Talha Mannan (TM), a PhD student in the MANUU (Hyderabad) and the National Secretary of the Students Islamic Organization (SIO, established in 1982; an affiliate of the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind-JIH, established in 1941 by Abul Ala Maududi) has come out with a critique in his piece published by a “Muslim” portal, maktoobmedia, dated August 26, 2025, “How (not) to talk about Aligarh Muslim University”. This was a week after the “second stage” of the hunger strike protest (hunger strike till death) was finally withdrawn in the pre-dawn moments of August 19, 2025.  The “first” was claimed to have been clinched by some girl students a few days earlier than August 19, 2025. Whereas the “third” stage came to an end with another glass of fruit juice offered by some girls (dukhtaraan-e-millat), subsequent to August 19, 2025.

While expressing his discomfiture with Yanis Iqbal’s and with Bhavuk Sharma’s pieces, (besides some of the write-ups of Prof Mohammad Sajjad), Talha Mannan (TM) has made what is termed as Strawman’s arguments. TM is manufacturing contentions out of nowhere and attributing these to the three authors.

For instance TM seems to suggest that a Leftist slogan, lal salam and laal-laal lehrayega) is equivalent to his Islamist slogan “Islam Ki Dawat”. First of all, no such Leftist slogan was raised in the AMU student protests of August 2025. Thus, he creates an illusion for himself that he has triumphantly refuted the arguments of the authors he purports to rebut. Also, how did he arrive at a conclusion that Bhavuk (and his PhD supervisor) are Marxists/Leftists, is also quite unclear? Of course, Yanis Iqbal does claim to be a Marxist, in his Facebook profile. TM’s motives become evident when he criticises the authors on account of failing to oppose the UP government’s ban on Namaz on roads.

As far as I have been able to follow from their publicly iterated positions, around the August 2025 protests of AMU students, they have raised the issue that JIH-SIO-Talha Mannan (JSTM) have not raised — their explicit and candid objection to the UP government’s pre-existing order (March 2025) banning roadside namaz. The JIH-SIO-Talha Mannan (JSTM) have maintained a silence on the said government order and he chose to take on the AMU Proctor who was trying to ensure that the UP government’s specific order doesn’t get violated. Such a shift of the student protest from being against the Proctor to making it against the Yogi government’s police, gave a pretext to the Yogi-led government’s police to launch a crackdown against the students who had already undergone the stun-grenade horror on December 15, 2019. [The immediate prelude of this horror itself awaits an expose]. That is how JSTM itself got the AMU students’ protest menacingly policed. Rather than accepting his own fault he is shifting the blames on the said three authors. This is sheer mischief.

Let it be noted that the AMU students began their protests on or before August 4, 2025, against the procedurally flawed fee-hike. Talha Mannan (TM) jumped into it five days later, on Friday August 8, 2025. The JIH-SIO-Talha Mannan (JSTM) remained silent on all the days of protests, preceding Friday August 8, 2025. Till August 8, no written statement, press communiqué of the JSTM has been found on the issue of fee-hike. Let it also be noted that in September 2024, the MANUU administration cancelled the students’ union elections scheduled for September 23, 2024. Talha Mannan (TM), contesting the MANUU Students’ Union elections, didn’t intensify his agitation there in Hyderabad, the way he suddenly jumped into the AMU protest on August 8, 2025 to make more vociferous demands for the right to roadside namaz and less for every other issue such as the procedurally flawed fee-hike and demand that elections for the AMU Students’ Union (AMUSU) be held. The JSTM was nowhere to be seen when the AMU girl students were protesting against power-cuts and the agitated girl students were maltreated by Proctorial professors in April 2025

Is it a case then that the JIH rarely exposes the ills within “Muslim managed or Muslim dominated” institutions, unless there is an intra-Muslim, sectarian disputes (for instance, a few months ago, there was a social and Urdu media outrage by JIH against the Darul Uloom, Deoband)? If the answer is in the affirmative, then this pathology that affects Muslim politics needs a deeper scrutiny. AMU has got many systemic flaws, such as a problematic localism, inbreeding (not only in enrolments, recruitments but also in the composition of the Executive Council (EC), in empanelling VCs and in recruiting higher officers and teacher-administrators, highly damaging the quality of academia. The long continuation of a handful of academically laggard teachers within AMU governance (who also extract lots of illegal benefits), and highly disproportionate preponderance of western UP + Azamgarh, financial and other corruption and irregularities, occupation of hostels by non-bonafide ex-students and hoodlums, massive corruption in contracts for supplies and civil constructions, patronage of AMU administration to certain dubious persons doubling as suppliers-contractors, and (also) a massive inflow of AMU teachers into majoritarian saffron outfits to curry favours (such as appointments to VCs!!). Why must posts of ad hoc Controller, ad hoc Finance Officer, ad hoc Registrar, too many Directors & OSDs must continue endlessly? Why must only a particular OSD get driver and security?

These serious, festering issues that plague AMU have, so far not  found any comprehensive expose’ from ‘Muslim bodies’ and their ‘leaderships.’

Besides Talha Mannan (TM)’s duplicity and cunningness, he is also self-contradicting himself and appears confused. At one place he calls Bhavuk’s position (“Why Protests at AMU take a Rightward Shift?”, LinkedIn, August 14, 2025) as being governed by his “Hindu, upper-caste” upbringing, while on the other he speculates Bhavuk’s write-up to be doing with his flawed “Left-Liberal” framework.

Historically speaking, within AMU, students’ protests often acquire a strand of demonizing the Left (the surkha) and then mobilizing [Muslim] students by raising the bogey of “Islam in Danger”..

TM has tried to misrepresent Bhavuk’s position as if he wrote against Namaz per se, which is absolutely false. I haven’t come across any of his writing stating that. The only point, if I haven’t missed something, Bhavuk was trying to make was the refusal to engage with and oppose the UP government’s order (March 2025) banning Namaz by the SIO or the protesters. According to Bhavuk, what Talha instead chose to do was holding the Proctor responsible for not letting Namaz be performed at the protest site as if the Proctor, and not the UP government, that had imposed the ban. [The JSTM seems to be unaware of the fact that the University Road of AMU from the Bab-e Syed to the Centenary Gate isn’t owned by the AMU; it is only used by the AMU; its ownership lies with the Aligarh Nagar Nigam].

What Bahvuk insisted on was that the JSTM has almost side-tracked the central issue of fee-hike which concerns all religious communities and atheists of AMU, and has (TM included) turned it into a Muslim identitarian issue. The AMU alumni too jumped into it only after August 8, insisting to speak only on the namaz issue (an audio conversation between an ex-student leader, Amir Mintoe and the Proctor, Prof. Wasim Ali had been circulated).  Such a twist and turn given by the JSTM weakened overall student solidarity. Also, the battle against the AMU administration was turned into battle against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Tactically this was a dangerous shift. The student protesters (vulnerable in the face of the BJP’s Neo-Hindutva regime) were made to confront the state and BJP, and less the AMU administration. This was exactly what was needed to weaken student’s mobilization and protest, while strengthening the AMU administration. This was also how and when (August 8, 2025) the JSTM gave a cause to the police to meddle into the affairs of AMU, the protests. Who then is responsible for involving the police in student protests? It is Talha Mannan, the JSTM; not the three writers Talha is trying to shift blame on.

The JSTM collusion with the functionaries of the Muslim managed institutions and JSTM’s prejudices in favour of privileged elite-powerful segments of Muslims (in this case, the AMU administrators) have become sharp and evident during and after the protest of August 2025.

TM does not talk about the timing of the Students’ Union elections previously agreed on in December 2025, after the semester examinations. JSTM has no questions on the refusal of the AMU administration to convene the Students’Union elections in August-September 2025.

It is quite well known that in December 2025, after the end-semester exams, most of the distant provinces’ hostellers leave for their respective homes in Bihar, Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Kashmir. Those left are the ones living closer to Aligarh i.e. the western UP students. Would not this leave the field open for the western UP lobby (aligning with the Azamgarh lobby) to gain control of the Students’ Union? AMU has already been quite infamous for its regionalism and factional politics and this chaotic-chauvinistic power play and such non participative elections will heighten this trend.

Faultline with the JIH’s Worldview 

Why is it that the tone and tenor of the speech by TM makes us believe that Muslim majority campuses are being conceived and portrayed as Muslim exclusive spaces where the Hindu minority is not to be taken along? Constitutionalism’s selective use and the disdainful attitude of the JIH and RSS towards the Constitution is no secret. That the JIH had allied with the saffron forces in 1975 is too well known a fact to be repeated here especially after the publication of Anderson’s and Jaffrelot’s works on the Emergency. Pan-Islamism finds endorsement from TM in the politics of Muslim victimhood where Islamic solidarity is concealed. The Indian saga of the Islamisation of Knowledge (IOK) project is not a problem for the left, liberal or Hindu Right Wing government. Chosen Muslims associated with it do not face problems in any of these regimes in fact all such characters find reward with some position of power. While Saffronisation is critiqued, Islamisation is spared. This double standard is not going to help in the fight against Hindutva. In fact such an attitude has helped in Hindutva attaining power.

Tragically, Muslim reactionary are even today strong enough to send a clear message to the non-Muslim students of AMU that even in today’s era of Hindutva hegemony, writing against the all-powerful Indian Home Minister is easy but a Hindu minority of AMU cannot write against the Muslim Right Wing. All AMU insiders know too well that the JIH wields a significant influence within the structures of AMU. It was these fundamentalist forces which ensured that Prof. Irfan Habib wasput under suspension in 1981. When Abrar Kashif came to a Mushaira in Kennedy auditorium last year (2024), the applause of the students on his “Pan-Islamic” nazm exhorting Mujahids (soldiers) from Afghanistan and Khurasan, had put the University to shame, drawing widespread criticisms on the social-media. Why it is so was easily forgotten that, Pan-Islamism had created a Hindu consolidation post-Khilafat Movement, which eventually became one of the factors in the Partition of India? Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928) had worked in collaboration with the Khilafat Movement. But soon after, he realised the dangers of Pan-Islamism and turned into a critic of anyone invoking this phenomenon. Among the Muslim intellectuals, only Intezar Hussain has had the moral courage to admit this in his biography of Hakim Ajmal Khan, Ajmal-e Azam (1999).

The JIH’s stated aim is creation of a theocratic state and for achieving this purpose they need to enhance the numbers of the Muslim population even by conversion (Dawat). JIH’s love for Muslim majoritarianism is no secret. Hence, their slogan, Islam ki Dawat, provides justification for the Hindutva project of Shudhi, Ghar Waapsi. Just see the resemblance between JIH’s Hukumat e Ilahi (Divine Governance) and Non Biological, Parmatma appointed PM!

No wonder then that the saffron outfits insisted for performing “Hanuman Chalisa” inside the AMU campus, a t funded residential university of the Indian state. It was after the call for “Islam ki Dawat” came from JSTM on August 8, 2025, that the call for Hanuman Chalisa inside AMU was echoed by saffron outfits as a “package deal”. The announcement was made by Hindu Raksha Dal’s state convener, Gaurav Sisodia, who was later placed under house arrest in Ghaziabad to prevent him from reaching Aligarh (The New Indian Express)!

This guilt is confessed by the JSTM kind of forces with the fact that the officially uploaded video-clip of TM’s speech (of August 8, 2025 at the Bab-e-Syed of AMU) has edited out the TM’s slogan of “Islam ki Dawat”.

It also needs to be stated that the AMU has a few dozen mosques (pesh-Imams, paryer leaders paid salaries by the University Grants Commission-UGC!), and not a single temple! This, by the way is an issue with Hindus students, even beyond those inclined towards majoritarian Hindutva. This policy is even at variance with the Holy Quran itself since the Quran says La IkraHa Fil Deen meaning there is no compulsion in the matter of religion (it appears in Surah-al Baqrah verse 256 also) and Lakum Deenukum Waliya Deen meaning for you is your religion and for me is mine. JSTM’s Dawat is in sharp contradiction with this verse of Quran. JIH’s Dawat would/should be seen as ominous by Liberal-Left and a tool for the Neo-Hindutva state power to repress the Muslims and reinforcing the stereotype of Muslims as radicalised bigots!

