A little over a month ago, a backlit banner proclaiming “I Love Muhammad” was put up in Syed Nagar, Kanpur, on the occasion of Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi. It is a decoration that the Muslim residents of the religiously mixed neighbourhood say they have put up in previous years as well, though without the backlights. Other residents objected to the banner, leading to tensions, which resulted in it being relocated. 

While such tensions are not uncommon, the decision by the police to register an FIR against the organisers for putting up the banner, on charges including promoting enmity between different groups, has sparked off a broader movement that forces us to confront the severe limitations placed by the Indian state on the right to religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution when it comes to Indian Muslims. 

The Muslim community has responded to the arbitrary crackdown on these banners by holding demonstrations and putting up similar banners and stickers, and the state response has been draconian. 

By September 23, over 1,300 Muslims had been booked and dozens arrested in relation to such demonstrations and banners. In Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, a post-prayer demonstration reportedly turned violent, resulting in the police using a lathi-charge to disperse protestors. 

In an intensified crackdown, the police have since cut internet services, arrested a Muslim influencer for writing the words on his chest and shot a Muslim leader in the leg in an extrajudicial attack. 

The Bareilly municipality meanwhile demolished a structure belonging to the family of Maulana Moshin Raza, the organizer of the Bareilly demonstration. The media has reported the incident as “bulldozer action” despite the Supreme Court prohibiting such acts of collective punishment.

The Uttar Pradesh government also placed prominent Muslim politicians under house arrest to prevent them from visiting the city and deployed surveillance drones to police Friday prayers. 

As per the Association for the Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), by October 7, a staggering 4,505 Muslims had been booked under 45 FIRs in 23 cities around India in connection with “I Love Muhammad” protests.  

While the actions of the Hindutva state are unsurprising, challenging these actions require us to go further than pointing to the right of religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution. It is important to understand the way in which caste-based norms with respect to the dominance of public spaces (that are both consciously and unconsciously accepted in Hindu society) are being used by the police and the Hindutva state to circumvent the religious freedom granted in the Constitution. 

Caste based norms, policing and the invisibilisation of Indian Muslims

In a traditional caste-based society, the dominant caste has the power to control or shape the public religious behavior of others. Neighborhoods are segregated by caste, and the routes a religious procession can take, for example, depend on the cooperation of the dominant caste. 

Colonial policing records point to the taking out of religious processions as being flashpoints of caste-based violence, long before they record the first instances of communal violence. Even today, religious or matrimonial processions by a caste seen as lower in the hierarchy, or not following caste norms, can provoke extreme violence by “upper” castes in the region. 

As I have argued earlier, Hindutva often takes these entrenched norms of a caste-based society, and turns them against Indian Muslims. It also offers up the resources of the state for their implementation. 

For example, the caste-based prohibition of inter-caste marriage is modified into “love jihad” (a right-wing conspiracy theory that Muslim men trap Hindu women into matrimony and conversion). The state, by enacting anti-conversion laws, then allows the police to act in conjunction with local violent elements to prevent inter-faith marriages. 

Similarly, the caste practice of not sharing cooked food with people outside the caste manifests as conspiracies like “thook jihad” (a right-wing conspiracy where Muslim food vendors are accused of spitting into the food they sell) and state actions like requiring Muslim-owned or operated restaurants to display the names of the proprietors and employees. 

When the caste-based practice of the dominant group maintaining control of public spaces is turned against Muslims, it results in the Hindutva state deploying the entire might of modern policing to invisibilise them. 

The state’s erasure of Indian Muslims from the public domain, especially in Uttar Pradesh, has become a defining feature of Hindutva assertion in recent years. These acts of invisibilisation range from rewriting history to renaming towns. This invisibilisation even finds its way into urban development discourse, where the large-scale demolition of Muslim homes is normalized under the guise of slum clearance. 

There is also a near constant clamp down on public religious expression. For example, in March this year, mosques were covered with tarpaulin sheets in Sambhal to make them invisible to Hindu revelers celebrating Holi. 

