Reserving the Majority
Mohsin Alam Bhat
“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.
Introduction
In April 2024, as India entered the final phase of its general elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a rally in Aligarh and accused opposition parties of having “marginalized Pasmanda Muslims.” These communities, he insisted, had been ignored by “secular parties” and “must be given opportunities.”
The reference was striking. Pasmanda—literally “those left behind”—is a term long used by activists to describe socially and economically marginalized Muslim caste groups, and to critique both Muslim elite leadership and the Indian state’s failure to recognize caste-based disadvantage beyond Hindu society. Modi’s invocation signaled an apparent turn: an avowedly Hindu-nationalist party speaking the language of Muslim social justice.
This rhetorical embrace, however, sits uneasily alongside the material trajectory of the Modi government’s policies.
Even as Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claim to uplift Pasmanda Muslims, the party has overseen the systematic erosion of the mechanisms through which Pasmanda groups have historically accessed education and public employment. Muslim sub-quotas have been abolished, Muslim inclusion in Other Backward Classes (OBC) lists has been aggressively challenged, and affirmative action has been reframed as a scarce entitlement to be defended against minority ‘encroachment.’
The gap between (ostensible) recognition and redistribution is not incidental.
This contradiction reveals something more consequential than electoral opportunism. It exposes how contemporary ethnic majoritarian authoritarianism governs ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ identities through the language and institutions of social justice.
This essay shows how Hindutva statecraft governs minorities not only through overt exclusion or repression, but also through more subtle forms of legal re-engineering. Rather than abandoning constitutional norms of equality, it reworks them—vulgarizing older constitutional commitments, hollowing out their universalist promise, and redeploying them to reorganize the very meaning of majority and minority citizenship. Pasmanda politics is a key battleground for this maneuver.
In this process, minorities are constructed and rendered hyper-visible as political problems while being stripped of their voice as rights-bearing citizens. Social justice itself becomes a technology of rule, and the Constitution a medium through which majoritarian power is reproduced.
Pasmanda Politics and the Constitutional Grammar of Difference
Beginning in the 1990s, Pasmanda activists and intellectuals articulated claims on behalf of marginalized Muslim communities, drawing attention to everyday experiences of violence, exclusion, and severe under-representation in political and governance institutions. Central to these claims was the exposure of practices of caste hierarchy—often articulated through idioms of purity and pollution—within Muslim social life.
At one level, this critique was directed inward. Pasmanda activists exposed the dominance of ashraf—higher-status Muslim communities—in institutions that claimed to represent ‘the Muslim community,’ from waqf boards and minority commissions to party tickets distributed by secular political formations. Leaders such as Ali Anwar documented how Muslim political representation, even within ostensibly secular coalitions, was monopolized by elite families and biradaris, while the everyday material concerns of backward-caste Muslims were sidelined.
But the more radical edge of Pasmanda politics lay in its challenge to how the Indian state organized equality.
Postcolonial constitutionalism in India had stabilized a division between two normative projects: Caste disadvantage was addressed through reservations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and later OBCs. These categories were implicitly imagined as Hindu. Religious difference, by contrast, was managed through minority rights centered on culture, language, and religious autonomy.
The Pasmanda movement questioned this division. It argued that the Indian constitutional order had misrecognized Muslim disadvantage. This misrecognition, Pasmanda activists insisted, obscured the lived realities of laboring, artisanal, and service communities who constituted the majority of Indian Muslims but remained politically invisible. Caste stratification, they argued, exceeded religious boundaries and could not be contained within a framework of religious difference alone.
Pasmanda activists thus sought to secularize caste itself—reframing it as a structure of inherited hierarchy rooted in occupation, stigma, and social exclusion rather than theology.
This critique normatively destabilized legal ordering. It revealed how India’s constitutional framework meant that caste was visible only when it aligned with a “Hindu” social imaginary, allowing the language of minority protection to function as a substitute for substantive equality—offering cultural recognition in place of material justice.
Viewed through the Pasmanda lens, constitutional scripts of social justice had produced a fractured conception of justice. These scripts constituted the identities of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ and the hierarchy between them: “Hindu/majority” disadvantage warranting redistribution, and “Muslim/minority” disadvantage relegated to symbolic accommodation.
These claims were reflected most forcefully in Pasmanda campaigns like Mission 341, led by figures like Ejaz Ali, which directly confronted the constitutional exclusion of Dalit Muslims from Scheduled Caste status under the 1950 Presidential Order.
Pasmanda critique also destabilized the political ordering of identities. If caste hierarchy is a trans-religious structure of domination, then the normative basis—and democratic legitimacy—of politics lies in solidarities forged across religious boundaries against social hierarchy. This implied a political reimagining of the majority–minority distinction itself, conceiving of a marginalized Pasmanda majority—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian—whose shared subordination demanded a different grammar of democratic politics.
