The political erasure of Indian Muslims

INDIA IS HOME to 200 million Muslim people. More Muslims live here than in any other country in the world barring Indonesia and Pakistan. 

Yet in 2023, the country’s ruling party – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), controlling a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament and governing, either alone or in coalition, in 15 of the country’s 36 states and Union Territories – had an almost complete absence of Muslim representation, to an extent never seen since India’s first general election as an independent nation in 1952. The party had no elected Muslim member in either chamber of the parliament, or in all but one state legislative assembly. Its only elected Muslim legislator was in Tripura, the sole exception among the party’s 1657 legislators across all states, and in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the parliament, it counted only a single Muslim representative, in a nominated seat. And, for the first time since India won its freedom, there was not a single Muslim minister in the national cabinet.