices?

A Note on Responsible Journalism: The Hindu’s Intervention

When most regional commercial channels were either actively spreading or uncritically amplifying this misinformation flood, The Hindu chose a different path. Their video analysis titled “Vijay, TVK and the rise of fake political narratives | Focus Tamil Nadu” — presented by D. Suresh Kumar, Deputy Resident Editor, Tamil Nadu — directly examined the surge of viral claims, AI-generated images, recycled government schemes, and fake “historic firsts” being attributed to the new administration. Within 19 hours it had crossed 55,000 views and 3,745 likes — proof that a substantial audience in Tamil Nadu is actively hungry for honest journalism. They simply cannot find it when the overwhelming weight of commercial media is pointed in the opposite direction. Responsible journalism in this environment is a choice. The outlets that did not make that choice made a different one.

The PhD MLAs Claim

A statistic went viral claiming that the TVK legislature party includes 6 PhD holders and numerous engineers — presented as proof of an exceptionally educated, meritocratic legislature. The claim was shared widely and celebrated across TVK’s online network.

The nomination affidavit data filed with the Election Commission tells a completely different story. Of TVK’s 108 total winners, these are the official figures from their own affidavits:

In other words, 33% – 35% of TVK’s elected MLAs — more than one in three — have HSC or below as their educational qualification. This is not a criticism of those MLAs. Educational qualification is not the sole measure of a legislator’s worth, and many capable public representatives have risen from humble educational backgrounds. The criticism here is directed entirely at the TVK online network that fabricated a flattering but false picture — inflating PhD holders six-fold, and claiming 126 MLAs when the actual number is 108.

The affidavits are public documents. The data is freely available. The viral claim required only a basic check to disprove. Nobody in the TVK ecosystem bothered — or wanted — to make that check.

SC Candidates in General Constituencies

It was widely claimed that TVK fielded as many as 28 SC candidates in general constituencies — presented as a historic gesture of social justice. Election Commission data tells a different story. Only one SC candidate was fielded in a general constituency — in Shankarapuram — and that candidate did not win. The gap between 28 and 1 is not a rounding error. It is a fabrication.

Tamil Nadu’s “First Woman Minister”

Among the most brazenly false claims circulating is that the Vijay government has given Tamil Nadu its first woman minister. Tamil Nadu has had two women Chief Ministers — J. Jayalalithaa and Janaki Ramachandran. Women ministers have served in Tamil Nadu’s cabinet since before Independence — including Rukmani Lakshmipathi and Jothi Venkatachalam. Sathiyavani Muthu aka Annai Sathiyavani Muthu have been in the cabinets of Arignar Anna and Kalaignar Karunanidhi. Even in the 16th LA led by MK Stalin, had Geetha Jeevan, Kayalvizhi Selvaraj in the cabinet. To claim a “first” here is not ignorance. It is an erasure of women who actually broke those barriers, decades before the TVK government existed.

SC Ministers and the “First” Portfolio Claim

It has been claimed that for the first time, a key portfolio like Education has been assigned to a Dalit Minister under Vijay’s government. This erases an entire history. Kakkan held the Home Ministry under Karmaveer Kamaraj’s cabinet. Parithi Ilamvazhuthi served as Deputy Speaker in Kalignar Karuanidhi’s regime. Dhanabal served as Speaker in J Jayalalitha’s regime. Kovi Chezhian, Madhivendhan held Higher Education and Forest & Tourism in MK Stalin’s government. Dalit leaders have held some of Tamil Nadu’s most consequential portfolios across multiple governments. Presenting this as a TVK first is not a celebration of Dalit representation — it is a falsification of the very history that Dalit political leaders fought to create.

The Chief Minister’s Grievance Portal — 25 Years Old

The CM’s helpline and online grievance portal has been presented as a Vijay government innovation. In reality, the Chief Minister’s Special Cell portal has been operational for over 25 years — serving citizens through DMK, AIADMK, and DMK governments alike. It predates TVK as a political organisation.