Thus the JSTM in this agitation stands as a culprit of putting India’s Muslims in great danger of repressive Hindutva state.

Sir Syed was against Pan-Islamism and he was a rational interpreter of the Quran. Maududi in his book Tanqeehat, attacks Sir Syed for borrowing “western thought” and inculcating western values into them. It is an irony that the very students benefiting from the fruits of Sir Syed’s enterprise are in solidarity and sometimes even having intimate collusion with such organisations opposed to Sir Syed’s vision. JIH’s duplicitous politics of Muslim majoritarianism in Islamic countries and minoritarianism in India stands thoroughly exposed, by now. Talha cannot play both ways. TM’s play of Victimhood Syndrome, while ground realities of victimisation of disenfranchised and poor Muslims are addressed more by the Liberal-Left. Not so unreasonably, a distinguished Aligarhian, K M Ashraf (1903-1962) clubbed JIH with CIA in his slim book (in Urdu) on Hindustani Muslim Siasat.

These Muslim communal organisations who play the victimhood card, reflect a form of minoritarianism while, on the other hand, rubbishing all secular-democratic forces. They attack Hindu majoritarianism in the rest of India while promoting Muslim majoritarianism within a Muslim majority campus. AMU cannot be expected to exist as a Vatican. Only Liberal-Secular Constitutionalism can guarantee minority rights. Islamist Minority Right Wing (and Pan Islamic politics) can only enable Hindutva.

Muslim reactionary forces such as JSTM must realise that it is not they who provide Rs 1200 crores to a modern university called Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). This fund comes from the Indian state because of its Liberal-Secular Constitution, which JSTM disdains. The bid, even now made, of minority communalists of converting Hindus to Islam in order to establish a Hukumat-e-Ilahiya, is a dangerous game. It needs to be unequivocally shunned. We have seen enough destructions of humans and values by the Salafi regime in Saudi Arabia and by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

(The author is a former student who has requested anonymity, he graduated in Sunni Theology from the AMU after studying at the Nadwat-ul-Ulema-Editors)

Related:

The Solipsism of Faith: A Response to Talha Mannan

Reluctant Democrats

Political History of India’s Two Muslim Universities since 1947

The post Is AMU, a Vatican of India’s reactionary Muslim elite? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

[Note: Before proceeding, I should situate myself: I studied Literature at AMU between 2015–2018 and lived in one of its hostels. This is not to claim privileged insight, but to underline that my reflections come from lived proximity rather than distant observation.]

The recently aborted student protest at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU)—ostensibly about reviving the Students’ Union (AMUSU) rather than resisting the fee hike—offers a troubling yet instructive window into the nature of campus politics at AMU.

A Legitimate Beginning

At the outset, it must be remembered that the agitation began on a legitimate plank: the arbitrary and unjustified fee hike. For many students from modest backgrounds, AMU’s subsidized education is their only ladder to upward mobility. Their resistance was therefore natural and justified. The protest was marked by determination and—crucially—visible leadership from female students who camped at Bab-e-Syed. Their resilience forced the administration to roll back the hike to 20%.

But soon, the focus shifted.

The Twist

Before engaging with this shift, a brief background is essential. AMUSU—short for Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union—was, in principle, meant to bridge the administration and the student community by offering effective representation. In practice, however, its history paints a sorry picture.

Supporters romanticise AMUSU as a “nursery for leadership,” pointing to names like Azam Khan and Arif Mohammad Khan. Yet, since 2017, when the University suspended it on the flimsy pretext of law and order, AMU has remained without an elected student body. The suspension was arbitrary and undemocratic, contradicting the very spirit of a university as a space for debate, dissent, and contrarian thought.

Reality, however, diverges sharply from the romanticism. Over the past decade, AMUSU has drifted far from its founding purpose. Most office-bearers—barring rare exceptions—have been academic underperformers or regional strongmen who treated the Union as a launchpad for failed political careers or as a network for contracts, patronage, and admissions. Regionalism thrived through collusion with faculty members from their own provinces, while the welfare of the broader student body remained a mere veneer. Unsurprisingly, AMUSU enjoys little respect among ordinary students.

Against this backdrop, the fee hike protest had nothing to do with AMUSU elections. Yet, seeing a readymade platform for mobilization, the AMUSU lobby opportunistically inserted itself. For a few days, they kept the rollback of fees as the visible agenda and AMUSU revival as a secondary one. But when their chances dimmed, anxiety set in. Their desperation

was rooted in past failures—one prominent activist had even approached the Supreme Court with a contempt petition citing the Lyngdoh Committee, only to have it dismissed in July 2025, a fact he concealed from fellow students. With the fee protest gaining momentum, the lobby saw its golden chance: a mass movement they could never build on their own was suddenly available to hijack.

How AMUSU Aspirants Hijacked the Fee-Hike Protest

Sections of students who had long lobbied for AMUSU elections—despite lacking credibility among peers—seized the protest as a platform to advance their agenda. History shows that AMUSU has ceased to represent students in any meaningful sense. Much like Ambedkar’s critique of Indian villages as “sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness, caste and communalism,” AMUSU has degenerated into a den of factionalism, patronage, and regressiveness.

Rather than critiquing, confronting and exposing systemic issues—declining academic standards, nepotistic faculty and administrative recruitments, inbreeding in admissions, or entrenched elites’ dominance—the AMUSU camp staged hunger strikes and moral dramas, allegedly under the blessings of a Law professor and the Eastern UP faction. These theatrics were less about student welfare and more about arm-twisting the administration.

Gender Insensitivity and Hypocrisy

Equally glaring is the hypocrisy. The same AMUSU hopefuls who now cloak themselves in the language of student rights were absent when female students were mishandled by the Proctorial team during protests over electricity shortages. Their selective silence exposes a deep gender insensitivity. Worse, when the fee hike protesters—mostly girls—refused to be co-opted, they were abused, branded “dalals,” and smeared on social media.

A movement that cannot respect women within its own ranks stands discredited- and rightly so.

The Deal with the Administration: Regional Politics at Play

Perhaps the most disturbing development was the timing of the administration’s assurance to the hunger striker: elections in December, after semester exams. This timing was no coincidence. By then, most outstation students—from Bihar, Bengal, the Kerala, and Kashmir

—would have left, leaving the electoral field to Western UP students and their Azamgarh allies.

Why not hold elections in August–September, when all students are present? Neither the administration nor the hunger striker offered a convincing answer. Their silence reeks of sub- regional opportunism.

What Went Off the Agenda?

Equally telling is what disappeared from the protesters led by hunger striker’s list of demands:

1. School fee hikes—despite RTE 2009 and the active role of Ahmadi School students— were quietly dropped, even though they had kept Centenary Gate closed till 19 August
2. Administrative accountability—the demand for replacing the Proctor, Director (Schools), and Controller of Exams was abandoned. The moment students pressed for the removal of the long-serving ad hoc Controller (a local appointee with entrenched clout), the entire protest was abruptly called off before sunrise on 19

This sequence exposes the deeper malaise: protests shaped less by genuine grievances than by the compulsions of entrenched elites.

The Larger Picture: Opportunism of the Muslim Elite

This episode raises uncomfortable questions not only about AMU but about India’s Muslim elites more broadly:

1. Why do entrenched cliques, clouts, lobbies monopolize university offices and student bodies?
2. Why is regional dominance—particularly of Western UP and Azamgarh—normalized, while voices from other provinces are systematically muted?

• Why do organizations like SIO or IYF remain silent on nepotism, gender insensitivity, or ad hoc appointments, yet selectively speak up when AMUSU’s revival is at stake?

The answer is crude opportunism. These elites are less invested in reform than in safeguarding their own hegemony.

Conclusion

The August 2025 AMU protests reveal a painful truth: genuine student concerns—fee hikes, gender justice, transparent governance, fair examinations—were eclipsed by the opportunism of a narrow faction bent on reviving AMUSU for self-interest.

The December election timeline, the abandonment of school fee issues, the silence on the ad hoc   appointments of high administrative officers/directors that too from within the internal teachers , and the abuse of female protesters expose the agitation for what it was: a cynical power       play.   Far      from sacrifice,               the    hunger    strike    was    political theatre. And the administration, complicit through opaque bargains, stands equally discredited.

In the end, one is left asking: was this agitation ever meant to empower students, or was it always designed to pressure the Hon’ble Supreme Court, which heard the case of VC’s appointed on 18 August 2025; the Petitioners, too, in the said case are insiders; and protect sub-regional dominance?

The anatomy of this protest leaves little doubt: AMUSU and the AMU administration mirror each other’s failures. Together, they embody what is wrong with entrenched elite politics of Muslims—visionless, opportunistic, and hostile to the aspirations of common students.

(The author of this article known to the Editors chooses to remain anonymous)

The post Power, Patronage, and Protest: The Making of AMUSU’s Opportunism appeared first on SabrangIndia.

First things first: it is necessary to clear away the red herrings. Mannan asserts that I, along with Bhavuk Sharma, “overlook that Hindu religious activities already occupy the public space in Kanwariya processions, Jagratas, Durga Pujas, Bhandaras, Matki Phodna, etc.” According to him, this ignorance leads me to celebrate JNU as “the most ideal, secular, and diverse campus” without calling those who celebrate Holi there as “Hindu right-wing.” “However, when Muslims mark their presence,” Mannan notes, “their practices are quickly pathologised, evoking a strong sense of injustice. What is celebrated as culture by the majority is often labeled communal when practiced by minorities.” This is supposed to be illustrative of the “double standards” that he later accuses me of holding. 

I have never expressed any admiration for JNU’s practice of holding Holi. However, since Mannan raises this example, I can clarify my own position. My outlook is closer to that of K. N. Panikkar, a staunch secularist who served as Professor of Modern Indian History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Panikkar’s reflections emerge from both experience and theory. He recalls an incident soon after joining JNU, when students approached him for a contribution toward an Eid celebration. His refusal, grounded in the conviction that universities should remain free from public displays of religiosity, immediately provoked hostility. He was branded a “Hindu communalist” for declining to participate in a Muslim festival. Later, when he resisted a similar attempt to celebrate a Hindu festival, he met with the same disapproval and imagined that, had he not been Hindu by birth, he would have been dismissed as a Muslim communalist instead.

For Panikkar, the episodes of campus religiosity revealed more than just the personal difficulty of being misread; they crystallised the structural impossibility of escaping communal labeling once religion enters the campus as public spectacle. His critique of the Indian model of secularism is telling here: it circumscribes “social consciousness within religious parameters and thus keep[s] the possibility open for particularistic and antagonistic tendencies to re-emerge at opportune moments…It keeps religion in play and in turn enhances religiosity; it preserves and projects religious identities and thus increases the social distance between different religious communities.” Public celebration on campus, whether Hindu or Muslim, therefore cannot achieve neutrality or solidarity. It generates a long-term dynamic towards the religiocisation of social life, thus preparing the ground for the eventual emergence of communalism. This is also why such practices hold little appeal for me. The alternative to it is pithily outlined by Panikkar: “a frontal confrontation with religion – an all-out critique of religion, with a view to its eventual negation – ‘a resolute, positive, abolition’ in the words of Marx.”

The Exclusions of Religion

Now that the red herring is out of the way, I can address Mannan’s main arguments. Basing himself upon Dr. Ishtiaq Hussain’s article “The AMU Fee Hike Agitation and a Misleading Narrative,” Mannan says that the “Friday prayer is not a festival or a political act but a religious duty, a widespread and common culture of the Muslim students at the Indian universities all over the country”. I have already critiqued Hussain’s piece in my own article “The AMU Fee Hike Agitation and the Fallacy of Harmless Faith”. 

There, I argue that Hussain is plagued by a contradiction: on the one hand, he says that the Friday prayer was a “mere manifestation of religious identity or general religiosity”; on the other hand, he praises the students’ restraint in not continuing to organise prayers at the protest site: “they rejected calls from fringe groups to organise prayers on August 15 to prevent the protest from acquiring a religious overtone.” This shift negates Mannan’s celebratory rhetoric and implicitly acknowledges that prayer in public, especially when tied to a protest, cannot be reduced to “mere obligation” but is always susceptible to political meaning. If prayer were simply harmless, its repetition would not have required avoidance. The fact that Hussain frames its absence as evidence of political maturity suggests an awareness that faith and politics cannot be neatly separated, that there is no “general religiosity”. 

