Himal Interviews: The threat to Muslims is a crisis for India’s democracy

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 this conversation with Harsh Mander, the legal academic Mohsin Alam says that the crisis of Indian Muslims – which is about safety, integration, and citizenship – is tied to the crisis of Indian democracy. How the Indian state and society treats with its weaker populations, including religious minorities, will determine whether India remains a democracy.

This interview was recorded on 6 March 2025. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

You can listen to audio versions of this conversation on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Harsh Mander

My guest today is Mohsin Alam, whom I’ve known and had enormous affection for and much admiration for many years. Mohsin is at present teaching law in the Queen Mary’s College in the University of London. He does much else and some of that will emerge from our conversation today. Mohsin, let’s leap right in. You’re working with Christophe Jaffrelot and many others on a project called the Muslims of India. So, I thought, let’s sort of take a broad view and then we’ll come into specific things that we might want to discuss. Is there a crisis among India’s Muslims? How deep is this crisis? What is the nature of this crisis? What has brought us to this point in the journey of India’s Republic? How far have we strayed from the promises of the freedom struggle under Gandhiji? So, just that broad picture, what would you like to say?

Mohsin Alam 

That is a very big, important and broad question. I think it might be useful to sort of just separate out the different dimensions of the crisis. But to start with, of course, this is a massive crisis. In many ways, I think it is an existential crisis. 

HM 

But existential for India’s Muslims or existential for India itself? 

MA

Both. 

HM

For both.