The Panic Button in Buses

The installation of panic buttons in buses for women’s safety has been projected as the fulfilment of a Vijay election promise — a new initiative, a new protection. Chennai’s Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) buses already have this facility operational. It was not invented by this government. It was inherited by it.

Still there are many more cases of such misinformation flooding, these are just examples.

The Structural Problem: When Media Becomes a Propaganda Relay

What we are witnessing is not a series of isolated errors. It is the normalisation of a post-verification media culture — one in which the virality of a claim, and its alignment with a dominant political mood, substitutes for the basic act of checking.

Several dynamics are at work here:

The Influencer-to-Mainstream Pipeline: Stories originate or are seeded — often without sourcing, often without documents — published by commercial media outlets looking for content that will generate engagement. By the time a GO is checked (if it ever is), the story has already circulated widely.

The Asymmetry of Correction: Misinformation spreads at the speed of sharing. Corrections, when they come, travel far slower and reach far fewer people. Media organisations that run false stories without correction are effectively choosing which version of reality reaches the public.

The Erasure of the DMK Record: Taken together, these stories form a coherent — if dishonest — narrative project: the systematic de-legitimisation of MK Stalin’s governance legacy and its absorption into the political identity of his successor. This is not incidental. Tamil Nadu has real, substantive policy achievements from the DMK years — in health, education, skilling, and social welfare — that deserve accurate attribution, both as a matter of historical record and democratic accountability.

A Note on Methodology

The cases documented here are not drawn from partisan counter-claims. They are verifiable through publicly available Government Orders on the Tamil Nadu government’s official portal, scheme documentation for Naan Mudhalvan, and the dates on the documents that the media itself published without reading carefully enough to notice the year.

Fact-checking in this context requires nothing more than reading the date on a document before broadcasting its contents. That this basic step was skipped — repeatedly, across multiple outlets — tells us everything we need to know about the current state of accountability journalism in Tamil Nadu.

Conclusion: The Chaos

The cases documented in this article are not exhaustive. They are representative. In the first two weeks of the TVK government alone, the recycled orders, misattributed schemes, unverified claims, and prematurely declared victories flooding Tamil Nadu’s media and social media landscape has been relentless. For every case fact-checked here, dozens more circulated unchallenged. So the question must be asked: is this a pattern? And if it is a pattern, who benefits from it?

In the digital era, misinformation is no longer merely a by-product of poor journalism. When a four-year-old GO becomes today’s headline, when a circular becomes a solved problem, when an announcement becomes a delivered promise — is that carelessness? Or is it architecture? When the same type of misattribution repeats itself across multiple issues, across multiple platforms, within the same two-week window, can we still call it coincidence?

The chaos that this kind of information flooding creates is worth examining carefully. When citizens cannot reliably distinguish what is real from what is recycled, what is new from what is four years old, what is promised from what is delivered — what happens to their ability to hold a government accountable? If the information environment is engineered to confuse rather than clarify, is democratic accountability even possible? Can you demand delivery on a promise if you have already been told, by a thousand voices simultaneously, that it has been delivered?

And here is the question that must be asked without flinching: have we not seen this playbook before? The systematic flooding of the information space with noise, the weaponisation of digital networks to manufacture consent, the deliberate blurring of the real and the fabricated — is this not precisely the strategy that the RSS-BJP machinery has deployed at the national level? Is this not how a government presiding over real failures continues to project an image of historic achievement? Is this not how legitimate criticism gets drowned, how democratic accountability gets quietly suffocated while the forms of democracy are preserved?

If the answer is yes — and the evidence increasingly points that way — then the next question is perhaps the most uncomfortable of all. A party that carries the intellectual and moral inheritance of Periyar and Ambedkar: is this the tradition it intends to honour? Periyar’s foundational demand was simple — think for yourself. Question authority. Refuse to be deceived. Ambedkar’s constitutional vision rested entirely on an informed, critically conscious citizenry as the only real safeguard of democracy. A political culture that actively works to prevent people from thinking clearly — is that carrying their legacy forward? Or is it dismantling it from within?