Religiosity itself is historically and institutionally constituted through political antagonisms: whether through colonial governance of religion, postcolonial state regulation of minority identity, or the identitarian agendas of Muslim elites. Hussain’s need both to defend prayer as harmless and to celebrate its absence already shows that religion cannot be cordoned off from politics, but is always entangled with it. By extension, Mannan’s attempt to portray the Bab-e-Syed prayer as a “religious duty” evades the question of what this religiosity means in its concrete setting. He asks us to accept religious obligation at face value, framing it as a call for “belonging, survival, and self-respect in a hostile political environment”. But “belonging, survival, and self-respect” for whom? Mannan presumes that the Islamic community he is addressing is an unproblematic entity, grounded in the simplicity and unity of all Muslims. But this is patently untrue, as is revealed by the analysis of the patriarchal Islamism embedded in the form of the Friday prayer at AMU.

This becomes clear when set against Tahrir Square in 2011, where prayer unsettled hierarchies. Muslims prayed under the protection of Coptic Christians and reciprocated by safeguarding a Coptic Mass, transforming ritual into a civic language of solidarity. Men and women prayed shoulder to shoulder, erasing the partitions that usually govern Salat. Even the khutba shifted, as Yusuf al-Qaradawi opened with “O Muslims and Copts! O children of Egypt!” dissolving the privilege of the ummah as sole addressee. In Tahrir, the form of prayer itself changed, becoming a medium for revolutionary equality and civic solidarity. Insofar as religiosity became a mode for bringing all Egyptians together against an authoritarian, neoliberal government, it lost the doctrinal exclusivist of faith, transforming into a broad-based culture. As Panikkar remarks, “The culture of the people, when divorced from faith, would provide the necessary channel for communication.”

The impossibility of imagining such a scene at AMU reveals the limits of Mannan’s narrative. The institutional history of AMU has been structured by women’s marginalisation, both spatially and ideologically. As Amber H. Abbas notes, women’s education has never been central to the university’s corporate life, with hostels situated kilometers from the centre and students’ visibility tightly controlled. The political culture of the campus has long been punctuated by moral panics over women’s public presence: the IYF’s 2024 statement against “indecency” in cultural programs, the 2019 poster depicting women as caged birds in need of protection from feminism, and the 2018 “blasphemous” picture case that criminalised students for a Facebook post. In each instance, religious and moral rhetoric has operated as a technology of control, limiting women’s movement, attire, and speech. 

This patriarchal Islamism has continued in the fee hike protests. Female fence-sitters have been branded as dalals, singled out through a steady churn of Instagram reels, WhatsApp clips, and public shaming rituals. These gendered attacks go beyond ordinary political name-calling. In one case, a young woman labelled a dalal publicly apologised for her stance, only to be praised not for her reasoning but for appearing in a dupatta and mask, which are visual markers of propriety in the Islamist worldview. In another, a leading female protester who had worn an abaya but opposed prolonging the agitation became the target of AI-morphed videos, abaya-clad parodies, and relentless online mimicry. 

Mannan’s framing of prayer as “duty” effaces the religio-patriarchal codes that structure the act and that spill over into other aspects of the protests. It asks us to treat ritual as self-contained, even when its performance re-inscribes institutional hierarchies. The contrast with Tahrir makes the stakes visible: if prayer can serve as a vehicle of revolutionary solidarity in Cairo and as an instrument of patriarchal closure in Aligarh, then it cannot be reduced to “general religiosity.” Mannan’s refusal to recognise this variability is itself political, since it secures the authority of religious form by denying that its meaning is always shaped by context, exclusion, and struggle.

Protecting Religion?

Mannan rightly stresses AMU as a “blessing for marginalised Muslim students who are left out of the mainstream of the Indian education system”. Why should “standing up” for AMU be imagined primarily in terms of praying in public or asserting religiosity? How is it that “strength, hope, and the existence of Indian Muslims” is made to signify faith above all else? This conflation is visible in the equivalence that Mannan draws between the protest slogan “Islam Ki Dawat Zinda Hai” and Qur’anic verse on AMU’s insignia, “Taught man what he knew not”. 

The verse, “Taught man what he knew not” (96:5), speaks about knowledge as a universal gift to humankind. Its reference is pedagogical, epistemic, and humanistic, placing education at the heart of AMU’s mission. It is a declaration of enlightenment and learning as common goods, accessible to every seeker, irrespective of faith. When this verse becomes the motto of AMU, it does not serve as a sectarian banner but as an emblem of secular modernity grounded in a universal conception of education. Its force lies in its generality, in its refusal to delimit who can or cannot partake in knowledge.

By contrast, the slogan “Islam Ki Dawat Zinda Hai” is not a neutral affirmation of knowledge but an assertive invocation of religious community. As Mannan puts it in his article, “A truly democratic system should enable Muslims to express their reality in their own terms, whether it is religious, cultural, or political, without being imposed into a pre-packaged ideology of others [emphasis mine]”. In other words, Islam should be a self-enclosed entity, immune from any influence exerted by non-Islamic others, or those who question the centrality of Islam in public life. In contrast, the Qur’anic verse addresses the universality of education, negating religious belonging to highlight the mission of imparting knowledge to those who need it. The verse invites all to the pursuit of knowledge, while the slogan calls forth only Muslims as a collective in struggle. To conflate the two, as Mannan does, obscures the fact that the verse is secular in scope while the slogan is sectarian in thrust.

The danger in this conflation is that it justifies communal idioms in the name of institutional heritage. Mannan argues that using Islamic slogans is a continuation of AMU’s spirit, yet this argument ignores the categorical difference between Islam as a source of civilizational inspiration and Islam as a rallying cry of political identity. One can accept that AMU’s history draws on Islamic civilization without endorsing slogans that, in effect, doctrinally exclude non-Muslim students or cast political conflict in religious terms. His framing allows no distinction between cultural inheritance and religious mobilization, and thus erases the distinction required to preserve AMU’s universal educational mission.

The erasure of this distinction allows Mannan to naturalise religion/religiosity as a desirable good, whose possession has to be maintained at all costs. In fact, when Muslims occupy a position of dominance, Syed Jalaluddin Umri, former president of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), counsels them to establish an Islamic state and govern it according to the laws of sharia. JIH’s student wing, the Students Islamic Organization (SIO), counts Mannan, its national secretary, among its leaders.

But is religion really that desirable? This question is not explored by self-assured theologians. Does the debate over AMU really concern the ability of students to protect their “Muslim Subjectivity,” or “Islam,” as Mannan insists? Put in more mundane terms, this would mean that the entire debate over AMU pertains to the Muslim youth’s right to recite Quranic verses in university premises. This seems more like the theologian’s dream, rather than a socially and economically disadvantaged student’s wish. The Supreme Court is correct in noting that what is primary in the determination of the minority character of an institution is not the “existence of a religious place for prayer and worship” or “the existence of religious symbols” but the objective of providing “benefit” to “a religious or linguistic minority community”. This means that “educational institutions could be established for minorities to provide secular education without imparting any lessons on religion”.

The Supreme Court’s observation about the general goal of providing “benefit” to “a religious or linguistic minority community,” rather than narrowly promoting faith or theology, forces us to ask the following question: is the attack on Indian Muslims really an attack on Islam as a theological system? The right to practice faith is just one among many human capacities that are being restricted. Even Muslims who are not particularly religious, who do not pray or wear visibly Islamic symbols, still face discrimination. Consider the following example. A study conducted in India tested hiring discrimination by sending out two nearly identical resumes for entry-level jobs. Both candidates had similar educational backgrounds, locations, and skills, with no photographs included to avoid visual bias. The only significant difference between them was their names: one had a recognizably Muslim name (“Habiba Ali”), while the other had a Hindu name (“Priyanka Sharma”).

Over eight months, 2,000 applications were sent for over 1,000 job listings. Despite being equally qualified, the candidate with the Muslim name received only half as many positive responses. This study underscores that discrimination against Muslims operates even in the absence of visible religious markers like dress, prayer, or religious expressions. Simply having a Muslim name, an ascriptive identity beyond personal choice, was enough to reduce opportunities, showing that the bias faced by Muslims in India is not necessarily about religious practice but about their very existence as Muslims. The issue is not about faith per se, but about the political and social vulnerability of a historically constituted, denominationally marked group. 

When the oppression is located at the level of Muslims-as-a-people, it becomes misleading to frame the defense of AMU or of Muslim students in overtly religious terms. To do so cements the very caricature produced by Hindutva, namely that Muslims are excessively, even obsessively, religious, and that every act they undertake flows from Islamic identity. This discursive trap is visible in the proliferation of “jihad” labels — “love jihad,” “population jihad,” “economic jihad,” even “corona jihad.” Hindu nationalists have already transformed ordinary social and economic practices into religious threats. In such a climate, when anti-secularists like Mannan elevate faith as the center of political self-definition, they unwittingly mirror Hindutva’s framework, reinforcing the notion that Muslim life can only be understood through the lens of excessive religiosity, as if every action was done for the sake of Islam’s theological sanctity.

The consequence of this is double-edged: on the one hand, it narrows the grounds of Muslim struggle to the defense of religiosity; on the other, it erases the broader human capacities that are being curtailed – education, economic opportunity, political participation, cultural flourishing. Faith is one dimension of human life, but not the sole or even primary capacity under siege. To focus resistance on religion alone is to surrender the universality of the claim: that Muslims, as equal human beings and citizens, are being denied the full range of their rights. 

For a genuinely emancipatory politics, the demand should shift from “protecting Islam” to “developing human capacities.” This means foregrounding the economic deprivation, lack of access to higher education, and structural discrimination that affect Muslims irrespective of their personal religiosity. It also means confronting internal hierarchies within the community: class divides, gender inequality, the marginalisation of Pasmanda Muslims, and the silencing of queer Muslims. Only such a politics can break from the religious template imposed both by Hindutva and by defensive communal rhetoric, moving toward a struggle that asserts Muslim dignity in its widest, most inclusive sense.

Indian Muslims thus are not just Muslims; they are full political, civic subjects whose rights and freedoms should not be contingent on religious identity. Instead of reacting to majoritarian pressures by asserting a religious counter-identity, the response of Indian Muslims should be: we refuse to be reduced to a religious category at all. The fight, then, is not for the recognition of Islam but for a secular space where no one – Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise – is pigeonholed by religious identity in the first place.

Questions

Given Mannan’s assertion that Muslims should “express their reality in their own terms” without paying attention the “pre-packaged ideology of others,” it is imperative to understand how such a politics of self-aggrandizement leads to the domination of those one considers to be “other”. I will attempt to show this through a series of questions for Mannan about the viewpoints espoused by his organization SIO (Student Islamic Organisation) or the parent organisation JIH (Jamaat-e-Islaami Hind). If Mannan’s vision is that Muslims should express their reality solipsistically, these questions expose the real-world implications of that worldview for gender, sexuality, and belonging.

On Sexuality and Homosexuality

• JIH describes homosexuality as “immoral and unnatural.” Do you believe that someone like Professor Ramchandra Siras of AMU deserved the humiliation, suspension, and eventual mysterious death he suffered simply for being gay?
• If homosexuality “destroys the family system,” as JIH says, do you acknowledge that many homosexuals themselves come from families, love their parents, siblings, and partners, and wish to build households of their own?
• Do you think the state has the right to police people’s private lives and consensual relationships inside their own homes?

On Women and Education

•  JIH calls for the abolition of co-education, effectively segregating women. While they are segregated, they should wear clothes that are “sober and dignified,” that “cover the body”. Can you explain why the burden of “preventing lust” falls entirely on women rather than teaching men self-restraint?
• Why should women’s dress be dictated by men in positions of authority? Does your logic not amount to blaming women for men’s violence?
• If women are forced into “separate” institutions and covered from head to toe, do you admit that what you call “modesty” is simply a system of control and surveillance over women’s bodies?