In many cities, offering Namaz in public was banned, and drones were deployed to check compliance. The erasure is so strict that groups of Muslims offering Namaz on their own private property, but in a manner that would be visible to others (on terraces for example) was also banned. Taxpayer funds have repeatedly been diverted into this exercise in invisibilisation.

The hyper-visibilisation of Hindutva

The corollary to this invisibilisation of the marginalized group is the hyper-visibilization of the dominant group. While Hindu traditions and practices have always been widely visible all over India (a roadside shrine or temple can be found on almost every road, as are festival celebrations, or traditions like lighting lamps in functions), Hindutva extends this in two ways. 

First, it entrenches its visibility at the level of the state. The prime minister, other government officials, a former chief justice and even the army chief have all been seen visiting or inaugurating temples and performing Hindu religious ceremonies. These videos are then widely disseminated into the public domain by state friendly news agencies. 

The Prime Minister inaugurated the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, built on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, in a ceremony attended by the entire government and a wide selection of the Indian business and cultural elite. The day was declared a public holiday across the country. It is also routine these days for taxpayer funds to be used to perform things like aerial showers of rose petals on processions like the Kanwar Yatra and the Kumbh Mela. The Indian Air Force also conducted an aerial show at the Kumbh Mela earlier this year. 

Second, the state backs the extension of these dominant group religious assertions into minority areas and neighborhoods. Hindu festivals these days are often celebrated by Hindu youth taking out processions and rallies in Muslim majority neighborhoods, playing “Hindutva pop” songs on loudspeakers and dancing outside mosques. The police often accompany these processions. 

Challenging these norms

The collective effect of this invisibilisation of Islam from the public domain and the hyper-visibilization of Hinduism signals to the public that no matter what is said in the Constitution, the nation and its public spaces belong to the dominant group. This is an idea that has received very little serious pushback in the last decade. 

Sadly, even within anti-BJP secular politics, there is a tendency to frame resistance to Hindutva in a manner that perpetuates this idea, instead of challenging it. For example, they often demand that Muslims contour their public existence into boundaries set by the dominant group, avoid praying in public and reject overtly visible symbols of Islam like the hijab in colleges, or long beards in professional settings. Any attempt at public assertion by the minority that moves beyond these boundaries is termed as “provocation”, or as helping the BJP consolidate the majority vote against Muslims. 

The “I love Muhammad” protests offer us an opportunity to reflect. At great personal risk, Indian Muslims are challenging the idea of an exclusively Hindu state, with exclusively Hindu public spaces. And this challenge is located where it matters – on the streets. The Hindutva state, confident in the backing of a majority population that both consciously and unconsciously believes in the caste-derived norm of dominance being exercised over the public sphere, will not be limited by the Constitution. 

There is a tendency in Indian politics to deify the Constitution. The Prime Minister bows down to it and opposition leaders speak of their respect for it and talk about the need to preserve it. And yet, the Constitution cannot be preserved by bowing down to it, holding up pocket size editions of it in press conferences, or even by relying on the courts. 

Preserving the Constitution means creating a society where the constitutional values that are enshrined in it replace the hierarchical values prevalent in a caste-based society. Bringing that about requires a politics that is centered around serious social reform. It is not enough for the opposition to tell people that all faiths are granted the right to practice and propagate their own religion in the Constitution. They must show their own followers that they actively and materially support the right of Indian Muslims to publicly proclaim their faith and to share peacefully in our collective public spaces as equal citizens. This is something which only a few non-Muslim politicians, like Chandrashekhar Azad have done so far. 

Indian political discourse often tends to center around a Hindutva versus “secular” binary. The actual battle is however a fight between a society organised around constitutional values – like equality, liberty, religious freedom and fraternity – and a society organised by the rigid hierarchies, segregation and dominant group violence, whose legitimacy derives from traditional caste-based norms. An opposition that does not seek to change this society will struggle to offer a meaningful alternative to Hindutva. 

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