Understanding the Govt's Attitude Toward Minorities and the Anxieties it has Provoked

Maulana Mahmood Madani’s recent speech at the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind's annual governing council meeting has once again ignited the debate on one of the most contested aspects of contemporary Indian politics i.e. government's relationship with India’s minorities, particularly Muslims. The argument is often reduced to slogans – either of an ascendant civilisational Hinduism or, conversely, of an endangered plural republic – but the truth lies in a more complex terrain.

Since 2014, India has witnessed a recalibration of the relationship between state, majority and minority that is neither entirely unprecedented nor easily explained. It is shaped by electoral incentives, ideological imperatives, shifts in the media ecology, and anxieties about national identity in a rapidly transforming society. Understanding this at depth is essential if one is to offer a fair assessment of the concerns voiced across India’s liberal spaces.

In moments of unease in India’s public life, one often returns to the words of the country’s early leaders, not out of sentimentality but because they located India’s modern identity in a complex moral universe. Among them, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad stands out for his prescience. In the Constituent Assembly in 1949, he reminded India that its nationalism was not the nationalism of a single people, but “a common nationality of many.”

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had echoed the same sentiment just months earlier, insisting that the idea of India could not be reduced to the hegemony of any religious group because such hegemony would “tear apart the fabric of this ancient land”. These were not rhetorical flourishes; they were warnings carved from the long history of the subcontinent where harmony and rupture have coexisted uneasily for centuries.

It is against this background that one must understand the government’s attitude toward minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, and the anxieties it has provoked across India’s liberal space. The state today gestures more explicitly toward majoritarian sentiment than at any time since Independence. This has heightened a parallel tension: whether the republic’s identity should be anchored in a civilisational Hindu tradition or continue to draw upon the composite, plural foundation laid by the Constitution’s framers.

The government argues that it has not discriminated against minorities and that development schemes – Ujjwala, PMAY, Jan Dhan, Ayushman Bharat – have been religion-neutral. This is true. These programmes have reached millions, including large numbers of Muslims. But the idea of India’s secularism was never only about welfare distribution; it was about the emotive anchoring of citizenship. Its more a question whether fraternity has weakened. Since 2014, the weakening has been perceptible. The symbolic acts that once maintained the state’s neutrality between faiths have been replaced by an overt embrace of rituals associated with the majority.

With Ministers attending Hindu religious ceremonies in official capacity, and the increasing use of civilisational language in governance – these have reconfigured the republic’s moral vocabulary. Supporters see this as overdue cultural correction; critics view it as a quiet transformation of the public sphere, where the majority’s culture becomes the norm and all others must situate themselves within it. People recall the rare occasion when the President of the new founded Republic, Rajendra Prasad, inaugurated the refurbished temple at Somanath in 1951, an act for which he was advised against by Prime Minister Nehru.

This cultural shift has coincided with certain policy decisions that disproportionately affect minorities. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which explicitly excludes Muslims from an expedited citizenship path, stands out as a turning point. Historians such as Ramachandra Guha and legal scholars like Gautam Bhatia have argued that the CAA departs from the Constitution’s spirit of religion-blind citizenship. For many Muslims, its message was chilling – not only for what it said, but for what it implied: that their place in India was no longer secure by default but subject to re-certification in the majoritarian imagination.

Similarly, the reading down of Article 370 in August 2019, and downgrading J&K’s status from a full state to a Union Territory, was met with celebration in most of India but with quiet dread in Kashmir. The long lockdown, internet restrictions, and arrests, though justified by the government as necessary for security, reinforced a perception among Kashmiri Muslims that they were subjects of a centralising state rather than participants in a shared federation. Scholars like A.G. Noorani have emphasised that the original constitutional arrangement with Kashmir was not merely administrative but psychological – a recognition of the region’s unique history and anxieties.

Outside formal policymaking, the social climate has changed in ways more troubling. Lynchings in the name of cow protection, public calls for boycotts of Muslim businesses, intimidation campaigns against Christian prayer groups, and the proliferation of polarising rhetoric on social media have fundamentally altered the texture of everyday life for minorities. The state seldom endorses such actions, yet its responses often appear reluctant, hesitant, or uneven. Christophe Jaffrelot and others have argued that this creates an “ethno-majoritarian ecosystem” in which non-state actors draw legitimacy from ideological proximity to those in power, eroding the rule of law.

Hate speech now emanates from mainstream political actors and goes unpunished

Even more insidious is the transformation of public discourse. Hate speech – once the preserve of fringe groups – now emanates from mainstream political actors and goes unpunished with disturbing regularity. Campaign speeches targeting Muslims, insinuations that they are inherently suspect or less loyal, and demands for exclusionary policies metastasise across the media landscape. Perhaps the worst is the systematic misquotes from the Quran that generate hate against Muslims.

Defenders of the government reject these accusations. They insist that Muslims remain free, secure, and constitutionally protected, and that assertions of persecution are politically motivated or intellectually exaggerated. There is some merit in challenging hyperbolic narratives. India is not Pakistan of the 1980s, nor has it descended into widespread state-sanctioned oppression. But liberal scholars note that the issue is not whether minorities face catastrophic danger; the issue is whether the emotional foundations of citizenship have shifted subtly yet profoundly.

Representation is a particularly revealing index. For the first time in independent India, the ruling party has virtually no Muslim MPs in the Lok Sabha. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) argues that representation should be about competence, not identity; liberals counter that descriptive representation matters in a society where historical anxieties run deep. When a community of over 200 million finds almost no voice within the ruling establishment, the message is frightening: it suggests that political integration is not essential to governance.

The Modi government’s tenure has unquestionably energised large sections of society, built state capacity, and redefined national ambition. It has restored to many a sense of cultural pride long felt to be suppressed. To dismiss these achievements would be intellectually dishonest. But governance in a plural society demands not only majoritarian affirmation but minority reassurance. When reassurance is absent, fear fills the vacuum. And therefore, whether intentionally or not, this era has altered India’s implicit social contract.

Minorities increasingly feel that they inhabit the republic on sufferance rather than partnership. The worry among liberals is not that India will abruptly abandon secularism, but that the gradual normalisation of majoritarian sentiment will harden into the common sense of future generations. Once that happens, the delicate equilibrium envisioned by the framers of the Constitution will die.

Yet India remains too large, too layered, too diverse to be permanently captured by any single ideological project. The constitutional framework continues to offer refuge, and periodic judicial interventions demonstrate that not all institutional resilience has eroded. Civil society, though weakened, still raises its voice. And ordinary Indians – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian – carry within them a memory of coexistence that cannot be easily extinguished.

The way forward lies not in denial or accusation but in a renewed commitment to constitutional values. The government must communicate, through word and deed, that equality is non-negotiable and that minorities are integral to the nation’s moral and cultural fabric. It must rein in vigilantism, prosecute hate speech impartially, and insist on institutional neutrality. And it must do so not because of international pressure or political calculation, but because the very idea of India demands it.

The current turbulence is not destiny, but a crossroads. The question, ultimately, is whether India chooses the road of fraternity that its founders hoped for, or whether it allows fear and exclusion to shape a new national narrative. History suggests both paths remain open. What India chooses will define not only its minorities, but the fate of the republic itself.

The author is a former civil servant, vice chancellor Jamia Millia Islamia, Lt. Governor Delhi and presently, chairman, Advanced Studies Instiutute of Asia.

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