Democracy requires an informed public. When the distance between citizens and truth is deliberately widened, when people are kept away from what their government has actually done and not done — how can we expect any government to remain ideologically moral and accountable? And if we cannot expect accountability, what exactly are we left with?

The people of Tamil Nadu — and the democratic forces that wish to raise real issues, real failures, real demands — deserve an information environment in which truth has room to stand. The question is: who is responsible for ensuring that it does? And are they doing their job?

(The author is an independent Tamil journalist with YouTube channels, Peralai, AranSei)

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

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The post Flood of Fake Narratives & Misinformation: How TVK’s propaganda machine is attempting a re-write of TN’s governance history appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In doing so, as the media have widely reported, the court expressed “serious reservations” regarding several aspects of the apex court judgement through which it denied bail to activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who have been incarcerated, in jail, since 2020.

Besides this observation that has given rise to much public commentary given the clearly split verdict of India’s highest court on the granting of bail under UAPA, the bench of Justice B.V. Nagarathna and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan most notably observed in the same judgment that conviction rates in UAPA cases across India remained abysmally low, ranging between 1.5% and 4% from 2019-2023. Even worse still, conviction rates in Jammu and Kashmir have stayed below 1%.

The court therefore noted that these statistics suggest a high probability of acquittal in such cases, reported Live Law.

“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,” the bench observed.

The present case and bail conditions

Who is Syed Iftikhar Andrabi? A village-level worker for the Rural Development department in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir, who was taken into preventive detention in August 2019, following the reading down of Article 370, but was released after the high court declared the detention legally untenable. Thereafter, he was subsequently arrested in June 2020 in connection with a National Investigation Agency (NIA) case alleging narco-terrorism activities.

Interestingly, his appeals for bail were denied by both the Special NIA Court as well as the Jammu and Kashmir high court. The prosecution alleged that on information provided by the appellant, drugs and cash were recovered from a co-accused’s premises, further claiming that his phone records linked him to operatives in Pakistan.

According to the May 18, Supreme Court judgment, no evidence was directly recovered from Andrabi’s person or premises, directing to release the appellant on bail, subject to conditions imposed by the special NIA court. The conditions stipulate that the appellant must deposit his passport and appear before the Handwara police station once every fortnight. He is also prohibited from threatening or influencing witnesses.

The UAPA has long since been criticised as an instrument of crushing dissent in India, with numerous activists and journalists slapped with cases under the draconian rule. In Kashmir, the act has seen some of its most controversial use.

Previous analyses of this counter-terror law may be read here, here and here.

Low rates of conviction

Making a reference to official data presented before the parliament by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, drawn from National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) figures covering 2019-2023, the bench stated that the all-India conviction rate in UAPA cases falls between 1.5-4%.

What this means that a person charged under the act faces a 96% to 98.5% probability of acquittal. The court added, “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.”

Hence, referring to the high rate of exoneration for the accused in such cases, the court emphasised that “bail is the rule and jail the exception.” Invoking an earlier ruling, Union of India versus K.A. Najeeb, the judgement reiterated that Section 43D(5) of UAPA cannot be used in isolation to deny bail and does not serve as a blanket instrument for prolonged pre-trial detention.

The Order passed by the Supreme Court of India may be read here.

