In 1992, when film historian Richard Schickel, at the behest of the Academy Awards committee, produced a montage based on Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s film clips, he was forced to request footage from the British Broadcasting Corporation and Channel 4 in the UK, as America had none.

Was Ray’s work already a passé “relic of a bygone” or was the presence of universalism—a distinct marker of Ray’s cinema—improbable for the times?

Any discussion on Muslim politics in contemporary India would remain entirely meaningless if two popular, and in a way, conflicting meanings of the term political representation were not taken into consideration. In a more general sense, Muslim representation is evoked as a normative ideal. It is argued that the adequate presence of Muslim MPs and MLAs in legislative bodies ensures the smooth and effective functioning of democratic polity.

Muslims in India are presently enduring a seemingly endless cascade of hate, violence, harassment, and demonization. While studying the ongoing struggle of Indian Muslims, there is a tendency to fall into one of two traps: victimization or romanticization. While the former renders Muslims devoid of all agency, the latter puts a sheen of glorification on what is hardly a winning battle. The reality lies somewhere in the middle.

The demolition of alleged unauthorized properties in the “Muslim-dominated” quarters of Jahangirpuri (New Delhi), Khargone (Madhya Pradesh), and Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) by government authorities underlines the nature of administrative discourse toward Muslim identity and space in contemporary India. While Muslim space has always been a contested category in the realm of official administrative discourse, this new bulldozer politics is a relatively new phenomenon.

In 2018, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi addressed a media conclave and outlined the reasons behind the party’s drubbing in the 2014 elections.

While framing the Constitution of India, 29 members of the Constituent Assembly participated in the debate over two days to articulate the provisions relating to the rights of religious and linguistic minorities, a part of the Fundamental Rights in the Constitution of India. Under Article 29, the rights are available to “conserve” distinct language, script, or culture.

Indian secularism has been loftily conceived as sarva dharma samabhava (or equal respect for all religions), which places it somewhat at variance with its Western counterpart. Its key principle has been adumbrated by Dr.