The Popular Front of India and Muslim Responses to Hindu Nationalism | Meghana Choukkar
On September 27, 2022, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs issued a notification declaring the Popular Front of India (PFI) an “unlawful association” under the country’s most stringent anti-terror law, effectively banning PFI and its affiliates for five years.1 The government said PFI was a “major threat to internal security” and alleged that the organization was involved in terror financing, had links to global terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (IS) and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), and was radicalizing “a particular section of society.”2 Following investigations in March 2023, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) filed two chargesheets (official documents listing offenses against the accused) against nearly 60 individuals and issued a statement that PFI was engaged in a criminal conspiracy to radicalize Muslim youth and provide weapons training with the ultimate objective of establishing Islamic rule in India by 2047.3
In public and media discourse, the emphasis on this alleged plot to turn India into an Islamic nation and discussions of “Islamic jihad” overshadowed a central aspect of PFI’s complex politics: resistance to Hindu nationalism. With Indian Muslims being a very diverse group—religiously, culturally, and politically—responses to the rise of Hindu nationalism and the consequent oppression of Muslims have been disparate and rarely coordinated on a national scale. In this context, the Popular Front of India has constituted a departure due to its formation as an attempt to build a grassroots socio-political movement across the country, with a purported aim to defend Muslims and other marginalized communities in India against the rising tide of Hindu nationalism. PFI’s politics have combined an assertive rights-based discourse of resistance with an aggressive, confrontational approach. The latter aspect of its politics justifies violence in the name of self-defense, which has often taken the form of deadly cycles of attacks involving its activists and those of right-wing Hindu nationalist groups.
Although PFI is now banned, its political arm, the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), remains active, having escaped due to the legal complications of banning a registered political party. SDPI’s politics are informed by the same ideas as PFI and the two organizations are closely linked with overlapping membership in many instances. With the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) predicted to return to power for a third term in India’s 2024 general elections, it is important to understand the politics of PFI and SDPI and their appeal as a resistance to Hindu nationalism. This study examines the politics of PFI and SDPI in Kerala, the southern state where the organizations were founded and have their strongest base, and show how fear, insecurity, and anger are leading to greater support for their confrontational resistance to Hindu nationalism, particularly among Muslim youth. It examines the challenges that any Muslim political response to Hindu nationalism faces in the context of India’s electoral system and majoritarian politics today. The article is based on interviews conducted by the author in May and June 2022 with leaders of PFI, SDPI, and other Muslim political and religious organizations in Kasaragod district and Kozhikode city in Kerala. It also draws on existing literature on PFI and SDPI, including the autobiography of the movement’s founder, and the groups’ social media channels.
Muslim Politics and Responses to Hindu Nationalism
Hindu nationalism is an ideological movement, originating in the nineteenth century, that aims to create a “Hindu Rashtra” or Hindu nation where Hindu culture, religion, and values are dominant in social and political life.4 The movement has been driven by upper-caste elite through the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a voluntary organization with networks that run deep in Indian society today. RSS and other organizations in its fold view Muslims and Christians as internal threats whose loyalty to the country is suspect and whose culture and religion pose a threat to the Hindu majority. Muslims have been a greater target for Hindu nationalists. They believe that Muslim rulers such as the Mughals, a dynasty of Central Asian origin that ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent from the sixteenth to nineteenth century, colonized and enslaved a Hindu India, destroying Hindu temples and culture. This view of history leads them to see ordinary Muslims today as permanent enemies who conspire to dominate Hindus, convert them to Islam, outnumber them demographically, and carry out terror attacks against the country.5
Having built momentum over the years, the ideology gained greater dominance in Indian politics and society since 2014 when BJP, the political party of RSS, came to power in the national elections under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since then, Muslims in India have been facing increasing physical attacks and threats to their identity, livelihood, and religious practices from the state and Hindu nationalist vigilante groups.6 Principles of secularism have been undermined and state institutions such as the police and courts are seen as facilitating majoritarianism. The following examples are illustrative of the systemic violence Muslims in India face today. In Uttar Pradesh, police used bulldozers to demolish the homes of Muslims who led protests against a BJP spokesperson’s derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad, on the pretext that the construction was illegal.7 Similar extrajudicial actions have been carried out against Muslims under BJP governments in Madhya Pradesh and Haryana.8 Hindu vigilante groups have called for Hindus to economically boycott Muslims in Karnataka, Haryana, and Chattisgarh.9 Vigilante groups have also routinely carried out physical attacks against Muslims under the accusation of slaughtering cows, an animal many Hindus consider sacred.10 Islamophobia in society is also on the rise and many ordinary Muslims have talked about living in fear of being attacked in public places because of their Muslim identity.11
