‘Outsiders in their own land’, TRT report highlights growing challenges for Indian Muslims
Istanbul: A TRT Global article critically examines the mounting challenges faced by India’s 200-million strong Muslim population, which is projected to be the world’s largest Muslim population by 2060.
According to Kashmir Media Service, the article titled ‘After 78 years, India’s Muslims are being written out of citizenship’ says that until December 2019, India did not have a religious test for Indian citizenship, but this principle was overturned with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which introduced a religion-based criterion for belonging.
The report says that subsequent events, including the post-Pahalgam attack crackdown on so-called unauthorised Bangladeshi immigrants, have only intensified this trend, highlighting the state’s growing determination to enforce exclusion along religious lines.
“In Gujarat, Maharashtra, New Delhi, and elsewhere, police have rounded up Bengali-speaking Muslims—most of them poor labourers—branding them “illegal” and, in many cases, doing so without even the formality of a brief hearing before a judge”.
The report details how the CAA permits authorities to disenfranchise Indian Muslims who lack documentary evidence of citizenship, a significant threat in a country where millions of the poor and marginalized lack such papers. Undocumented non-Muslims, however, would remain entitled to citizenship under the law.
The article points to a “layered betrayal” of the promise made to Muslims in 1947, where socio-political and historical fissures are being turned into an instrument of state policy. It notes that the Election Commission of India’s revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, which will re-verify 80 million voters’ papers, is a step in this direction, with officials signaling that large numbers of “illegal immigrants” will be deleted from the lists.
It says the evidence is not confined to desperately poor Muslim workers. “Bollywood, India’s biggest cultural export and a formidable shaper of public imagination, is silent as a jury announced two national cinema awards for The Kerala Story (2023), a film built on widely debunked claims about Muslim women from the southern state of Kerala trafficked to serve ISIS but still disingenuously championed by Hindutva leaders”.
“Meanwhile, battered by a financial downturn, the industry continues to churn out villains in the usual mould: the Islamic terrorist, the cruel Muslim emperor, the drug lord named Zubair—complete with skull cap and soorma-lined eyes—in a trope that never tires”.
The article concludes that for millions of Indians, especially Muslims, the rights once considered inalienable are being redefined and erased, recasting them as outsiders in their own land.
