Winning Without Muslims: The New Logic of Power in Indian Democracy
By: Mohammed Hidayathulla
Indian politics after 2014 is fundamentally different from what it was before. For decades, Hindu votes were fragmented along caste, regional, and linguistic lines. In that fragmented landscape, the Muslim vote—though numerically limited—often played a decisive role. Whichever party or candidate Muslims collectively supported stood a strong chance of winning, particularly in closely contested constituencies.
That political arithmetic no longer holds.
Since coming to power at the Centre, the BJP’s most consequential achievement has been the consolidation of Hindu votes across caste and regional divisions under a broader ideological umbrella. This consolidation has sharply reduced the electoral relevance of Muslim voting patterns. The possibility that Muslim support alone can swing elections has largely disappeared, and there is little indication that this situation will reverse in the near future.
The BJP’s political journey is now complete in one crucial sense: it has ceased to be a challenger and become a system. Like the Congress in its dominant phase, the party today enjoys structural advantages—electoral, institutional, and narrative—that make displacement increasingly difficult. With repeated victories at the Centre and in key states, and with an opposition unable to present a coherent alternative, regime change in the foreseeable future appears improbable. This consolidation has produced a distinct and troubling political outcome: the systematic political marginalisation of India’s Muslim community.
Unlike other social groups—Dalits, OBCs, regional castes, or linguistic communities—Muslims remain almost entirely outside the BJP’s electoral coalition. Other groups may be divided in their political loyalties; Muslims are not. In a political system where Hindu consolidation has reduced electoral competition, this reality reshapes incentives in a stark way. When a community’s votes no longer influence outcomes, its political relevance declines. Accommodation gives way to indifference, and indifference easily slips into exclusion.
The BJP has demonstrated that it can win elections without Muslim support. Having achieved that, it no longer needs to concern itself with where Muslim votes go—or even whether Muslims vote at all. This marks a decisive shift in India’s democratic logic: a large minority has become electorally dispensable.
This helps explain the rise of policies and administrative practices that are formally legal but socially selective. Electoral roll revisions such as Special Intensive Revision (SIR) are not, in principle, unlawful. Every democracy periodically updates its voter lists. However, when such exercises are conducted in a polarised environment, with documentation requirements that disproportionately affect poorer and marginalised citizens, the outcome is predictable. Errors and exclusions rarely fall evenly. They fall where resistance is weakest and political cost is lowest—on Muslim voters.
The objective is not overt disenfranchisement but numerical thinning. Even marginal reductions in minority voter participation, when replicated across constituencies, can decisively alter electoral outcomes. Since Muslim votes no longer figure in the ruling party’s electoral calculus, the incentive to correct these distortions remains minimal.
More disturbing is the broader institutional pattern that accompanies this political logic. Investigative agencies appear markedly more energetic when cases involve Muslim individuals, activists, or organisations. Prosecutions are prolonged, bail is delayed, and trials proceed at a glacial pace. Meanwhile, comparable or even more serious allegations involving members of other communities often see swifter relief. The law, in effect, begins to operate asymmetrically.
The judiciary finds itself in an uncomfortable position. Courts are neither immune to political pressures nor equipped to constantly confront an entrenched executive. Increasingly, judicial responses are procedural rather than corrective—technically sound, but substantively hollow. Extended incarceration without conviction, selective urgency in hearings, and routine deference to national security narratives have become familiar features of cases involving Muslim accused.
This is not the crude authoritarianism of emergency-era India. It is subtler, more efficient, and far more durable. Power is exercised through legal form, administrative process, and institutional inertia. Each individual action appears lawful; the cumulative effect is deeply unjust.
What emerges is a legalised marginalisation—a system where rights formally exist but are unevenly enforced, and where citizenship itself is graded by political utility. In such a framework, Muslims are not targeted because they oppose the ruling party; they are targeted because their opposition no longer alters political outcomes.
What this moment ultimately demands from India’s Muslims is not withdrawal, but realism. When political power offers neither protection nor partnership, survival depends on internal resilience. The community must invest deliberately in managing its own affairs—education, legal aid, documentation support, welfare mechanisms, and economic networks—without assuming timely or fair governmental assistance. This is not a rejection of the state, but an acknowledgment of present constraints. History shows that communities that build robust internal systems are better positioned to withstand periods of exclusion and to re-engage when democratic conditions improve. Self-reliance, civic discipline, and institutional strength within the community are no longer optional; they are essential.
Indian democracy is not collapsing. It is being recalibrated. Whether this recalibration remains reversible will depend on how institutions respond—and how prepared excluded communities are to endure, organise, and reclaim equal citizenship when political conditions finally shift.