Related:

Supreme Court reasserts KA Najeeb, warns against “hollowing out” constitutional protections in UAPA cases; questions Umar Khalid bail verdict

Supreme Court restores Article 21 safeguards, calls 24-month UAPA custody without charge sheet illegal; sets aside Gauhati HC’s reliance on Sec 43D(7)

Allahabad HC grants bail in UAPA case over WhatsApp video; raises questions on overuse of stringent national security laws

The post UAPA: ‘99% Possibility of Acquittal’: What the SC said on Conviction Rates appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In this wider context, therefore, this attempt, “India Economic & Social Justice Report 2025”, authored by none less than Professor K S Chalam, former Vice Chancellor, Dravida University, Andhra Pradesh and former Member, Union Public Service Commission, Chairman, Institute for Economic and Social Justice, Vishakhapatnam, is both significant and path-breaking. This report analyses the historical, constitutional, and socio-economic landscape of justice in India, with a specific focus on marginalised communities. This report is first of its kind to measure and indicate where both the Union and State governments stand in providing constitutional guarantees of Justice –both economic and social— equally and to all citizens of the country. Inspired by Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), this report has examined several indictors to determine the Economic and Social Justice Index.

Finally, it has fixed following three dimensions.

1: MPCE (monthly per capita expenditure) per family, among Scheduled Castes to signify economic Justice. (The MPCE for ST is not produced because, states the author, it reflects the same trend).

2: Atrocities committed on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribe population published by NCRBI

3. Human rights violations as recorded by NHRC are considered for estimating the Index.

The report has followed a statistical method on the lines of UNDP’s HDI. The report presents data for two periods 2011 and 2023. It is surprising to find states that are economically proactive are socially regressive in protecting the SC and ST populations; as a result, the overall ranks of ESJI are getting depressed over a period of time for such states. The report provides data and information on castes, sub castes of SC, ST and OBC population by states with caste wise data on education, economic status, reservations etc given in the Appendix. This analytical appraisal under pioneering concepts reviewing 75 years of the implementation of the Constitution is both profoundly innovative and also, bold.

The text begins with highlighting the concept of “Justice” in the Indian Constitution noting that it was heavily influenced by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who served as the Chairman of the Drafting Committee.  The report cited how Ambedkar argued in the Constituent Assembly that social and economic justice could only be achieved through a socialistic economy, including the nationalisation of land and industry. The Preamble places “Justice—social, economic, and political” as its first element, signalling its role as the ultimate goal of the Republic.  The report emphasises that democracy in India is a “top dressing” on an undemocratic soil, requiring the cultivation of constitutional morality to overcome historical cultures of inequality as its back drop.

The report contrasts Western theories of justice with the Indian social reality of the caste system.  It discusses John Rawls’s “Justice as Fairness” and Amartya Sen’s critique, which utilises the Indian concepts of niti (organizational propriety) and nyaya (realized justice). The text argues that Western libertarian and liberal theories often fail to account for the “caste mode of production” and the “Composite Index of Discrimination” (CID) inherent in Indian society. To assess the achievements and limitations of the Constitution during the last 75 years of its operation, the report identified the instruments and institutions of justice with which they can be interrogated the transactions both in the legislature and in the judiciary. Given the limitations of the scope of the study, it broadly discusses the instruments of justice as legal documents, including Acts, Rights, Rules, Property, Budget provisions, Atrocity rates, Gini Co-efficients etc.

The institutions of Justice in India can be identified as the judiciary, civil society, market, and state represented by the proceedings of Parliament/Assembly and not necessarily the private institutional structures, as the report is concerned here with public documents: the Constitution and Government Reports .The process of delivering or dispensing social justice through the passing of various Acts, such as the SC ST (prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, including the Protection of Civil Rights Act (prevention of Untouchability) 1955, 1976, and the judicial interpretations or interventions over a period of 70 years, is termed ‘a saga of social justice drama in India’. The report opines that the appointment of the SC, ST, Minorities and Backward Classes commissions indicate the government’s intentions and obligations as per the mandate of the Constitution. However, the imagined constitutional objectives of social justice seem to have not been realized due to litigation. The issue of social justice as part of the routine prevention of untouchability cases is not limited to the broad understanding of the term Dalit at the all-India level and goes beyond. The report brings out a significant fact that some of the untouchables of North India like in UP, Bihar etc are listed as Scheduled castes there and are recorded as Backward Classes (BCs) in South India. It is difficult; the report agrees to understand the social categories without looking at the evolution of each caste group in the social history of India. The report however, has not gone deep in to that dimension here.

