South Asia Citizens Web

. . . one of the biggest dilemmas of the Pakistani State’s interpretation of religion and national identity. Given the immense emphasis on distinguishing themselves from Hindus, it has been hard to reconcile the ancestral heritage of a majority of the population. Therefore, history is often reinterpreted and several castes claim Arab, Persian or Afghan ancestry insteading of acknowledging their Indian roots. This was also the attitude adopted by the State when it took charge of the syncretic Sufi shrines.

PUDR investigated the aftermath of July 12, 2017, when Zohra Bibi, a domestic worker in Noida’s Mahagun Moderne, was severely beaten up and later went missing from her employer’s flat after allegations of theft were leveled against her. Subsequently, the local police, administration, Resident Welfare Association, as well as the MP and BJP minister Mahesh Sharma have been complicit in unleashing the combined might of the state machinery and the wrath of upper class residents in the violence, detention and deprivation of livelihoods of the protesting workers.

A picture, drawn with the utmost love and respect by a child, is not some kind of anti-state or subversive activity. It does not, in any conceivable way, cause anyone any kind of harm.

The ummah is at war with itself. What other way is there to describe the brutal bloodletting by Muslims of Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, and, of course, Pakistan.

The rise of Hindutva, particularly since the eighties, is paralleled by strenuous contemporaneous attempts by writers like Ayesha Jalal and H.M. Seervai to present a sanitized version of the politics of M.A. Jinnah. Such accounts have had an appreciable circulation. Some of the conceptual questions arising on the above basis and having implications for the notion of ‘minority’ and ‘minority politics’ are dealt with in this paper.