India is a country of incredible religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. Muslims form an important part of that mosaic which would be incomplete without them. Muslim communities themselves are ‘diverse, with differences in language, ethnicity, and access to political and economic power’. But, lately, they have faced discrimination regardless of their internal differences in employment, education and housing. Many lack access to health care and basic services. Above all, they often struggle to secure justice despite constitutional protections and equal citizenship guarantees.
The ruling party, its politics
In general, Muslims are under-represented in public institutions and representative bodies in India. While there have been improvements in the representation of most groups, for example, the percentage of backward caste Members of Parliament in the Hindi belt had nearly doubled from 11% in 1984 to more than 20% in the 1990s, Muslims continued to be under-represented in relation to the general population. Upper castes remain the most over-represented in the Lok Sabha with nearly 29% and Other Backward Classes 22% in 2019. Most importantly, there will be no Muslim Member of Parliament in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when the terms of three of its Muslim MPs in the Rajya Sabha ends in July. It did not nominate any Muslim member to the Rajya Sabha in the recently concluded elections to the Upper House to recompense for their absence in the party contingent in the Lok Sabha. This marks an unprecedented moment in the history of our democracy as for the first time the ruling party will have no Members of Parliament from the largest minority in the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha, signalling their distance from political power and curtailing their opportunities of getting heard where it matters.