The first part of the report examined various aspects of each dimension, namely the Economic and Social measures of justice. After identifying the dimensions, the data was normalised. In the second stage, the indicators for economic justice, consisting of monthly per capita expenditure are considered. The maximum and minimum values of each dimension were obtained from the internal dimensions of the factors considered. For example, the four categories of social groups SC, ST, OBC, and others for which data are made available have been tested as to which group was the most deprived in terms of their mean values, and the group with the least value was used for the calculation of the indicator (the data are given in the appendix Tables not in the text). As noted above, the economic dimension of MPCE adequately explains literacy; therefore, it is dropped at the stage of calculating the index. Finally, the ESJI is arrived at by combining the three dimensions and dividing it by 1 by 3 to arrive at the average and subtracting the value from 1 to arrive at the comprehensive index. The ESJI value indicates deprivation, with zero indicating absolute justice and one indicating Absolute Injustice or Deprivation.

The significant finding of the report is estimation of Wealth Stolen from Native Indians including ‘Untouchables and lower (depressed) castes’ who suffered the loss of lands cleared and cultivated by them. These were ultimately stolen by the traivarnikas[1] with the support of the state, argues the report Native Indians have remained landless and poor. Yet, they were the ones who were involved in the production process and created wealth. The report obtained data from the Madison study on the World GDP and GDP for India from the year 0 to 1973 as published by OECD. The data was used to arrive at the contribution of ‘lower (depressed) castes’ to India GDP and its proportion in the World economy. It is surprising to find that one fourth of the Wealth of the World was created by these ‘depressed’ castes of India amounting to around $ 25 billion in the year 0 and this figure could have reached $ 25 trillion cumulatively by the end of 1000 AD known as the age of conflicts and regional satraps. The Report notes (observes) that a vast portion of India’s historical wealth was created by depressed (lower) castes but appropriated by “non-productive groups”. The report has cited the Oxfam Report on India 2025 to show that the amount of colonial plunder of the British India is almost equal to the amount estimated to have been stolen by the upper castes from Dalits and Bahujans. This is a very important statistic that might, in future, lead to probing debates across activist groups.

A significant portion of the text is dedicated to the unequal distribution of assets and wealth.  Historically, Dalits (Scheduled Castes) were forbidden from owning land, gold, or weapons. As of 2015-16, the average land holdings of Scheduled Castes have dropped to 0.78 hectares, and roughly 58% of them remain landless at all India. The author of the report introduces the concept of “Caste-Based Cronyism,” arguing that modern economic liberalisation has primarily benefited the “Dvija” (upper-caste) groups through Multi-Caste Corporations (MCC), effectively recreating Varnashrama Dharma in the 21st century.

Social Injustice is measured in terms of the atrocities data for SC and ST obtained from the NCRB reports. It is noted that despite Article 17 of the Constitution, the report notes a sharp rise in atrocities. NCRB data shows atrocities on Dalits increased from 17,667 in 1990 to 53,886 in 2020, more than threefold raise.  In the context of women empowerment as part of Social Justice the text of the report recognizes the “Founding Mothers” of the Constitution (e.g., Sarojini Naidu, Amrit Kaur) who fought for women’s rights and the Hindu Code Bill against “blatant sexism” in the Assembly. The judiciary is critiqued for its “non-representative character,” with allegations that it remains influenced by a small number of elite families (as reported by Prof Mark Gallanter etc.), often leading to the acquittal of those accused of atrocities against Dalits implying that it did not result in reducing the intensity of injustice. Apart from the NCRB data, the report makes use of the NHRC data on human rights violations recorded by caste and state to arrive at the Economic and Social Justice Index.

