Can Indian Muslims be represented only by Muslim leaders?

Do Muslims need to be represented only by Muslims? This provocative question is usually overlooked to make a few sweeping generalisations about ever-declining numbers of Muslim MPs and MLAs in legislative bodies. Popular journalistic writing on this subject tends to focus entirely on the exact number of Muslim legislators to highlight the political marginalisation of Muslims in India.

Scholarly works, on the other hand, rely heavily on statistical data to prove Muslim underrepresentation, simply to substantiate an outdated understanding of “descriptive representation,” which is the idea that legislative bodies ought to represent the socio-religious diversity of the nation so as acquire a “mirror image”.

These arguments, more broadly, stem from a conventional thesis, which claims that the collective interests of a homogeneous Muslim community can only be protected by Muslim legislatures. To move beyond this simplistic idea, we need to raise three fundamental issues: the constitution of Muslims as a political community; imagination of a set of collective Muslim interests; and the expected role of Muslim leaders (or legislatures in a formal sense) in safe-guarding these interests.

Community identity

In my recent book, A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (Penguin-Random House, 2024), I make an analytical distinction between “substantive Muslimness” and the “discourse of Muslimness”. “Substantive Muslimness” tries to capture the everyday experiences of...

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