A Kashmiri MP's Case for a Muslim Political Philosophy

Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi, the Srinagar Member of Parliament, returned to the Nous Podcast for a second long conversation with host Ali Javed that ranged from constitutional theory to foreign policy, but kept circling back to a single provocation: that India's Muslims, after seventy-odd years as a political community, still lack anything resembling a considered political philosophy, and that this absence, more than Hindutva's hostility, is the deeper crisis.

A Uniquely Difficult Moment to Enter National Politics

Mehdi described his year and a half in Parliament as, paradoxically, an ideal time to have entered national politics, precisely because the scale of the crisis facing Kashmiris, Muslims and India's constitutional order more broadly has forced a reckoning that calmer times would not have demanded. He was insistent that he does not practise "identity politics" and resists being cast solely as a spokesman for Kashmiri or Muslim grievance, even though the current moment requires he speak to exactly those issues. His broader claim was diagnostic: seventy years after independence, India's founding promise is being tested, and the outcome of the current moment will reveal, in his words, the "character" of Indian Muslims as much as it exposes the character of Hindutva.

He was careful to distinguish this project from a narrow sectarian one. His own political horizon, he said, extends beyond Kashmir and beyond Muslims to a broader ambition of re-imagining India along the lines its founders originally intended, before that vision was placed in doubt. But because Muslims and other minorities are currently bearing the sharpest edge of what he called state aggression, addressing their situation has become, in his words, unavoidable rather than a matter of preference.

Reactive Politics, Missing Philosophy

Mehdi's sharpest self-criticism was directed inward. Muslim political engagement in India, he argued, has almost never been proactive. It responds to lynchings, to the Waqf Amendment Act, to bulldozer demolitions, to bans on loudspeakers or beef, but has never built a comprehensive political philosophy capable of answering the right wing's foundational claim, one voiced by the RSS and BJP alike, that Muslims are simply incompatible with Indian society and, by extension, with any society they inhabit. "I have not seen anyone engage with this," he said, arguing that no political or academic work has been done to refute that claim with clarity and conviction — leaving Muslim politics permanently on the back foot, arguing about meat, clothing and loudspeakers while the larger accusation goes unanswered. Since Maulana Azad, he suggested, no one has seriously attempted to translate Quranic principles into a modern political philosophy adequate to India's specific constitutional and pluralistic conditions.

The Constitution as a Contract

The philosophical core of Mehdi's argument treats the Indian Constitution as a literal contract, agreed upon by every community and identity present in 1947, including Hindu nationalists who were represented in the Constituent Assembly and had every opportunity to insist on a religiously defined state but chose not to. That contract, in his account, promised equal citizenship to every group — Muslim, Sikh, Dravidian, Bengali, Kashmiri — in exchange for their consent to remain part of a shared Indian nation rather than pursuing separate paths, as one part of prior undivided India in fact did. Kashmir's accession, the outreach to princely states, the integration of the south and northeast: all of it, Mehdi argued, was secured on the promise of pluralism, equal rights and constitutional protection, not on any claim of Hindu supremacy.

It is the RSS and BJP's Hindutva project, not "Hinduism" or "Sanatan Dharma" as broader traditions, that he accuses of unilaterally tearing up that contract seventy years later — instituting what he called a de facto, if not officially declared, Hindu Rashtra built on the supremacy of one caste and religion, a project he explicitly compared to Nazi ideology in its aspiration to entrench one group's authority while diluting the rights of everyone else. Had this intention been disclosed in 1947, he argued, many Hindus as well as Muslims and other regions might have made different choices about joining the Indian union at all; the current claim to reshape the country's basic character decades after consolidating control amounts, in his framing, to a bait-and-switch played on the entire population, not on Muslims alone.

A Challenge to Secular Parties, Not Just the Right

Mehdi was almost as critical of India's secular and opposition parties as of the BJP. Their fundamental error, he argued, has been practising identity politics of their own — courting Muslim votes as Muslims, or courting Hindu votes as Hindus — rather than anchoring their politics in constitutional principle. He cited the reopening of the locked Babri Masjid site shortly after the Shah Bano judgment as a textbook case of Congress compromising constitutional consistency to manage communal vote-bank anxieties, a pattern of dilution he said runs through decades of federal overreach, including the repeated use of governors and President's Rule to unseat inconvenient state governments, of which he considers Kashmir the "ultimate victim."

His demand of secular parties was narrower than commonly assumed: not that they defend Muslims specifically, but that they defend the Constitution's spirit consistently, for everyone. "I will not ask them to stand up for Muslims," he said, arguing instead that parties should organise politics around federalism, cultural and linguistic protections, and functional democracy — an agenda in which "there is neither Muslim identity nor Hindu identity," but which would, if pursued honestly, protect both. If Congress, the DMK, the Samajwadi Party, Trinamool and others returned to this constitutional register instead of chasing communities, he argued, much of the current confusion would resolve itself, and the vacuum that right-wing politics has filled over decades of principled dilution would close.