The report proposes a new quantitative tool, the ESJI, inspired by the UNDP’s Human Development Index. This is calculated using the three dimensions: MPCE: Monthly Per Capita Expenditure of SC households, SC and ST Atrocities: Rates recorded by the NCRB per lakh of population and Human Rights Violations: Cases recorded by the NHRC.  The index aims to provide a measurable “deprivation index” where a value of zero indicates absolute justice and one indicates absolute injustice.  The report concludes that while the Constitution provides a mandate for justice, institutional structures—particularly the judiciary and the market have failed to gift justice to the victims and the same have largely helped to reinforce traditional caste-based inequalities rather than dismantling them.

The report notes that Justice is not quantifiable, but its impact can be envisaged in terms of the dimensions through which it affects the human condition. There are several measures developed and used to state the economic circumstances of the people like the PQLI (Physical Quality of Life) Index constructed by ODA in the 1970s. There are other indices that are now being used to quantify and analyse human quality of life, economic and social development indicators along with the aggregate concept of GDP, HDI etc. Against this background, the objective of this report as claimed by the author is to determine where Economic and Social Justice, as defined in the text, stands at different periods of time in India. The values are arranged such that the highest value indicates more deprivation and the lowest value nearing zero indicates perfect justice. The ESJI was 0.212 in 2011 and climbed to 0.305 in 2023. This means that economic and social justice deprivation has almost doubled over 12 years in India.

Economic and social justice are interdependent, complimentary and it is only a comprehensive approach that will tremendously help India grow. Such ‘growth’ is simply not possible unless the fruits of development reach the most marginalised sections. The report examines state wise indicators in terms of the above-mentioned dimensions and found the major former BIMARU states, Bihar, U.P, Rajasthan that are being touted now as improving in terms of economic indicators like per capita income or expenditure, are however consistent in getting higher ranks of deprivations except U.P that records minor change.

In 2011, the ESJI of Bihar was 0.141, M.P 0.184, Rajasthan 0.225 and U.P 0.510. The ESJI for 2023 for Bihar is 0.281, M.P 0.412, U.P 0.443 and Rajasthan 0.433. Uttar Pradesh (UP) that had an index of 0.443 in 2011 has the highest rank among the states now and has lowered its value to 0.470. Rajasthan with 0.480 has replaced U.P in the dubious position of highest rank in 2023.  These five states are listing as the better performing West Bengal 0.040, Assam 0.041, Chhattisgarh 0.074, Tamil Nadu 0.099, Punjab 0.101 and Maharashtra 0.107 in 2011. The same states remained as better though their ranks have altered. In 2023 Assam with 0.077, West Bengal 0.110, Chhattisgarh 0.112, Jharkhand 0.167 and Punjab 0.162 are found to be in a better position with lower ranks. Interestingly Jharkhand a predominantly tribal state joined the ranks of better performed states in 2023 and Maharashtra slid down one mark in its rank.

Among the South Indian states, the ranks of Andhra Pradesh in 2011 was 13 with 0.196, Kerala with 0.317 in 16^th rank were among the lowest five ranks. It is noted that in 2023 Telangana joined the ranks of lowest performing states with 0.380 at the 20th rank and Andhra Pradesh has improved its rank with a value of 0.285. The ranks and values of ESJI are given for all the states and Union Territories are given in the Appendix to the Report.

The author is very pragmatic in accepting the limitations of the study: restrictions in data and the inadequacies of reports of the government for an all-India study of this nature.   However, the estimated indices to quantify and explain how India is performing in terms of the Constitutional objectives of Economic and Social Justice is a first rigorous endeavour and commendable. With all these limitations, this is an excellent report with useful parameters and matrix on economic, social and other related issues. These tables and data are presented in the Appendix of Tables for reference to assist scholars and activists and lead them towards compiling more such indices.

The report is not a simple exercise of research and reflection. The exercise reveals the author’s commitment to the most marginalized peoples, Constitutional categories of persons that were promised justice, economic and social about 75 years ago and who have suffered betrayal for decades since. This section is also the major segment of our population.

