Has India’s democracy failed its Muslims? Jailed scholar triggers debate
Sharjeel Imam questioned foundational ideas of India's nationalism in interview with The Quint, inspiring heated debate.
Has the world’s largest democracy failed the world’s largest minority – its nearly 200 million Muslims? That question is at the heart of a polarising debate currently under way in India.
The debate started with Sharjeel Imam, a 38-year-old Muslim scholar, who gave a lengthy interview to an Indian news website on September 29 from his prison cell in New Delhi.
Imam covered a wide range of issues and raised uncomfortable questions about the place of the country’s Muslim minority, which forms roughly 14 percent of India’s 1.4 billion population.
“The fact is that from the beginning, the Congress had within what it depicted as its outside: ethno-racist-Hindu nationalists. The flow of leaders between the Congress and overtly Hindu parties was smooth,” he added, citing Lala Lajpat Rai, K M Munshi, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, and Madan Mohan Malviya as examples.