On Maududi and the SIO’s Intellectual Project

• Your student organization recommends Towards Understanding Islam, in which Maududi explicitly states, “there are certain women who do not mend their ways without a beating.” Do you condone the idea that men have the right to physically punish women in their households?
• Maududi asserts that men are naturally suited to govern the family because women have “natural limitations.” Given that Indian women today excel as doctors, engineers, judges, and university professors, do you claim these women are exceptions, or do you believe Maududi’s hierarchy still applies to all women?
• Maududi presents domestic confinement and withdrawal from public life as “freedom” for women. Do you agree that forcing women to stay at home, manage the household, and submit to male authority counts as true freedom?

On Equality and Democracy

• JIH advises Muslims to establish an Islamic state under sharia when they are in a position of dominance. Do you recognize that this vision is fundamentally at odds with the Indian Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law for all citizens?
• How do you justify advocating for laws that would make women second-class citizens, LGBT people criminals, and non-Muslims subjects of a religious order?
• If your worldview requires hierarchy, segregation, and surveillance to function, what place does it have in a modern secular university where equality is the very foundation?

Mannan will probably say that those who are raising such questions from a secular-liberal perspective are enacting “a kind of violence in the name of intellectualism”. His alternative, as we have seen, is to allow to “Muslims to express their reality in their own terms, whether it is religious, cultural, or political, without being imposed into a pre-packaged ideology of others.” Thus, instead of allowing the actions and thought processes of Muslims to be examined by others, Mannan wants the Muslim community to behave solipsistically, as if there is no disagreement about his religion-centric vision of politics. But I believe that it is only through democratic discussion and critique that Indian Muslims have any hope of reclaiming their future. 

 (The author is a student at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), India. He is the author of the book “Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia” (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024) and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-imperialist political philosophy with Iskra Books)

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The post The Solipsism of Faith: A Response to Talha Mannan appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan-an educationist from the 19^th century who also was also the founder of the Aligarh movement-founded the Mohammeden Anglo Oriental College (MAO College) in 1877. There is a great deal of literature on how Syed Ahmed Khan was working for development of both Hindus and Muslims while serving as a judge, and how he found the Scientific Society with Hindu personalities to translate scientific works into Urdu and Hindi.[3] The same literature also marks a shift in how he later specifically focussed particularly on upliftment of Muslims through education. In this pursuit, he established a school in 1875 which later became the MAO College.

The MAO College eventually transformed into AMU in 1920 through an Act of the Central Legislature, expanding its academic reach and gaining university status.  The birth of independent India in 1947 brought forth a new era, marked by the adoption of the Constitution in 1950. This landmark document enshrined fundamental rights, including provisions for minority institutions, notably Article 30(1), which guaranteed religious and linguistic minorities the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.  The enactment of the Constitution necessitated aligning existing laws with its principles.  Consequently, the AMU Act underwent amendments in 1951 and 1965. These amendments aimed to reconcile the university’s governance structure with the newly established constitutional provisions, particularly those related to secularism, equality, and the right to education for all citizens.

Changes to AMU Act after Independence

The 1951 Amendment Act was crucial in reshaping AMU’s governance to adhere to the principles of the Constitution, particularly those related to government aid and non-discrimination. The amendment addressed several key aspects, including the composition of the university’s governing body, “the Court,” and provisions for religious instruction. Prior to the amendment, the AMU Act mandated that all members of the Court be Muslims.  This provision was deemed incompatible with the secular and egalitarian ethos of the Indian Constitution, which prohibits discrimination based on religion.  The 1951 amendment removed this requirement, allowing for a more diverse and inclusive composition of the Court, thereby adhering to Article 14, which guarantees equality before the law.

Another significant aspect addressed by the 1951 amendment pertained to religious instruction. The original AMU Act mandated religious instruction for Muslim students, a provision that raised concerns about potential discrimination against students of other faiths. To rectify this and ensure compliance with Article 28(1), which prohibits religious instruction in educational institutions wholly maintained out of State funds, the amendment removed the mandatory religious instruction provision.  This change was crucial in aligning AMU with the principles of the. By removing the requirement for an all-Muslim Court and the mandatory religious instruction provision, the 1951 amendment sought to remove any impediments to AMU receiving government aid while upholding the principles of secularism and equality enshrined in the Constitution.

However, the 1965 Amendment Act, introduced amidst a period of campus unrest, significantly altered the power dynamics within the university, further intensifying debates about its minority character and the autonomy of minority institutions in general. This amendment effectively curtailed the authority of the Court, reducing it to an advisory body. The Executive Council, on the other hand, saw its powers considerably augmented. Additionally, the amendment introduced significant changes to the composition of the Court, shifting from an elected body to a primarily nominated one. These changes, perceived by many as a move towards greater government control over the university, sparked concerns about the erosion of minority institutions’ autonomy and sparked renewed legal challenges. The Supreme Court delivered its judgement on the validity of the amendments in Azeez Basha vs. Union of India.

Azeez Basha v. Union of India (1967) and subsequent developments.

In the 1967 case of Azeez Basha v. Union of India, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) was a minority educational institution under Article 30(1) of the Indian Constitution. The Court ultimately ruled that AMU was not a minority institution, a decision that has been contested ever since.

The petitioners in Azeez Basha had challenged amendments made to the AMU Act in 1951 and 1965, arguing that they violated the Muslim community’s right to administer an educational institution they had established. These amendments, as previously mentioned, changed the university’s governance structure and composition, including measures that reduced the power of the university’s Court, removed a requirement for Court members to be Muslim, and empowered the Executive Council.

The Court upheld the amendments, determining that the AMU was neither established nor administered by the Muslim minority at the time the Constitution came into force. The Court reasoned that because the central legislature enacted the AMU Act in 1920, the university was established by the government, not a religious minority. The Court determined that the words “establish and administer” in Article 30(1) must be read conjunctively, meaning the minority community must have both established and administered the institution to qualify for protection under this article.

Timeline: key developments after Azeez Basha

November 26, 1981: The two-judge bench in Anjuman-e-Rahmaniya vs. District Inspector of Schools expressed doubts about the Azeez Basha judgment and referred the matter to a larger bench for reconsideration.[4] The case involved a different educational institution and was considering whether registration as a society under the Societies Registration Act changed an institution’s status as a minority institution. The judges questioned whether an institution established with any non-minority participation could be considered a minority institution and directed that a larger bench consider the matter. However, this reference was never conclusively addressed.

December 31, 1981: The AMU Act was amended with the intention of overturning the Azeez Basha judgment. This amendment redefined “University” in the AMU Act to mean “the educational institution of their choice established by the Muslims of India, which originated as the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and which was subsequently incorporated as the Aligarh Muslim University”. The amendment also emphasized the university’s role in promoting the educational and cultural advancement of Muslims. However, the legal validity of this amendment, and whether it could supersede the Supreme Court’s Azeez Basha judgment, became a point of contention in future litigation.

 2002: The Supreme Court, in TMA Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka stated that the determination of whether a community is a minority is to be made at the state level.[5] The Court in TMA Pai framed a question similar to the one in Anjuman-e-Rahmaniya, but ultimately determined that the question of indicia for treating an educational institution as a minority institution should be decided by a regular bench, not the eleven-judge bench hearing the case. However, this question remained unanswered.

2005: AMU, asserting its claim as a minority institution based on the 1981 amendment, reserved 50% of seats in postgraduate medical courses for Muslim candidates. This decision led to the case of Dr. Naresh Agarwal v. Union of India.[6] The petitioners in this case, citing Azeez Basha, contested the reservation policy and argued that AMU was not a minority institution. The Union and the University countered that the 1981 amendment had nullified Azeez Basha.

2005: The Allahabad High Court, relying on the reasoning in Azeez Basha, struck down AMU’s reservation policy.  The High Court determined that the 1981 amendment did not change the basis of the Azeez Basha decision, and so AMU remained a non-minority institution. The High Court reasoned that the Muslim community had willingly surrendered their right to administer AMU to the government. It also found the 1981 amendment impermissible because the amendment sought to overrule the Azeez Basha judgment without removing its legal basis.

2006: The Union government and AMU appealed the Allahabad High Court’s decision to the Supreme Court.

 February 12, 2019: A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, recognising that the correctness of Azeez Basha remained unresolved, referred the question of AMU’s minority status to a seven-judge bench. The bench determined that previous references, including the one in Anjuman-e-Rahmaniya, had not provided a definitive answer to this question.  This referral also directed the seven-judge bench to consider the impact of the 2010 amendment to the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions Act (NCMEI Act) on AMU’s minority status. The 2010 amendment to the NCMEI Act expanded the definition of a minority institution to include universities, a change the three-judge bench felt necessitated further examination.

Arguments

The petitioners primarily argued that the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) should be recognized as a minority institution based on its historical connection with the Muslim community, and therefore entitled to protection under Article 30(1) of the Indian Constitution. They challenged the long-standing precedent set by Azeez Basha, which had denied AMU minority status. The petitioners contended that the Azeez Basha judgment misinterpreted the scope of Article 30(1) and created a restrictive precedent that limited the ability of minority communities to establish and administer universities. They emphasized that a university could be considered “established” by a minority community even if it was formally incorporated through a legislative act, particularly when the community played a significant role in the institution’s conception, development, and ongoing character. The petitioners highlighted AMU’s historical origins, its contributions to Muslim education and culture, and the university’s strong ongoing connection with the Muslim community as evidence of its minority character.

The respondents argued that AMU’s establishment through the Aligarh Muslim University Act of 1920, enacted by the British Indian government, negated the claim that it was established by the Muslim minority community. They emphasized that the Act granted the government extensive control over the university, including the power to appoint key officials, regulate its functioning, and oversee its finances. This control, they contended, contradicted the autonomy and independence typically associated with a minority institution. The respondents also argued that the Muslim community, in its pursuit of a university, had willingly accepted a certain level of government control in exchange for recognition and support. This acceptance, they argued, amounted to a surrender of the right to establish an independent minority institution. This surrender predated the Indian Constitution, they noted, and therefore could not be reevaluated based on the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution. The respondents further argued that AMU’s designation as an “institution of national importance” under Entry 63 of List I of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, combined with its integration into the regulatory framework established by the University Grants Commission (UGC) Act of 1956, demonstrated its national character and its alignment with the broader Indian higher education system.

Majority Judgement

Decoupling minority status from statutory incorporation, date of establishment, and administrative composition

The majority judgment authored by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and joined by Justices Sanjiv Khanna, J.B. Pardiwala, and Manoj Misra sought to clarify the criteria for determining the minority status of educational institutions in India. This 4:3 decision rejected a narrow interpretation of Article 30(1) of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees religious and linguistic minorities the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice. The majority opinion articulated a set of principles aimed at ensuring the protection of minority rights in the realm of education.

Firstly, the judgment refuted the long-held notion that statutory incorporation automatically precludes minority status. The court distinguished between “incorporation” and “establishment,” asserting that these concepts are distinct and should not be conflated. Therefore, the mere fact that the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) was created through an Act of Parliament (the AMU Act of 1920) does not inherently negate its potential minority status. The majority opinion emphasized that the critical inquiry should focus on who established the institution and the driving force behind its creation, the purpose of the creation and the way it was created. It is here the majority judgement makes the distinction. [Paragraph 94]

The majority stated that the indicia for treating an educational institution as a minority education institution constitutes the genesis of the idea or ‘brain’ behind the establishment as gauged from the correspondence, government resolutions.  This inquiry should lead back to a person from the minority community. Additionally, the purpose of the institution can be for the benefit of the minority community rather than being ‘solely for the benefit of the minority community.’ [Paragraph 72]

The implementation of the idea, according to the majority opinion of the Supreme Court, needs to be examined but state aid in the implementation would not adversely affect the minority status of the institution. The administrative structure also should reflect the minority character of the institution. [Paragraphs 133-138]

Secondly, the majority judgment debunked the idea that an institution’s date of establishment is determinative of its minority status. The court clarified that Article 30 does not restrict the right to establish and administer educational institutions to minorities only after the Constitution came into effect. This clarification ensures that the protection afforded to minority educational institutions under Article 30 extends to institutions established before the Constitution’s adoption, acknowledging the historical context of minority education in India.[Paragraph 119]

Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, the court held that administration by non-minority members does not, in itself, negate an institution’s minority status. Recognizing the evolving nature of educational institutions and their commitment to secular values, the majority acknowledged that a minority institution might not require minority members in its administration to maintain its essential character. The court highlighted that a minority institution might prioritize secular education, making the presence of minority members in administration unnecessary. This principle allows minority institutions to embrace inclusivity and diversity in their administrative structures without jeopardizing their minority status and the associated constitutional protections. The court also recognized that compelling a minority institution to surrender its minority character in exchange for recognition or affiliation would violate Article 30(1).[Paragraph 160]

Minority opinion

Justice Surya Kant’s dissenting opinion disagrees with the majority on two crucial points: how the case came before the court and what criteria should be used to determine the minority status of an institution.