Ummah, Not Nation-State

Mehdi's most distinctive argument was theological. He rejected the idea that the Quran addresses Muslims as members of a nation-state at all, arguing instead that it addresses them as part of a universal ethical community, the ummah, comparable to alumni of a shared moral university: wherever a graduate of that university lives and works, in government, business, or any sector of any country, their obligation is to be the best possible citizen of wherever they are, adding value rather than staking a competing claim to territorial loyalty. He grounded this in the Quranic phrase "kuntum khayra ummatin ukhrijat li'n-nas" — "you are the best community brought forth for humanity" — arguing the verse addresses humanity as a whole, not a state.

From this he derived what he called two guiding jurisprudential principles for Muslim political conduct: first, that peace should be established wherever others initiate it, regardless of whether they are Muslim; second, that promises and contracts, including the constitutional promises of citizenship, must be honoured absolutely, since the Quran holds believers accountable for broken pledges not only in courts of law but "in the hereafter." A third principle, drawn from an oft-cited line attributed to Imam Ali — that the foundation of any state is justice — led him to argue that Islam prioritises substance over label: a system delivering justice under a secular or even non-Muslim label is preferable, in his reading, to a nominally Islamic state that fails to deliver it.

Answering the "Double Standard" Charge

Mehdi anticipated and took on directly a common right-wing rhetorical challenge: why do Muslims demand secular democracy in India while several Muslim-majority states operate as theocracies. His response had two parts. First, he noted that governance models like Iran's doctrine of clerical guardianship are themselves contested and debated within Shia jurisprudence, not universally accepted even among Muslim scholars, so the premise that "Muslims" uniformly prefer theocracy is false on its own terms. Second, and more fundamentally, he argued that his own political obligations are bound by the specific contract he lives under: as an Indian citizen he can work to establish equal citizenship in India because he is party to that political community, but he has no comparable standing to reshape Iran's or Saudi Arabia's internal arrangements, just as an Indian labourer who spends decades building infrastructure in the Gulf is never granted equal citizenship there despite the sweat invested. He was explicit that he personally opposes restrictions on equal citizenship wherever they occur, including in Muslim-majority states, but distinguished between contesting a "demerit" and being obligated to own it.

Solidarity Without Borders, Loyalty Without Confusion

Mehdi extended this into a broader account of how Indian Muslims should relate to global Muslim causes such as Gaza and Iran without triggering the "divided loyalty" accusation the right wing routinely levels at them. His argument was that solidarity flows not from shared religious label but from shared human "fitrah" — an innate moral essence the Quran describes as universal, present in Muslim and non-Muslim alike — which is why, he observed, protesters in Europe outnumbered those in several Muslim-majority states after the war in Gaza, and why non-Muslims mobilised alongside Muslims after strikes on Iran: people were responding to visible oppression and courage, not converting overnight to a shared faith. On the same logic, he argued Muslims bear equal responsibility to condemn atrocities committed by Muslims against religious minorities, citing attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh as something he considers "worse than terrorism" and equally deserving of Muslim condemnation and solidarity with the victims.

A Foreign Policy Verdict

Mehdi reserved some of his most pointed criticism for India's foreign policy realignment toward Israel and Washington, arguing it damages India's interests independent of any Muslim grievance. He pointed to the scale of India's economic entanglement with the Gulf and the wider Muslim world — roughly thirty percent of the workforce in the UAE being Indian, remittances and trade running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and near-total dependence on Gulf energy imports — against a comparatively marginal trade relationship with Israel skewed toward Indian imports. Betting regional and energy security on an ideological alignment with the Netanyahu government, he argued, "makes no sense" in narrow material terms, let alone moral ones, and marks a retreat from the moral leadership that once gave India outsized global standing despite lacking major military or per-capita economic power. He argued that India's silence after strikes on Iran, and its visit to Israel just two days before that attack, reflected a loss of both regional and global independence — one he linked directly to an ideological convergence between Hindutva and Zionism as parallel projects of ethnic and religious supremacy.

Internal Reform Before External Engagement

Mehdi's closing argument returned to his opening premise: before Indian Muslims can credibly engage the right wing, or even negotiate terms with secular parties, they need to complete an internal reckoning — jettisoning any residual notion that Islamic law must be implemented identically to seventh-century Medina, engaging the Quran's foundational principles rather than reactive grievance politics, and building the "fiqh al-siyasat," or Islamic political jurisprudence, appropriate to a minority operating within a pluralist constitutional democracy, a project he compared to the Meccan rather than Medinan phase of Islamic political thought: intellectual foundation-laying rather than state administration. Only once that internal clarity exists, he argued, can Indian Muslims offer what he believes could be a genuinely original contribution to global Islamic thought — a jurisprudence of pluralism forged by living amid more religious, linguistic and cultural diversity than almost any Muslim-majority society has had to reckon with, and, he suggested, a model global Muslim discourse badly needs.