These claims, however, have met with mixed success. While Muslim and Christian communities have been variably included in OBC lists following the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations in the early 1990s, they continue to be excluded from the Scheduled Castes category, where the most robust forms of constitutional protection and redistribution are concentrated.
Hindutva Statecraft and Pasmanda Politics
Since around 2022, the BJP has sought to engage Pasmanda Muslims more visibly during electoral campaigns through PM Modi’s repeated references to Pasmanda exclusion and the organization of Pasmanda sammelans in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. These gestures, however, are cosmetic. The BJP fielded very few Muslim candidates in either state or national elections, and most of those came from ashraf rather than Pasmanda backgrounds. In the 2024 general elections, for instance, it fielded only one Muslim candidate, from Kerala.
Nevertheless, during and after the elections, the BJP consistently insisted that welfare benefits must reach Pasmanda Muslims directly and not be ‘cornered’ by upper-caste Muslim elites.
These proclivities are inseparable from a wider political–economic shift over the past two decades, during which social policy in India has been reshaped by neoliberal logics of efficiency, fiscal discipline, and technological delivery. Distributive justice, once imagined as a collective political project, is now mediated through individualized, means-tested benefits—ration cards, housing subsidies, token scholarships—that produce subjects of welfare rather than citizens with rights.
Hindutva statecraft fuses this governance model with its majoritarian ideology. Pasmanda Muslims are acknowledged not as political agents entitled to remake the constitutional order, but as economic subjects to be managed and pacified. Their expansive claims for representation and justice are displaced by emaciated forms of targeted relief, designed precisely to foreclose structural critique.
The normative horizon of Pasmanda politics, which once sought to democratize Muslim leadership and transform India’s constitutional understanding of caste, has thus been reduced to an anodyne discourse of ‘opportunity.’
Hindutva statecraft cannot embrace the radical implications of Pasmanda thought.
To recognize Pasmanda claims that caste is a trans-religious structure of marginalization would destabilize Hindutva on two fronts. First, it would expose Hindu majoritarianism to the full force of Dalit and OBC critiques, drawing in a wider and more compelling set of stakeholders who demand a reckoning with social hierarchy. Second, it would dissolve the Hindu–Muslim binary by foregrounding caste—encoding stigma, precarity, and subordination—as the deeper fracture defining India’s social condition, unsettling the BJP’s effort to consolidate a ‘Hindu majority’ by portraying Muslims as a privileged minority.
Perforce, Hindutva governance operates through a dual logic of hyper-visibility and hyper-erasure. Pasmanda identity is rendered selectively hyper-visible as an electoral trope—useful insofar as it weakens Muslim elites and constructs a ‘Hindu majority’—but silenced the moment it threatens to recover an egalitarian future that transcends religious boundaries.
Hindutva Reworking of Social Justice
Another crucial site of this move is the constitutional practice of social justice itself. Law provides not only the framing of, but also the institutional apparatus through which Hindutva’s vision of reinforced religious majority–minority distinctions is enacted—most notably by constitutionalizing suspicion.
This dynamic is starkly illustrated by the Calcutta High Court’s April 2024 decision in Amal Chandra Das v West Bengal, which struck down the inclusion of seventy-seven Muslim communities in West Bengal’s OBC list just before the elections. The ruling invalidated nearly half a million caste certificates and cast immediate uncertainty over the affected people’s access to education, employment, and welfare.
The juridical underpinnings of this decision were constituted through careful political work.
PM Modi and other BJP functionaries repeatedly alleged that West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress government was “snatching” reservations from Hindu Dalits and OBCs and handing them to Muslims for political gain. Such rhetoric reframed affirmative action as a zero-sum Hindu entitlement and re-coded Muslim participation as theft. Drawing selectively on Pasmanda rhetoric, this discourse framed Muslim poverty as politically manufactured.
The inversion was striking: Muslims were recast not as disadvantaged citizens seeking justice, but as interlopers pilfering benefits from “genuine” Hindu claimants.
This framing increasingly took bureaucratic shape. Interventions by the chairperson of the National Commission for Backward Classes questioned the scale of Muslim inclusion in West Bengal’s OBC lists—118 of the 179 notified communities were Muslim—and insinuated large-scale fraud. These interventions suggested that Muslim OBC status had been shaped by the infiltration of “Bangladeshi immigrants,” accusing state authorities of depriving “actual beneficiaries.”
Muslim backwardness was thus not evaluated through social or economic evidence, but through suspicion—linked to allegations of political manipulation, demographic anxiety, and illegal migration.
The Calcutta High Court in Amal Chandra Das constitutionalized this suspicion. It declared that the West Bengal government had granted reservations “on the sole criterion of religion,” bypassing the statutory Backward Classes Commission and thereby committing what the bench described as “a fraud on the constitutional power of the State.”
The court’s language was sweeping and unusually severe. It stated that “this Court’s mind is not free from doubt that the said community has been treated as a commodity for political ends,” and concluded that such reservations constituted “an affront to Democracy and the Constitution of India as a whole.”