First, Justice Surya Kant strongly criticizes the procedural route the case took. The issue of AMU’s minority status started with a two-judge bench that doubted the correctness of a previous five-judge bench ruling (the Azeez Basha case). This two-judge bench then referred the case directly to a seven-judge bench, bypassing the proper channels. Justice Surya Kant argues this is a fundamental error. He cited established legal principles and the Supreme Court’s own precedent in Central Board of Dawoodi Bohra Community v State of Maharashtra to emphasise that a smaller bench cannot overrule or refer the decisions of a larger bench without going through the Chief Justice of India.[7] This, he argued, undermines judicial order and predictability. [Paragraph 91]

Second, on the substantive issue of how to determine minority status, Justice Surya Kant disagreed with the majority’s view that an institution incorporated by a statute can still be considered a minority institution. He emphasizes that both the “establishment” and “administration” of an institution must reflect its minority character for it to receive protection under Article 30(1). This is a conjunctive reading of those two terms – both conditions must be met. [Paragraph 131]

.Justice Surya Kant, in his dissent, listed factors indicating a loss of minority administrative control over an institution: management unaccountable to the founders, external vetoes in staffing decisions, lack of guaranteed minority representation on governing bodies, and a shift from the institution’s original minority-focused goals. These suggest diminished influence of the minority community in administering the institution.[Paragraph 181]

Justice Dipankar Datta expressed caution against recent judicial trends that diverge from historical precedent and original constitutional interpretations. [Paragraph 133] He emphasised that judges are not infallible and should be guided by the framers’ intentions rather than rewriting history. He argued that the right to establish and administer minority institutions (under Article 30) is contingent upon the community’s intent and control. Regarding Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), he noted its founding circumstances, highlighting that it was publicly funded and controlled by the colonial government, with minimal Muslim community oversight—pointing to a limited claim to minority status in its administration. He was the lone judge withing the minority to go ahead and declare that AMU is not a minority educational institution.

Justice Satish Chandra Sharma opined that for a minority community to claim administrative rights under Article 30, they must have “established” the institution, meaning they must have independently and predominantly created it without substantial outside control. The institution’s purpose should primarily serve the minority’s interests, and they should hold decisive administrative power. The term “establish” refers strictly to the act of creation, and cases should evaluate whether the minority community directly contributed to its foundation and operation, according to him. [Paragraph 266]

Understanding the reasoning

El Clásico between purposive and literal interpretation

The majority took the route of purposive interpretation of the Constitutional provision by examining the purpose of Article 30(1) and how the article underscores the imperative to enable minorities to maintain their distinctive characteristics and fulfil their specific needs. Out of the majority judgement’s discussion, a principle emerges— that the special right under Article 30(1) of the Constitution is that the state must grant the minority institution sufficient autonomy to enable it to protect the essentials of its minority character. [Paragraph 65] Using this, the Court also went on to devise the tests which look at the origins and purpose of the institution in question, to answer whether it is a minority institution or not. The majority judgement also stated that it is inconsequential whether the word ‘establish’ in Article 30(1) actually means ‘to bring into existence’ or ‘to found’ the real determination becomes possible only when the veil of the statute is lifted. [Paragraph 110]

Justice Dipankar Dutta’s minority opinion stresses on the literal phrase in Article 30(1) and states that the framers of the Constitution were aware of the circumstances of the times and yet, they used the word ‘establish’ instead of ‘found’ —a broader word. [Paragraph 134] Later he stated that even if the verb ‘establish’ could be read as ‘to found’ which he found no warrant to so read, the Muslim community’s leaving the administration of AMU to be worked out according to the AMU Act shows the clear lack of intention on part of the community to administer it. [Paragraph 133]

These are classic conflicts in terms of interpretation. While the purposive interpretation looks at the origins of the law and the purpose it sought to achieve, the literal interpretation gives importance to the intent and wisdom of those who framed the law since they understood the circumstances better and yet used the wording. While literal interpretation is used to let the law be a stable instrument for order, purposive interpretation enables law to be instrument in social change.

Justice Satish Chandra Sharma’s minority ppinion and loose threads

An interesting line of reasoning emerges from the minority opinion of Justice Satish Chandra Sharma. First, he states that there was no right under Article 30 in 1920 for it to have been surrendered to the government by the minority community via the enactment of AMU Act. Essentially, he stated that the Constitution bestows the right on minorities and before 1950, the right did not exist. This reasoning recognises constitution as a document that effectuates change-something similar to what  Justice Vivian Bose had said in Virendra Singh vs State of UP in 1955 that “The Constitution  by  reason of the authority derived  from and conferred  by the people of India destroyed all vestiges  of arbitrary and despotic power in the territories of India and over its citizens and lands and prohibited just such acts of arbitrary power as the State in the present case was seeking to  uphold.”  The chance at progressive interpretation however gets lost when the opinion says that since there was no right to establish institutions for minorities, there is no question of relinquishing the right. Additionally, he went on to say that limited minority aspects/elements cannot make an institution a ‘minority institution.’ [Paragraph 204]

Justice Satish Chandra Sharma stated in his minority opinion that the court cannot be swayed by one side of the story or the other. He referred to the competing narratives by both appellants—saying that the university was established by Muslim people for the benefit of Muslim community with the help of state sanction, and by respondents—saying that the establishment of the university was largely a government affair with minority elements. He states as follows in Paragraph 204:

“If in a given case, there may be other factual factors pointing towards the contrary, highlighting that whatever the intention or the will of the minority community might have been at the said time, in exchange or during negotiations, if the resultant institution was effectively rendered an open governmental institution [with limited minority aspects], then Article 30 would be out of the picture.”

We do not get to see in his opinion how or why this conclusion can be drawn from the elaborate discussion he did on the facts leading up to the establishment of the university or why a significant effort by the minority community can be trumped by the mere fact that university gets incorporated by a legislative act.

The majority judgement tackles this line of reasoning by saying that In Article 30(1) by saying that, there is no distinction between universities and colleges regarding minority rights. Both serve the common purpose of educating students, and minorities are entitled to autonomy in administering these institutions to benefit their communities. The term “establish” refers to the act of founding an institution and is distinct from “incorporation.” A person or community could establish a teaching college that later became a university, and the right to establish is not limited by legal incorporation under the Act.

The bench however left the determination of the minority status of AMU itself and directed that a smaller bench would apply the criteria as laid out by the seven-judge bench.

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

[1] 2024 INSC 856

[2] 1968 AIR 662

[3] Kidwai, S., 2020. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan: Reason, Religion and Nation. Routledge India.

[4] W.P. (C) 54-57 of 1981

[5] Writ Petition (civil)  317 of 1993

[6] 2005(4)ESC2489

[7] (2005) 2 SCC 673

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The post Supreme Court delivers a 4:3 Verdict on parameters to determine the minority status of institutions appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Universities, ‘transmit, interpret and develop the cultural tradition of the society’. They can either ‘continuously reproduce’ these traditions or ‘critically transform’ them, said Habermas. What did the two centrally funded ‘Muslim’ universities in India, viz., the Aligarh Muslim University and its “rebel sister”, the Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia, really do?

The Cambridge trained French scholar, Laurence Gautier, has made an immensely successful attempt at working out the abovementioned question by bringing in wide range of empirical details, embarking on a very deep analysis of a wide range of evidence and putting these in larger perspective. She has proceeded to examine as to how did these two denominational universities, and the Muslims associated with these universities, negotiate their place in India, their individual rights as citizens, and their group rights as a religious minority, and/or as descendants of ex-ruling class, one must say. (The work also explores Muslim-ness of Indians and Indian-ness of its Muslim communities).

The Role of AMU & JMI in shaping Muslim identity politics

Whether such negotiations were confined more to the domain of political articulations or whether they produced researches too? Such articulations remain and remained largely tilted towards a particular class within the community of particular region(s). This Urdu speaking Ashraaf elite was called “Kutcherry Milieu” by the best biographer of the MAO College (which became AMU in 1920), David Lelyveld (1978). This is a particularly more relevant question to be raised for the AMU, because, in the colonial period, the All India Mohammedan Educational Conference (AIMEC, founded in 1886) soon became the political organ of the Muslim League rather than keeping the promise of opening up a chain of residential schools/colleges across the subcontinent. Given this legacy,  worldview and outlook, did AMU, post-partition (for pre-partition days, introduction of the book does deal with these questions), ever raise self-introspective question against itself? Did the institution bother to question –in the republican-democratic era –why its enrolments, recruitments and governance-personnel suffer from an elite syndrome: the predominance of a select Club of a particular region-class of the Qaum?

The AMU, in the late 1940s had become epicentre of the Muslim League with the separatists enjoying a stronger presence on the campus. Various circles (not confined to the Hindu Right alone) memorialise AMU as a villain of Partition. The Pakistani intelligentsia also reinforces this idea. On the other hand, Muslims of various persuasions, look upon AMU not only as a platform aimed at their educational uplift but also as a fort safeguarding their identity. In fact, the latter aspect is arguably stronger than the former. This is perhaps congenitally associated with MAO/AMU. Look at Peter Hardy (1972: 103-104)’s assertion, “It is, however, important to recognise the limitations of Aligarh as an educational foundation. At no time did it educate a majority of the Muslim graduates even of the North-Western Provinces [UP]… Success in examinations and individual achievement were at a discount”.

Did the two universities question and address, even in their academic outputs, caste-based hierarchies and exploitation or did they deny or downplay these? Did they, through their research as well as through their political interventions and mobilizations, challenge regressive patriarchy, or, rather did they align with, or capitulate before the orthodoxy? Did they contribute towards secularisation-pluralisation of the state and society in general and the community (Qaum) in particular? Did they democratise the institutions and resources monopolised by the “Kutcherry Milieu”? Or, did they treat Indian Secularism more as a favour to Muslim conservatism and communalism and regressive patriarchy, thereby stoking and bolstering majoritarianism?

A large number of Urdu memoirs of the Aligarh community (faculty, alumni) mostly indulge in self-praise, rather than being critical and self-introspective. [Of significant note in exception are critical essays of Kunwar M Ashraf (1903-1962), in the Aligarh Magazine (Urdu), “Aligarh Ki Siyasi Zindagi” (1953-1955) and “Aligarh aur Siyasiyat-e-Hind” (1960)]. Most of these  reproduce,  disseminate and celebrate a class culture (not the mass culture), often misrepresented as the “Ganga Jamuni Tehzeeb”, discounting core academic production for an ameliorative and empowering politics of pluralization and thereby strengthening of Indian democracy. Of course, the two English language memoirs brought out by the AMU-VCs (both were not AMU alumni), viz., Badruddin Tyabji (1907-1995 ) and Nasim Faruqi (d. 12012) in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, have certainly given us critical accounts of some of these aspects.

The two Universities produced two “intertwined yet distinctive political trajectories” (p. 11). By the early 1990s, as the Chapter Six in the book, “Bastions of Islam”, demonstrates, the two campuses were no longer distinctive of each other in terms of shaping and articulating Muslim identity politics. Both campuses had become strong centres of retrogressive forces of north Indian Muslims. According to the author, the JMI became so, more pronouncedly, in the 1990s. This is indeed the boldest and bravest chapter of the book.

Competitive religious radicalism since the 1970s

The AMU was never weak in terms of its right wing Muslim presence and influence, though in the 1970s and 1980s it became even more pronounced along those lines. Both Universities were now becoming even stronger bastions of Islamism and retrogression rather than enhancing the qualitative and quantitative output in terms of academic research and or prioritizing the educational uplift of the Qaum. They were rather more engaged in emotive, identitarian issues. Chapter Six, towards its concluding notes, brilliantly underlines the fact that the more the Qaum turned towards emotive symbolism and identitarianism, the more they (un)wittingly pushed down the agendas of educational and political empowerment of the Muslim communities within. Worse still, the more they stoked majoritarian forces through their own retrogression, the more they made themselves all the more vulnerable, as this partly contributed to pushing India towards Hindu supremacism. Laurence Gautier, in this significant chapter takes into account the sub-continental as well as global phenomenon of the rise of competitive religious radicalism. She has brilliantly benefitted from the essays of Anuj Nadaur (2006), Simon Wolfgang Fuchs (2022), Yoginder Sikand (2003), etc.

