Himal Interviews: Indian Muslims’ marginalisation and the myth of appeasement
In June 2025, Himal Southasian launched a podcast series titled Partitions of the Heart in collaboration with Karwan-e-Mohabbat, hosted by the peace activist Harsh Mander. The inaugural season, called ‘Muslim Life – and Death – in Modi’s India’, focuses on the deepening crisis of Muslims in the country. Since 2017, Mander and Karwan-e-Mohabbat have done the extraordinary and difficult work of documenting a rising wave of hate and crimes against India’s Muslims, and of lending support and solidarity to victims of communal atrocities. In Mander’s words, “We live in deeply troubled times of visceral, everyday hate, violence, fear and division. The first step towards healing our growing fractures is to talk and listen to each other.”
This series is part of the effort to bring forward meaningful conversations on the increasing marginalisation and vilification of Muslims in India. In the season’s first episode, Mander spoke to Hilal Ahmed, an academic and writer about his positionality as a practising Muslim and as a scholar looking at Muslim lives and the Muslim experience.
This interview was recorded on 27 February 2025. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You can listen to audio versions of this conversation on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Glossary:
NITI Aayog: The top policy think tank of the government of India
Sachar committee: A high-level committee headed by Justice Rajendra Sachar and constituted in 2005 by Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister at the time, to examine the social, economic and educational status of Muslims in the country
Kaka Kalelkar commission: India’s first backward classes commission established in 1953 to determine criteria for socially and educationally backward groups.
SC, ST, OBC: Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes are demographic categories in India of groups that have been historically discriminated against and marginalised, and therefore identified for affirmative action.
Hela caste: The Hela Mehtar are Muslim converts of the Hindu Hela caste and have been categorised as an Other Backward Class (OBC)
Bhangi or Valmiki: A Dalit community categorised as a Scheduled Caste group in India
Triple-talaq: In 2019, India’s government criminalised triple-talaq – the practice which allowed a Muslim man to divorce his wife by saying “talaq” three times – making it a non-bailable offence with three years imprisonment. A major criticism of the move was that criminalising the civil law was a way of targeting the Muslim community
Khadi: the hand-spun cloth that was intrinsic to Congress philosophy and therefore worn by many party members