Subordinated Muslim communities were thus depicted as instruments of political opportunism. Reports documenting Muslim disadvantage—such as the Sachar and Misra Committees—were dismissed not as imperfect evidence but as normatively suspect artifacts. The judgment did not merely demand better data or procedure; it cast doubt on the very possibility that Muslims could legitimately qualify as socially and educationally backward. In this process, suspicion emerged as a governing sensibility—translated from political accusation into legal reason, and experienced by minorities as a condition of citizenship itself.
This episode reflects the deeper unfolding of the Hindutva project: the transformation of India’s constitutional grammar of social justice through the Hinduization—or saffronization—of the reservation regime. It marks an ideological reconfiguration in which reservations are no longer understood as a universal constitutional response to structural hierarchy, but as a Hindu social contract—a mechanism of intra-Hindu reconciliation.
This project has gained increasing resonance within Hindutva thought. The Constitution is increasingly framed as a civilizational text rooted in Hindu traditions, with reservations recast as a duty that privileged Hindu castes owe to their Hindu counterparts. Muslims and Christians, by this logic, fall outside the historical bargain; their claims to inclusion appear as opportunistic demands rather than entitlements grounded in shared experiences of caste subordination.
Guru Prakash Paswan, a Dalit academic and BJP spokesperson, captures this emerging view with unusual clarity:
There is a constitutional basis and a history of social marginalisation that provides a moral justification for reservation for SCs, STs and the OBCs. [There was a] widespread presence of a Muslim aristocracy. They were connoisseurs of art and culture and there have been robust sources of social capital and networks within the community. Dalits remain largely landless… It is difficult to find the logic behind the accommodation of Muslims in the quota meant for socially backward communities… this goes against the fundamental spirit of the Constitution of India.
This reasoning reflects a dual move. First, it draws a clear conceptual boundary between Muslims (and, by implication, other religious minorities) and subordinated caste communities: Muslims cannot be Dalits, and Muslim disadvantage can be framed only in religious—not caste or socio-economic—terms. Second, it redefines the remediation of caste subordination as an exclusively intra-Hindu project.
Saffronized social justice also performs political work for Hindutva by resolving a core contradiction within its politics, which are defined by upper-caste interests and leadership and deep ambivalence—if not outright opposition—towards caste-based reservations. Through the saffronization of social justice, Hindutva actors domesticate Mandal politics. They appear to accommodate Dalit and OBC aspirations by weaponizing Muslim identity as a foil. When critics warn that the BJP may dismantle caste-based reservations—as they did during the 2024 elections—party leaders respond by claiming that Muslim “encroachments,” facilitated by opposition parties, pose the real threat to subordinated Hindu communities.
Hindutva statecraft thus rehabilitates its image among subordinated castes while preserving upper-caste dominance, converting caste-based affirmative action into an intra-Hindu compact and rejecting minority claims as illegitimate.
In doing so, constitutional practice becomes a site for entrenching majority–minority distinctions. Social justice is no longer understood as a constitutional commitment to dismantling hierarchy; it is recast as a mechanism for defining the boundaries of and politically consolidating the Hindu majority.
The Agility of Majoritarian Domination
This story of Hindutva statecraft reveals how majoritarianism operates not only through spectacular or visible violence, but also through more durable forms of governance. Its work lies in demarcating, consolidating, and normalizing majority–minority distinctions, embedding them in everyday life and—most strikingly—within the ostensibly progressive scripts of constitutional social justice itself.
Hindutva majoritarianism is not fixed but dynamic: capable of shape-shifting, absorbing critique, and re-engineering itself while preserving entrenched hierarchies. Its engagement with Pasmanda politics illustrates this adaptability with particular clarity. Minority identities can be simultaneously co-opted, reconstructed, and rendered hyper-visible for strategic ends, yet made politically inert or invisible the moment they threaten to unsettle the majoritarian order.
The implications for Indian constitutional discourse are troubling. Hindutva exhibits an agile capacity to reshape the constitutional project from within—recasting social justice as a majoritarian compact that selectively incorporates subordinated Hindu groups while relegating others to the status of governed subjects, excluded from the constitutional imagination of justice.
At the same time, this trajectory invites a different response: a renewed investment in insurgent constitutional politics aimed at reordering the legal and political landscape. This aspiration has animated, and continues to animate, the most radical possibilities within the Pasmanda tradition.
Dr. Mohsin Alam Bhat is a Senior Lecturer in Law (Associate Professor) at Queen Mary University of London. He writes on constitutional politics, democratic decline, and minority citizenship in comparative perspective. He is closely associated with several human rights and civil society initiatives, including Parichay Legal Aid Clinic and “Article 14”, a collaborative media platform on law and democracy in India. His co-edited volume on Muslims in India under Hindutva rule is forthcoming with Hurst in 2026.
Thumbnail credit: "BJP supporters" by Al Jazeera English is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.