The study is not just presentation of figures and statistical tables to substantiate the arguments, but the sheer writing —sentences with emotions carried through the paragraphs reflect the agony and despair the author experienced both as a scholar and perhaps as a silent worker. Frankly speaking, much has been talked about Human Development Reports but they fail to take into account Caste discrimination and other systematic deprivations that are both social as well as political.

Prof K.S.Chalam should be applauded for the effort of producing such a report despite acute hardships of access, especially because most of data relied upon is institutional data. It is also important that the publication of such/similar reports becomes an annual feature to assist and guide policy makers who frame policies for the widest sections of Indians.

We hope that NITI Ayog and other important institution both at the Centre as well as in the states will benefit from these reports and encourage each state to engage with such an approach to publish HDIs on social, economic and political justice. The Institute for Economic and Social justice along with Prof Chalam’s vast experience in socio-economic and political economy studies should continue this exercise and bring in greater nuances into the public debate. The report is an important step in that direction.

Pre-launch orders (before May 31, 2026 are discounted and the price for the single copy is at Rs 400 including postage charges during this period) Contact for copies: Email: Chalamks@hotmail.com

[1] Traivarnikas (or Traivarṇika) is a Sanskrit term referring to the members of the three upper classes (varnas) in traditional Hindu society: the Brahmins (priests/scholars), Kshatriyas (warriors/rulers), and Vaishyas (merchants/traders); the term translates directly to “those of the three colors” or “three classes.” It serves to group these three communities together and distinguish them from the Shudras (laborers) and Avarnas (those considered outside the traditional four-fold Varna system).

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The post India Economic & Social Justice Report 2025: First-ever study measures constitutional justice across union and state governments, have they delivered? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Millions of people sharply criticized the contrast between the approach taken in Karnataka in 2018 and that later adopted in Tamil Nadu. They wondered what strategy or constitutional reasoning lay behind that decision. The Union Government, particularly the Union Home Ministry, also bears responsibility for protecting constitutional federalism in such situations.

If such a long leash could be offered in Bengaluru, could a similar blueprint unfold for Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) leader Vijay in a fractured Tamil Nadu Assembly? In a hypothetical scenario where the state is staring at a deeply divided mandate, what determines who grabs the crown? Is it a masterstroke strategy, a calculated constitutional interpretation, a political illusion, or sheer cinematic magic?

A Matinee Idol as CM

Vijay’s transition from a cinematic powerhouse to a frontline political contender has broken the conventional speed limits of Dravidian politics. As a young Scheduled Caste Christian leader, his political identity carries deep symbolic resonance:

• Breaking the Reservation Mold: Defying traditional identity politics, Vijay chose to contest and win from two unreserved general constituencies.
• Rapid Mainstream Acceptance: Within days of the election results, he transformed TVK from a nascent political startup into a formidable claimant for the Chief Minister’s office.
• Strategic Representation: For his supporters, his ascent represents a generational shift, a rare moment where a Dalit-Christian leader commands center stage in Tamil Nadu without relying on traditional Dravidian umbrellas.

During the height of this post-election instability, the acting Governor of Tamil Nadu, Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar, holding temporary additional charge, maintained a calculated, unusual silence. Free from dramatic public posturing or polarizing declarations, the Raj Bhavan silently allowed the political gears to turn toward an eventually stable resolution.

When TVK initially staked its claim with the backing of roughly 108 legislators, critics pointed out that Vijay lacked an absolute majority. Vijay countered by demanding the right to prove his strength on the floor. This brought a classic constitutional debate back to life: does the “single largest party” hold an inherent right to form a government?

The short answer is no. The phrase “single largest party” is conspicuously absent from the text of the Constitution of India, nor is there any legally binding convention that forces a Governor to invite them first. Once sworn in, the authority of the office is to engineer defections and gather support over several days or weeks.

SC radically redefined federalism.