Chapter Six of the book under review is a greater eye-opener, particularly for those who are steeped into and subscribe to the victimhood narratives of the Muslim elite and also the Islamic Right Wing. This wonderful chapter also exposes as to how do the hasty, ambitious Muslims bolster their political career through advocating, championing and perpetuating conservatism within the Qaum and pushing them rightward? Very skillfully, they keep the commoners of the Qaum blinded by the fact that such approaches strengthen Hindu majoritarian forces and inflict ever greater vulnerability upon the Qaum. The more both campuses (AMU and JMI) pushed the Qaum towards “Islamisation of Knowledge (IoK) and society” (funded by some of the Islamic countries from the 1970s) the more they ignored the under-representation of India’s Muslims in education, in public employment and in other such sectors such as media and judiciary. The chapter underlines this Rightward shift of the educated segments of the Qaum that was prompted/inspired by and/or coincided with the Maududi’s worldview, the Iranian Revolution (1979), Afghan Jihad, Radicalization of Pakistan under Ziaul Haq, etc.. This is what makes the chapter even more insightful.

Interestingly, during the late 1980s and early 1990s [when the localised dispute of Ayodhya was nationalised through competitive communalism and around the time of the Hindu reaction against the legislative undoing (1986) of the Supreme Court verdict (1985) on Shah Bano and the Ayodhya campaign of the Hindu radicals], the cataloguing of the Muslim underrepresentation was articulated either through the pamphlets of the three major Communist parties, viz., CPI, CPI-M, CPI-ML Liberation, and in certain liberal media outlets such as the Illustrated Weekly of India. Besides, the cataloguing of Muslim under-representation in the Gopal Singh Report (1983). These core issues were being raised to some extent by the state appointed VCs and other functionaries of the two universities but, significantly, not, in any significant measure, by the Islamists on the two campuses. Gautier writes (p. 286), “in the 1980s, university authorities increasingly invoked the need to uplift backward Muslims to frame their actions in a consensual framework.” Though, Gautier has expressed ignorance of benefitting from such pamphlets.

The growing Islamic fundamentalism combined with the boom in Gulf economies added to the anxieties of the sections of Hindu population which feared that the oil money may fund mass conversions to Islam and ‘give to Islamism in India a new glow of self confidence in one sudden sweep’ (pp. 284-285). [A similar apprehension was raised by Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928) in the 1920s, after the Pan Islamist Khilafat Movement, best articulated by Intezar Husain, in his Urdu biography (1999), Ajmal-e-Azam]. This is a significant point which needs to be probed further by collecting some data from the ground. As of now, there are very limited explorations about the socio-economic status of the Muslim communities of different regions and sub-regions. Most of the better known University academics, working around such themes of India’s Muslim communities, shy away from collecting such data from the field. Another aspect, missing in this chapter, is to probe this question:  how, while Islamists were active on both campuses, engaged in and “advocating the purifying of Islam, promoting Islamic values and prioritizing the language of religion over the language of minority rights or social welfare”, their own children were –at the same time –pursuing all kinds of empowering education in professional courses as well as in the humanities. Also, how this project of Islamisation was, in itself, shaking overall secularisation and provoking a Hindu majoritarian reaction and thereby aggravating the vulnerability of the Qaum.

Another significant insight coming out of this volume is in the Chapter Four, “Resisting Minority Politics, Holding on to Composite Nationalism: Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) in the post-Nehruvian period”. The author underlines that “JMI’s atmosphere became more orthodox in the 1980s when the ‘influx’ of teachers from AMU increased significantly”, particularly in the Engineering department, and “‘the liberal [ethos of JMI] was slowly isolated’”; and that, “arrival of teachers trained at AMU led to the rise of ‘class consciousness’ on the campus, thereby jeopardising JMI’s vision of a ‘classless society’” (pp. 192-193). The JMI’s Department of Education excelled for as long as the AMU alumni weren’t recruited as JMI’s faculty. This is demonstrated here by the author’s well-tabulated data.

Laurence Gautier, while expounding on the student politics of AMU during 1965-1981, looks upon the minoritarian assertion as politics of pluralising the Indian democracy and that it was also the case with non-Muslim Indians, the Hindu OBCs, who were asserting their rights to a share in the structures and processes of power and were articulating their grievances against “Nehruvian Consensus”. To contain such assertions, Emergency was imposed, after which the Hindu Right gained legitimacy as well as registered rise and expansion, also funded by the Hindu diaspora.

Cunning craft of the Qaum’s elites: nationalizing local issues for self-perpetuation

This raises a question as to why and how the local AMU issue of reservation for “internal” students in AMU enrolments, a discrimination in favour of the privileged, was cunningly made into a larger  problem the Muslim communities across India, in 1965? This cunning craft of the descendants of the “Kutcherry Milieu” needs to be decoded minutely. This particular clique of the Qaum had kind of forced Sir Syed to shun progressive religious reformism as much as also to withdraw the welfaristic (charitable) Waqf Bill (1879). Yet, all such forces succeeded in taking over his College almost completely, soon after his death in 1898. Some of them, without subscribing to his modernist reformism, had opportunistically and tactically aligned with Sir Syed because he had access to the high echelons of the colonial administration up to the Viceroy and his legislative council.

Chapter Two is particularly more nuanced because it makes a very fine distinction between the visions of Nehru (the Prime Minister), Maulana Azad (the Education Minister) and Zakir (the Vice Chancellor) around the question of what kind of role should and would AMU play in the post-Partition period. In a polite and skillfully understated manner (English is anyway said to be a language of the under-statement), Gautier has articulated the tension between the liberal state, Muslim state actors (often derided as the Sarkari Musalman) and the Muslim Right Wing on and off the campus.

Interestingly, while the sarkar (state) and the Sarkari Musalmans attempted at combining the goals of educational uplift of the Muslims as well as helping Muslims acquire liberal-pluralist outlook, the Muslim Right Wing was geared towards preserving and promoting regressivism and emotive priorities than on any educational uplift. That minority regressivism remained a contributory factor towards strengthening Hindu majoritarianism, is still a less addressed aspect in academia and in the popular domain. Not without substance, the Liberal- Left academic and political forces are often charged of going silent or soft on Muslim regressivness.

Socio-political movements and silence on the campus on caste among Muslims

While discussing social justice movements and backward caste assertions, the relevant chapter of this book does not, it appears, adequately engage with the layered dynamics of the JP Movement and Anti-Emergency resistance. As to how much or less AMU and JMI identified with or stayed away from those movements? The student activists turned mainstream politicians of the era have been interviewed by the author. While bringing out polyphonic voices on these campuses on the question of caste, the dominant narratives on the campuses have almost denied existence of such a discriminatory practice. The AMU and JMI were almost equally aloof in 1990 when there were direct clashes across the country among the students on the implementation of the Mandal Commission Recommendations, despite the fact that as many as 82 communities of Muslims were to benefit from the implementation of the Mandal Report, in 1990.

The narratives within Muslim politics generated out of and sustained within AMU, needs further probing. It needs no particular mention that many Muslim leaders emerged on mainstream Indian electoral politics out of these agitations on AMU issues in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the names are: Arif M Khan, Azam Khan, Javed Habib (d. 2012), and of course leaders such as Abdul Jalil Faridi (1913-1974), Ilyas Azmi (1934-2023), and scores of Muslim leaders (including the theologians) across the country. Remember the lines of Lelyveld & Minault (1974) that the AMU was a “profoundly political enterprise”.

Laurence Gautier clearly demonstrates that before the Emergency (i.e., during 1972-1974) and after it (1977-1981), Muslims, around the AMU campus and related issues, emerged as the interlocutor between the Qaum and the Indian State. Soon after that, the Muslim bodies or pressure groups such as the AIMPLB (founded in April 1973), and BMAC/BMCC emerged on the scene. I repeat, the Muslim politics of nationalising the local issues, and secondly, the formation of pressure groups least for educational uplift and empowerment and more for emotive cultural politics, speak tellingly of the priorities of Muslim politics, among north Indian Muslim elites. This also reminds me of an assertion of Theodre P Wright Jr about the Muslim politics in India, raising the question of whether the Muslim minorities can actualise more of their goals through pressure groups rather than through electoral party politics. Paul Brass and Harry Blair, endorsing Wright, are inclined to suggest that the pressure groups yield better results.

Gender Issues: dominance of regressive patriarchy and retrogression

Chapter seven (on gender) is forthright in stating that “In the 1970s, Islamist groups gained increasing influence on campus as they sought to promote adherence to ‘Íslamic values’, including with regard to men-women relations’’ (p. 375) and “At JMI, the SIMI gained popularity among a part of the student body thanks to their firm stance against the state’s interference in Muslim Personal Law” (p. 379). A fairly distinct reactionary patriarchy prevailed on the campus, in which the Islamists having been dominant and hegemonic forces on the both campuses, neither pushed for reforms from within nor did they allow the state to intervene in favour of gender justice. Women, including the various shades of feminists (except among a miniscule sections of the Left) remained ‘guardians of tradition’ rather than ‘actors of change’.

The author candidly states that “The Shah Bano controversy had a deeply divisive impact both at JMI and at AMU” (p. 378). The author however avoids saying that the divisive impact was not confined within the two ‘Muslim’ campuses. Rather the stubbornness of the Muslim conservatives and reactionaries was going to change the whole grammar, syntax and vocabulary of politics across the country in the days to come. This eventually came to be confessed even by Ali Miyan Nadvi (1914-1999), one of the prominent villains of the Shah Bano dispute. The narratives of the vulnerability of the Muslims were falsified by their power to arm-twist the regime to legislate against the Supreme Court verdict of April 1985. The two campuses, in effect, stood by or capitulated before such reactionary forces, subsequently contributed, in whatever degree, by pushing India towards the grip of majoritarianism. The narrative-making elite (Kutcherry Milieu) of India’s Muslims is yet to persuade the Qaum to bring in reforms from within or let the state do the needful. Needless to add, many such reforms have already been carried out in most of Islamic countries. Yet, the reactions of the dominant Muslim elite to date, are as outrageous as were in the 1970s and 1980s. Most recently, one could see this in the S[h]ayera Bano Case (2017) as much as in the latest Supreme Court verdict of July 10, 2024. In this specific regard, it is difficult to share the optimism that the author has sanguinely articulated in the last two pages (pp. 388-389) of the chapter of the book.

Chapter seven appears to be implicitly rather kinder to Muslim conservatives in a very limited sense. The author seems to suggest (p. 380) that “the growing militancy of the Hindu right” and the BJP support to UCC, kind of forced some Muslim progressives to promote reform from within. To some extent, fair enough. However, please pay attention to these words of Saumya Saxena (2018, p. 424): “the first battle of Muslim personal law was fought in the 1970s rather than the 1980s”. The AIMPLB came into existence in April 1973. It was outcome of a series of Muslim protests in late 1972 against state interference in reforming the laws regarding adoption of child and maintenance to divorced women. The Muslim Right Wing was in the forefront of such protests and in formation of the AIMPLB. The academics of the Islamic Studies, Theology, Law, Gender Studies, of the two universities haven’t yet explained to the Qaum that Instant Triple Talaq (divorce; ITT) is Un-Quranic, that maintenance is not Un-Islamic, that adoption per se isn’t prohibited in Quran, it only prohibits concealing the biological paternity of the child adopted, that it won’t be anti-Islamic to give equal share to the daughters in inheriting parental assets. These highly paid academics benefitting from funds of the secular state haven’t come out in open against the reactionary theologians exposing them about their stances on these abovementioned issues. Thus, their silence or silent support to the reactionary theologians is undermining the secularization processes, which eventually provides fodder to majoritarianism.