Indian Muslims are a heterogeneous community of about 200 million, made up of different sects, religious practices, castes, classes, languages, and cultures. The resultant diversity of political interests combined with other factors such as geographically dispersed populations, a first-past-the-post electoral system, and lack of reserved constituencies for Muslims, have constrained the emergence of Muslim political parties, let alone a unified one at the national level.12 Muslims have largely supported mainstream political parties such as the Indian National Congress, Communist Party of India (Marxist) [known as CPI(M)], and regional parties like the Samajwadi Party, a party of “backward “caste groups and religious minorities in Uttar Pradesh. However, the ability and willingness of these parties to articulate the political demands of Muslims has been wanting and, in recent times, constrained by the rise of majoritarian politics. In these circumstances, the capacity of Muslim politics to respond to the crisis of Hindu nationalism has been limited. In fact, political scientist Hilal Ahmed argues that the diversity of Indian Islamic communities is such that “the idea of having a defined strategy to counter Hindutva seems unreasonable and vague.”13
The most significant Muslim political coalition to challenge Hindu nationalism was formed in response to the dispute over the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. Hindu nationalist groups claimed that the sixteenth-century mosque had been built over a temple that marked the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. In the 1980s, Hindu nationalist groups, including the RSS and BJP, led a concerted movement to construct a Ram temple at the site.14 The conflict became a national issue in February 1986 when a local court allowed Hindu devotees to worship at the site which had been closed off to both Hindus and Muslims since 1949.15 This prompted the All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (a federation of various Muslim organizations), the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) (an organization of religious scholars) and Syed Abdullah Bukhari, the influential imam of Jama Masjid in Delhi, to form a coalition to strategize on political and legal responses.16 The result was the creation of a 10-member All India Babri Masjid Movement Coordination Committee (AIBMMCC) in 1986, and the adoption of a plan of action involving mass public campaigns and a legal-constitutional response. The committee was composed of mainly North Indian Muslim elite from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and New Delhi, with only two representatives from South Indian Muslim parties.
The trajectory of the AIBMMCC and its internal conflicts highlight the challenges of claiming to speak for a national Muslim community and the predicament of a minority responding to majoritarian pressures. AIBMMCC called for Muslims across the country to not participate in the observance of Republic Day on January 26, 1987, to register their protest against the government.17 This became very controversial and several Muslim ministers, academics, journalists, and industrialists criticized the call as “anti-national” and “inflammatory,” forcing AIBMMCC to withdraw its call.18 This episode underscored the delicate tightrope minority political actors have to walk under majoritarian pressures. AIBMMCC’s non-observance call was publicized by mainstream national media as a “boycott call”; this led to anxieties over the “separatist communalism” of Babri Masjid politics, reflecting the post-partition suspicion of Indian Muslims’ loyalty to the nation.19 AIBMMCC clarified that the non-observance call was intended to question the government of the day for violating constitutional principles and was not a boycott of the state. However, even within the community, Muslim leaders and thinkers expressed concern that such confrontational politics would alienate the community and provoke further inter-communal conflict.
AIBMMCC split in 1987 and, while it successfully lobbied the Union government to pass a law to protect other places of worship from similar disputes, it couldn’t prevent the destruction of Babri Masjid by Hindu nationalist groups on December 6, 1992.20 The coalition, which later splintered, pursued the matter legally through the courts and was unsuccessful. In 2019, the Supreme Court acknowledged the illegality of the demolition but awarded the land to the Hindu party and, in January 2024, a Ram Temple was inaugurated at the site of the mosque by Prime Minister Modi in a grand ceremony.21
The deadly communal clashes across the country following the Babri
Masjid demolition, and the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, also
catalyzed another kind of response–violent acts of terror perpetrated by
members of the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Indian
Mujahideen. SIMI started as a student group of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind
in Uttar Pradesh which later separated itself when SIMI took a radical
Islamist turn and expressed commitment to establishing an Islamic
Caliphate.22
Among other things, the growth of the Hindu nationalist movement in the
1990s had been a factor in the radicalization of SIMI. The group was
banned in 2001 over allegations of violence and connections with global
terror groups. Similarly, the Indian Mujahideen, a jihadist group that
carried out several terror attacks in India in the 2000s, was also
formed as a Muslim ‘self-defense’ and to take revenge for Hindu
nationalist violence.23 Notably, some PFI leaders were previously members of SIMI.24 [. . .] Full text here