In the landmark S. R. Bommai v. Union of India case, the Supreme Court radically redefined federalism and gubernatorial discretion. The judgment laid down ironclad principles that directly govern hung assemblies:

• The Assembly Floor is Supreme: Majority support cannot be assessed through headcount lists in Raj Bhavans or resort roll-calls; it must be tested exclusively on the floor of the House.
• No Partisan Preferences: Governors cannot act on personal political whims or align their decisions with partisan agendas.
• Limits on Article 356: The threat of President’s Rule cannot be wielded arbitrarily to dismantle or prevent elected governments.
• No Studio Mandates: Legitimate majorities are manufactured through constitutional processes, not in television studios or luxury hotels.

Commissions and Conventions

While the Constitution is silent, successive expert panels, most notably the Sarkaria Commission and the Punchhi Commission, have outlined a clear hierarchy of preferences for Governors navigating a fractured mandate.

Though these guidelines lack the force of codified law, they heavily guide gubernatorial ethics. In this instance, constitutional strategist Vikas Bansode reportedly advised that the Governor’s primary duty is not just tracking down the biggest single entity, but actively facilitating a regime that promises long-term structural stability.

This explains why a Governor functioning under a BJP-led Central Government acted with unexpected institutional restraint, deviating from past controversies. In places like Goa and Manipur (2017), governors skipped the single largest party (Congress) to invite BJP-led coalitions that demonstrated stable post-poll numbers. Conversely, rushed swearing-in’s in Karnataka (2018) and Maharashtra (2019) ended in public embarrassment and abrupt resignations within days.

Vijay’s transition

Vijay’s transition from a vulnerable claimant with 108 seats to an unassailable leader was a masterclass in quiet political realignment. The operation moved through three distinct phases:

1. The Initial Staking (108 MLAs): On May 5th, Vijay approached Raj Bhavan with a base of 108 legislators. The crucial momentum shift came when 5 Congress MLAs broke ranks to back him. Remarkably, they did this while their party formally remained a part of the DMK-led INDIA alliance—moving like silent grandmasters on a multi-dimensional chessboard.
2. The Governor’s Validation (120 MLAs): Backed by the Bansode stability doctrine, the Governor permitted a floor test once Vijay’s consolidated file reached 120 MLAs.
3. The Coronation (144 MLAs): During the actual voting process on the floor of the House, the numbers swelled dramatically to 144, transforming a fragile minority into an absolute, commanding majority.

Twin titans of Dravidian politics

Vijay’s rise evokes memories of iconic actor-politicians like M.G. Ramachandran, J. Jayalalithaa, and N.T. Rama Rao. Yet, his structural consolidation raises deep, lingering questions about what truly transpired behind the scenes.

If the twin titans of Dravidian politics- the DMK and the AIADMK- wanted to stop TVK, they possessed the combined numbers to do so. Why did they falter?

• The DMK’s Calculated Retreat: Former Chief Minister M.K. Stalin publicly announced that the DMK would not destabilize a TVK government for at least six months. During the final vote, his party staged a strategic walkout rather than voting Vijay down.
• The AIADMK’s Internal Fractures: The AIADMK, traditionally aligned with the BJP, suffered sudden internal rifts at the exact moment of the vote, effectively paralyzing their opposition and indirectly strengthening Vijay’s hand.

Ultimately, this sequence of events enters the realm of political philosophy. Was Vijay the ultimate architect of his own destiny, a lucky beneficiary of a fractured era, or an unsuspecting protagonist in a larger, intricate script written within the quiet corridors of Raj Bhavan? Thus, the Governor steered Tamil Nadu, protecting the constitutional propriety.

While the public witnessed a spectacular, cinematic climb to the apex of power, the real puppeteers steering the strings may choose to remain forever invisible.

Dr. Madabhushi Sridhar, Professor of Media Law, LL.D., Advisor, Mahindra University, Hyderabad.

Courtesy: CounterCurrents

The post Twin Titans of Dravidian Politics and Vijay’s Rise appeared first on SabrangIndia.

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.

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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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