On certain aspects, this book has preferred to spare the two denominational universities, in exposing their flip sides, such as their deficit (self-chosen?) in academic output on the most immediate concerns regarding caste, gender, Minority conservatism, communalism and isolationism-exceptionalism). Do they really deserve this much of empathy?

Muslims in their political articulation talk of their victimisation, and discrimination but in terms of academic output of the AMU, we have rightly been accused by Omar Khalidi that there is “absence of interest in Indian Muslim issues at the three departments”, viz., Economics, Sociology and Political Science.

Political priorities of the AMU-JMI elites have been to generate agitations more intensely about emotive and identitarian issues. Their narrative-making politics has prioritised emotive issues and of lack of criminal justice system in the anti-Muslim communal pogroms, besides underrepresentation in education, public employment, legislative and other institutions. But they have chosen largely not to conduct researches on such issues, in order to make stronger advocacy, as indicted by Omar Khalidi (2010), in his academic audit of the research production of AMU.

How do we explain this (mis)prioritization? Can we not see certain kind of politics played out by the elites of Muslims against its own wider community? This deficit among AMU-JMI elites (the narrative-makers) on those counts is contributing to the skewing of political priorities, fuelling of prejudices, fears and apprehensions. Arguably, our own forthright incompetence and mediocrity, that has harboured a less competitive, more cocooned spaces, in terms of enrolments, recruitments, promotions, etc., within these “Muslim” campuses is a cause?

Anti-democratic governance structure of AMU: An incestuous club

The governance structure within AMU is such that it has been helping it, through dangerous and malicious inbreeding, inside the Executive Council (has got almost 80% of its members from among its own faculty), up to the level of empanelling its VCs (without inviting application from outside through an advertisement), to protect, promote and perpetuate the interests of a small club of Muslim elites (Kutcherry Milieu). The narrative-generating elites of both universities as well as of the theological seminaries of these regions, increasingly confined mostly to western UP and Bhojpuri speaking districts of UP (such as Azamgarh), are also home to some of the noted Islamic seminaries. In contrast, the BHU has got all its EC members nominated by the Union government since the 1950s. AMU is the only University where certain teachers continue in certain administrative offices for far too long — even over a decade –with preposterously poor academic credentials. Successive internal VCs perpetuate and strengthen these cliques and clouts rather than launching a crackdown against these debilitative lobbies.

Record preservation in AMU leaves much to be desired. Had it been preserving the day-to-day resolutions and transactions of the AMU Students’ Union and of the AMU Teachers’ Associations and other such formal and informal pressure groups, lobbies and clouts (including the sub-regional ones) within AMU, the practice would have helped for academic researchers to bring out the layered details of the political-ideological character and Qaum’s misplaced priorities and the huge disjunction of aspirations between the elites and the people of the Qaum.

Taking forward from the insights provided by Laurence Gautier, a sequel volume along these lines on the two campuses, or even taking into account more of the “Muslim” campuses can well be a research project worth taking up. A hint (p. 236, Table 5.1) at tardy, slow, lackadaisical and reluctant efforts of the Muslim elites of western UP in establishing Muslim minority educational campuses and educational trusts, compared to the laudable efforts of their counterparts in southern and western India, is a question of deeper concern that requires consideration.

Sadly, Uttar Pradesh’s Muslim elites compare very unfavourably even with the Bihar Muslim elite which is otherwise identified as poorer and backward. In this specific table of educational initiatives of Muslims, post-partition, Kerala tops it all in terms of establishing total number of Muslim colleges until the early 1980s. Tamil Nadu is far ahead despite having the least percentage of Muslim population. They created quality Muslim educational institutions out of the secular laws of Trusts rather than the self-perpetuating “scam” called Waqf-e-Aulad. Thus, the already short share of the south Indian enrolments in AMU kept falling further.

With such tabulated data of the book under discussion, I propose before the academics, researchers and commentators that a precise gaze on, and scrutiny of, the roles of the Muslim elites of UP, and their dominance/hegemony in the narrative-making power/entitlements of Muslim politics is awaited.

Another significant question to be raised here is: why the newly independent liberal state of India was more favourably inclined towards the ex-Leaguers than towards the consistent Congressite Muslims? Were they greater vote-catchers for the ruling Congress than the consistent Congressites? If so, then what does it tell us about the Muslim politics and its elites? Such a proposition is prima facie provocative but the differential treatments in terms of supplying state fund to the JMI and AMU does testify this proposition. There are many more of such evidence in terms of scores of the overnight turncoats among the UP Muslim leaders, such as Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul (1908-2001), not to say of similar testimony in the Urdu novels of Abdus Samad, Do Gaz Zamin and Khwabon Ka Sawera.

In summing up, this wonderfully well-researched book offers profound and nuanced exploration of the socio-political dynamics of AMU and JMI (north Indian Muslim middle classes and elites) since 1947. It provides valuable insights into the evolving landscapes of the politics of Muslim communities in India. This is indeed an important resource for scholars to elaborate upon many aspects outlined in this book pertaining to the polyphonic voices on almost every important issue which the Muslim communities are grappling with. Thus, this engrossing read offers many promises to open up several unchartered layers of the politics of India’s Muslim communities, waiting to be opened up, with even more courage. The post-independence incarnates of the “Kutcherry Milieu” are waiting to be dissected, x-rayed and held accountable in order to make a new move in a menacingly majoritarian rightward shift of India. The increasingly atrophying Liberal-Left too needs to rethink their hitherto flawed treatment of Muslim regressivism. It is already too late.

[Note: This is an abridged version of the draft presented as a panel discussion on the book, in the India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi, on 28 August 2024].

(The author is a Professor of History, Aligarh Muslim University)

Related:

The Waqf Bill 2024: An Open Letter to the Joint Committee of Parliament, the Opposition, and India’s Muslim Communities

Three Banes of India’s Muslims: Victimhood Syndrome, Power Theology, Obsession with Identity Politics

No Central Funds, Aligarh Muslim University’s Second Campus in West Bengal Faces Uncertain Future

The post Political History of India’s Two Muslim Universities since 1947 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Srinagar: Authorities at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) on Wednesday withdrew the circular that called for the profiling of students from Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) enrolled at the varsity after the move drew flak from students and political parties in the region. 

An earlier order dated December 27, from the office of the controller of examination at the university, had sought the personal information of students including the name, parentage, address and mobile number.

The order directed all departments to gather the information on a priority basis that was meant to be further provided to the Superintendent of Police, Aligarh, according to the order.

The order was termed as discriminatory and prejudicial by student organisations and several political parties also called for the rollback of the order.

“AMU has issued an order asking various departments to furnish details about Kashmiri students. A discriminatory move which reeks of surveillance of the Kashmiri students. Urging @AMUofficialPRO to revoke the order forthwith and restore the lost sense of security among the students,” Kashmir’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M) leader M Y Tarigami tweeted after the order was issued. 

Tarigami’s concern regarding the security of Kashmiri students at the university stemmed from the apprehensions of students from the university. The order had heightened their concerns regarding their safety after a recent row between students of the union territory and others.

Last month, at least three students were injured after they were allegedly beaten up inside the campus which the students protested against many said was a part of hostilities that they had been facing. Many including students organisation like J&K Students Association (JKSA) and regional political parties also expressed concerns regarding the safety of more than 1400 students enrolled at the varsity.

The fresh order regarding the “profiling” of students had only compounded these concerns.

“Kashmiris have been studying at the Aligarh Muslim University for decades and not ever had they been asked to furnish these personal details. If it was genuine then why is it that the students from J&K are being asked for these details and why not from other regions and states,” National Conference Spokesperson Imran Nabi Dar told NewsClick.

The students at the university had said that they will not provide these details as they considered it a “breach of their privacy.”

The J&K Students Association which called the order “unjustified” and demanded its rollback in a statement, issued after the withdrawal, urged the students to not feel worried now.

“After requesting authorities to withdraw the circular, since it has led to fear, and scepticism among J&K students in the Varsity, we have been assured and told that exercise will stop onwards now,” the student organisation said.

Zubair Altaf, a research scholar at the University who had also expressed concern over the order, said that the withdrawal has eased stress amongst the students to an extent.

“We appreciate that the University withdrew the order finally. I think there should be more interaction between the administration and the students that could iron out problems that many students have been facing,” Zubair told NewsClick.
 

Courtesy: Newsclick

The post AMU Withdraws Profiling Order of J&K Students Amidst Criticism appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Aligarh: The Jammu & Kashmir students association (JKSA) in Aligarh has also written to Home Minister Amit Shah, demanding a ‘time-bound inquiry’ into the repeated attacks against Kashmiri students to ascertain “facts and nefarious designs” behind the harassment.

Nasir Khuehami, convenor of JKSA, said, “The AMU administration needs to initiate criminal proceedings against those who are indulging in targeted harassment of Kashmiri students.”

On Tuesday, a purported video surfaced showing Kashmiri students being attacked by a group of men. In the clip, one of the attackers is seen brandishing a pistol.

Aligarh SSP Kalanidhi Naithani, said, “There has been no complaint so far. No one has been found to be injured and the university administration is looking into the matter.”

Deputy proctor of AMU, Syed Ali Nawaz Zaidi, said, “The matter is being probed. Action will be taken against those seen handling weapons and creating disturbance on campus. The allegation that Kashmiri students are being targeted is wrong.”

According to the Kashmiri students, “This is the fourth such attack on students from Kashmir this month. There are over 1,400 students from Kashmir at AMU and we frequently face harassment. On minor issues, students barge into rooms of the Kashmiri students and beat us up.”

Students from Kashmir at the Aligarh Muslim University have been protesting for three days against the alleged harassment faced by them on campus.

The protests started after a December 25 incident when a Ph.D scholar from Kashmir was allegedly thrashed by other students for requesting them not to play badminton at 1 a.m. on the hostel premises.

A delegation of Jammu & Kashmir students association (JKSA) met Aligarh MP Satish Gautam and demanded “safety and security”.
 

Courtesy: The Daily Siasat

The post Kashmiri students allege attacks in AMU, write to Shah for probe appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In December 2020, the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s dream-come-true, completed a hundred years. It’s an occasion the global community of its proud alumni – the ‘Aligs’ – would have celebrated in grand style. But the raging pandemic put paid to any such plan. However, it did provide time and space for one Alig to pay a unique tribute to his alma mater in the form of a book: Aligarh Muslim University – The Making of the Modern Indian Muslim. The author Mohammed Wajihuddin is a senior journalist at the Times of India.

As is clear from the Notes at the end of his book, lots has been written on Sir Syed, the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College founded by him in 1877 and its later avatar, the AMU. But this is perhaps the first journalistic account on the subject which accounts for the easy-read, engaging text that flowed out of Wajihuddin’s keyboard.

In his book, Wajihuddin reminds readers on more than one occasion how Sir Syed was not interested simply in a university for Indian Muslims to dish out degrees in this or that subject. Rather, by founding an educational institution to act as the “intellectual hub of Indian Muslims”, infuse in them the spirit of modernism, rationalism, scientific thinking, he “stirred the waters of the stagnant Muslim community”.

The success of that venture is evident from the galaxy of freedom fighters, political stalwarts, writers, poets, actors and other luminaries associated with AMU at different points in its hundred-years-old history. Here is a short list of freedom fighters and national leaders with which the average Indian will be familiar with. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Khudai Khidmatgar), Hasrat Mohani, the Ali brothers, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (India’s first education minister), Dr Zakir Hussain (President of India), Hamid Ansari (Vice-President). Included among the luminaries from the world of art, literature and sports are Saadat Hasan Manto, Ali Sardar Jafri, K.A. Abbas, Asrarul Haque Majaz, Naseeruddin Shah, Saeed Jaffrey, Shakeel Badayuni, Javed Akhtar, Talat Mehmood (playback singer), C.S. Naidu and Syed Mushtaq Ali (cricketers), Olympians Aslam Sher Khan, Govinda and Zafar Iqbal.

On a personal note, Wajihuddin records how his own life is among the numerous examples of the success of Sir Syed’s dream. On how a brief stint at AMU transformed a boy from small-town Bihar into a modern Indian Muslim. “I owe my existence to AMU. Had it not been for the three years I spent there, I would not have been the person I am today… AMU opened my eyes to the world”.

That, however, is only one side of the story of an institution which was once referred to as the ‘Oxford of the East’. AMU has had its ups and downs. Wajihuddin, who loves his alma mater but not blindly, does not shy away from drawing attention to the not so pretty side of the picture. 

The role played by a significant section of the students, staff and administration in the movement for the partition of the country on the basis of religion remains a major blot. Between 1938 and 1945, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan visited the AMU campus several times to a rousing reception on each occasion. Though they refused to be cowed down, “the ‘nationalist group’ at Aligarh was ridiculed, humiliated and pooh-poohed by the ‘pro-Pakistani’ section at Aligarh as they were outnumbered by the aggressively dominant (Muslim) League sympathisers”. In 1945, Maulana Azad who was dubbed the “poster boy” of the Congress by Jinnah closely escaped being lynched by the pro-Pakistan students. Post-independence, the same Maulana Azad along with Dr Zakir Hussain and others played a stellar role in helping the AMU community recover from the trauma of its own role in the partition saga. 

In a chapter titled ‘A modern institution or madrassa?’ Wajihuddin draws attention to the problematic ‘madrassanisation’ of AMU. While recognizing the dire need for the modernisation of madrassas across the country, he bemoans the fact that by opening its doors to madrassa products from the early 1980s onward, the AMU campus opened itself to students groomed in orthodox, conservative, insular, even regressive outlooks. This is something “the founder Sir Syed would not have approved of”.

Another chapter of the book titled, ‘Bastion of liberalism or hotbed of Islamism?, the author recounts how for long the AMU campus has also been a breeding ground for various Muslim religious outfits including the Tablighi Jamaat and the Jamaat-e-Islami. Though it had a benign agenda at birth in the early 1980s, the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), spawned by the Jamaat-e-Islami, emerged from the womb of the AMU. 

“Were Sir Syed to return to his beloved campus, he would not recognize it today—and not only for its physical changes alone,” Wajihuddin writes. But being the optimist that he is, the concluding chapter of the book titled, ‘To the students of AMU’, reminds the present generation that Sir Syed’s mission of founding a modern educational institution was not just to hand out degrees but to impart the spirit of modernism and scientific thinking among Indian Muslims.

“You can take an Alig out of Aligarh but you cannot take Aligarh out of an Alig,” goes the saying. Hopefully the Aligs will read this book and introspect on the role they could play in reorienting AMU towards its original vision and mission.  

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The Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has decided to extend the tenure of Dr. Azeem Malik and Dr. Obaid Haque of the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College Hospital (JNMCH), after their services were terminated by the AMU administration allegedly due to their remarks to the media pertaining to the Hathras rape and murder case.

The two doctors had contradicted the Uttar Pradesh Police’s claim that the 19-year-old girl was not raped. They had said that the medical report was collected way too late to determine the commission of a sexual offence.

“On the request of the Chief Medical officer of the hospital, received on Wednesday, the university has given its nod to the proposal to extend the tenure of the two doctors,” AMU spokesperson Omar Saleem Peerzada told Firstpost.

The termination letter of the two doctors was issued by Doctor S.A.H. Zaidi, the Chief Medical Officer in-charge, a day after the CBI team had visited the Hospital to investigate the gang rape and murder of the Dalit girl.

On October 21, 2020 the Resident Doctor’s Association of JNMCH had issued an urgent notice to the Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University condemning the termination of the two doctors demanding the hospital authorities to the order immediately to protect the rights of doctors. The notice stated, “We have strong reasons to believe that that this is a decision influenced by vendetta politics aimed to suppress independent voices. If their suspension is not revoked within 24 hours, RDA will convene a GBM and will utilise its democratic rights to safeguard the interests of the doctor’s fraternity.”

The two doctors told FirstPost reporters on October 20 that “they were quite taken aback by this step because they had not been given a chance to present their view to the authorities.” The Wire had also reported that the President of the Progressive Medicos and Scientific Forum (PMSF) Dr Harjit Singh Bhatti wrote to the AMU Vice Chancellor, demanding the “revocation of the termination order of two the Medical officers.” The letter, which was sent by mail on October 22, states that it appears that the two doctors have “paid the price for providing factually correct and scientifically sound information pertaining to the samples of the Hathras rape victim.” The letter further mentioned that this episode comes at a time when universities across the country are “struggling hard to defend democratic values and the fundamental rights” of freedom of expression.

The AMU authorities have earlier denied the allegations of termination as “highly speculative” and said the two doctors were engaged on a temporary one-month vacancy from September 9, 2020. They were quoted saying that, “There was an emergency and the two doctors -Dr Malik and Dr Haque were only appointed to fill the leave vacancies. Now that the CMOs are back, there are no leave vacancies, hence their services are not required.” Later they issued another statement on October 21, 2020 saying “It has come to our notice that the doctors aren’t happy with the decision. We are looking into their grievances and they might be adjusted somewhere else in the hospital.”

Dr. Azeem Malik, the erstwhile Chief Medical Officer of Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College (JNMC) at Aligarh Muslim University, had claimed that the FSL report in the Hathras woman’s case holds no evidentiary value as it was collected 11 days late. His colleague Dr. Obaid Haque had attested the Hathras victim’s medico legal case report.

Dr. Obaid Haque while talking to The Indian Express said, “I was last paid in August. We were hired because our seniors weren’t well. That time, we were told to join immediately. I did my Master’s in surgery from AMU and graduated this year. I worked during the pandemic and risked my life and now they have terminated us because Dr Malik spoke to the media and they think that I leaked information. I am still not sure why I am being targeted. Three days ago, I came to know that my appointment will be rejected. We still don’t have a written statement from the Vice-Chancellor about this… This is sad, we didn’t do anything wrong.” Dr Malik, when contacted, also said he wasn’t given last month’s salary and was “scolded” by his seniors because he had given his “personal opinion” to the media.

Hathras in Uttar Pradesh has been in the news since September after a young 19-year-old Dalit girl was allegedly gang raped and strangled to death by four upper caste men in Bulgadi village.

Related:

AMU doctor who challenged UP police’s ‘no rape’ theory sacked!

Hathras case: Two doctors who questioned the FSL Reports, scolded by senior doctors

We are ‘the others’: No justice in Hathras case, 236 Valmikis convert to Buddhism

UP Police now claim that Hathras Dalit victim was not raped!

The post Hathras case: AMU to extend the tenure of 2 JNMCH doctors who spoke to the media appeared first on SabrangIndia.

As the call to #FreeDrKafeel grows louder, the Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum (PMSF) has joined the cause in asking that Dr. Kafeel Khan be immediately released from prison. A statement issued by Dr. Harjit Singh Bhatti, National President of the PMSF read that the Uttar Pradesh government has been vindictive towards Khan.

Appeal to everyone to raise the voice to release Dr Kafeel Khan, a humanitarian paediatrician who is currently languishing in jail from months. Request to all to make a video of one minute with your introduction & upload on Twitter tomorrow morning at 11 am with #FreeDrKafeel pic.twitter.com/zOKDsKqsNa

— Dr Syed Faizan Ahmad (@drsfaizanahmad) July 13, 2020

It must be noted that Dr. Khan was suspended by the UP government in the case of the BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur, where the lack of oxygen supply had taken the lives of more than 60 children. Dr. Khan was falsely accused in the case and forced to spend nine months in prison for alleged medical negligence. He was later given a clean-chit in the matter and acquitted in the case after a government-appointed inquiry.

However, he was arrested in December 2019 for his allegedly inflammatory statements during an anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and has been languishing in jail ever since, after being booked under the stringent National Security Act (NSA).

The PMSF said that Dr. Kafeel Khan was known for his humanitarian work by organizing free health camps and providing his services free of cost to all needy patients. Many times, he also put his own life in danger to help others.

Even from prison, Khan had written a letter to PM Modi on March 19, offering help to fight the coronavirus infection, using the 20 years of experience he had in the medical field. In this letter, he had also provided a roadmap to fight the virus advising the government to “Increase the testing strength (1 in each district), isolation wards (1000 in each districts), opening of new ICUs, extensive training of the doctors/paramedics, support groups including AYUSH and private sectors, curb the rumors, avoid unscientific views and mobilize all resources as soon as possible.”

However, nobody paid heed to his request. Even though the Supreme Court ordered that prisons be decongested to curb the spread of coronavirus there, Dr. Khan, in another letter described the horrid conditions he and other inmates had to survive in, even during this time. “In a jail made for 534 inmates, there are 1,600 people kept with one barrack holding at least 100-125 of us. There are just 4-6 toilets,” Dr. Kafeel Khan wrote unveiling the torturous conditions inmates are subjected to even at the time of a pandemic.

In light of this and his continuous incarceration under stringent charges, the PMSF has asked the medical fraternity to join the movement to save Dr. Kafeel Khan and democracy. Many from the medical fraternity have now uploaded videos in support of Dr. Khan, urging the authorities to release him.

Dr Kafeel Khan, a humanitarian paediatrician is in jail from last 5 months. I request everyone to support him with #FreeDrKafeel
Our society needs doctors like him and he should be in the people & not in jail. pic.twitter.com/NYznpxwAST

— Harjit Singh Bhatti (@DrHarjitBhatti) July 14, 2020

Please spread my words in support of #DrKafeelKhan .
अपने दिल से खुद पूछिए क्या वो सच में अपराधी हैं जिन्हें 6 month से jail में रखा गया है ?!#FreeDrKafeel #DrKafeel_ko_RihaKaro #DrKafeel_LifeMatter #Drkafeelkhanwantsjustice #FreeDrKafeel pic.twitter.com/Gfr6mTFlLm

— Dr Syed Faizan Ahmad (@drsfaizanahmad) July 14, 2020

We urge the government to release #DrKafeelKhan immediately and to safeguard health workers and their rights. #FreeDrKafeel pic.twitter.com/A1Wju3MOum

— Dr Kirash Parthipady (@KirashAbdulla) July 14, 2020

I’m Dr.Tabish khan. I’m standing in support of our senior Dr. Kafeel khan who is in jail for the crime he didn’t commit. We all know how he has been falsely accused and is facing serious charges. Please watch what we have to say.#FreeDrKafeel #FreeDrKafeel#FreeDrKafeel pic.twitter.com/0HdBheIF1n

— Dr. Tabish khan (@tabkhan001) July 14, 2020

The medical fraternity is speaking up for the release of Dr. Kafeel Khan. Dr Kafeel is the frontline warrior India needs. #FreeDrKafeelhttps://t.co/1gAF1UyCR0

— Umar Khalid (@UmarKhalidJNU) July 14, 2020

Let us make every effort to get Dr. Kafeel released. All the political prisoners be released at least in this period of Corona crisis. Do watch and share the video. Let the world know that one of India’s remarkable doctor for poor is in jail for speaking truth to power. https://t.co/k6spZaQW23

— Jignesh Mevani (@jigneshmevani80) July 14, 2020

Thanks for speaking up @DrHarjitBhatti
Medical fraternity must stand with this fabulous doctor who should be out, serving the country during this pandemic.#FreeDrKafeel https://t.co/HLnXFGqACQ

— Yogendra Yadav (@_YogendraYadav) July 14, 2020

A man who saves lives without discrimination on any religious basis is in jail because of his religion.

No one can denied the Islamophobic nature of the govt.#FreeDrKafeel pic.twitter.com/ic3cue9nzj

— Faisal Nadeem (@faisalnadeem93) July 14, 2020

The call for his release has now gathered momentum as the hypocrisy of the government has come to light. On the one hand the government is hailing doctors for their work as frontline workers during the pandemic, but on the other is still being out on a witch hunt against doctors who expose the ills of the government.

It isn’t just Dr. Khan who has been harassed. In Visakhapatnam, a doctor was dragged and beaten by the police mercilessly, The Wire reported. This was the same doctor who had complained about the lack of PPE equipment and had been suspended in April, though the police claim that the two incidents weren’t related. State repression and police brutality in India has grown in the last few years. The perpetrators within the system continue to exploit with impunity while those cleared even by the law continue to languish behind bars.

Related:

Kafeel Khan describes prison to be ‘a living hell’ in letter from jail
Dr. Kafeel Khan arrested in Mumbai for remarks at anti-CAA rally in AMU
Dr Kafeel Khan still behind bars, wife Shabista appeals for release

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