Liberty Over Equality: A New Case for How India's Muslim Question Was Made

A Question of Gifts

For decades, the story of Partition has been told as a story of what Muslims wanted and got: a homeland, carved out of a united India, that left the Muslims who stayed behind to fend for themselves in a Hindu-majority state. Javed Gaya, whose book reconstructs the making of what he calls majoritarian India, wants to invert that story. The real question, he argues, was never what the minority was owed. It was what the majority was prepared to give up.

"What was the majority willing to sacrifice to retain a united India?" Gaya asks. His answer is: almost nothing. Citing the British lawyer Sir Stafford Cripps, who told the Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee that safeguards for a minority are not something a minority can seize but something a majority must offer, Gaya insists the burden of proof in 1947 fell on the wrong side. Muslims were not the only community that sought some form of protection or exit — Sikhs and several princely states, including Kashmir and what is now Rajasthan, resisted joining the union too. But only the Muslim demand was allowed to define the settlement, and only Muslims were made to answer for it afterward.

This inversion sets up the book's governing idea: that India's constitutional order was built on a choice between liberty — the unrestrained right of any group to organise and vote as it pleases, including along religious lines — and equality, understood as the deliberate restraint of a majority so that a minority is not simply outvoted into irrelevance. Gaya's example of the stakes is blunt: when Uttar Pradesh's chief minister frames an election as a contest of "80 and 20" he is describing, quite precisely, liberty without restraint. A majority that faces no guardrails, Gaya says, produces not democracy but arithmetic — echoing a line he attributes to the British judge Jonathan Sumption, that a majority is, in the end, just a matter of numbers, not of legitimacy.

Who Actually Wanted Pakistan?

Gaya's revisionism is sharpest on the question of blame for Partition itself. He does not absolve Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whom he describes as a gambler who "gambled with his community" by betting everything on the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 — a scheme that would have kept India united under a loose federal structure with group safeguards, and which Jinnah, having no fallback, treated as his last real option. But Gaya's central claim, drawing on an older strand of legal scholarship that concluded Congress bore more responsibility for the final break than is usually admitted, is that it was Congress that torpedoed the plan, not the League that demanded Partition outright.

Why would Congress do this? Gaya offers two readings, one charitable and one not. The charitable version centres on Jawaharlal Nehru's near-Marxist faith in what Gaya calls "economic man": a belief that state-led industrialisation, modelled on Soviet central planning, would generate enough prosperity within a generation or two that religious and caste identity would simply fade into a shared civic nationalism. The less charitable version is that a federal settlement of the kind envisioned by the Cabinet Mission would have limited the very central planning apparatus Nehru wanted, and would have denied Congress the uncontested, near one-party dominance it went on to enjoy for three decades.

Either way, Gaya argues, a significant part of the Hindu political elite was not merely resigned to Partition — it welcomed it. He cites a recent book, written from within the Hindu right, that frames Partition itself as a gift Jinnah handed to Hindus by removing the Muslim question from politics altogether. That, Gaya says, is the poison at the root of everything that followed: the idea that Partition discharged India's obligations to its Muslims once and for all, so that nothing further need ever be conceded to them.

Uttar Pradesh's Wounded Pride

If Partition set the terms, Gaya locates the engine room of majoritarian politics specifically in Uttar Pradesh — not Maharashtra, where the RSS was founded, nor Bengal, with its own communal history, but the old United Provinces, whose social composition made it uniquely suited to the project. Brahmins made up roughly twelve percent of the state's population, an unusually high concentration compared with Bihar or Tamil Nadu, alongside a substantial merchant caste and a landed Kshatriya elite. That combination, Gaya argues, produced both the appetite and the capacity to fuse caste hierarchy with religious mobilisation, absorbing lower castes as allies against a common Muslim other — a strategy in which cow slaughter became a deliberately chosen wedge issue.

What strikes Gaya most, researching the book, was how much of this was about wounded cultural pride rather than material grievance. Urdu, spoken across religious lines as part of a shared north Indian tehzeeb, was pushed out of Uttar Pradesh's schools in the 1950s in a way it never was in Maharashtra. The state pressed for a Sanskritised Hindi and the Nagari script; even Arabic numerals, used everywhere in India then as now, drew objections purely because of their Islamic association. Gaya reads this as a project of erasure aimed at a composite Indo-Muslim culture — in food, dress, language — that much of the Hindu elite in Uttar Pradesh experienced as humiliating precisely because it had been so thoroughly, and pleasurably, adopted by everyone.

The Political Economy Behind the Piety

Gaya, who describes his own politics as broadly socialist, is unwilling to let the usual economic story of Indian stagnation stand unchallenged. The familiar accusation is that Nehruvian planning strangled growth. His counter-argument is that the real culprit was the cow belt's own elite — and specifically two features of the tax system that a government-appointed committee reviewing direct taxes in the early 1970s effectively called a scam.

The first was the Hindu Undivided Family, a unique legal category that let India's mercantile families, the Marwari business houses that bankrolled the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh among them, shelter wealth from income and wealth tax by taxing family units rather than individuals. The second was a blanket, uncapped exemption from tax on agricultural income, which let large landholders in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — the beneficiaries of only partial, weakly enforced land reform — escape taxation altogether. Between the two, Gaya argues, the cow belt's elite, Hindu and Muslim landholders alike, had every incentive to keep the state poor and uninterested in public goods.

The contrast he draws is with Tamil Nadu, where Chief Minister K. Kamaraj's midday meal scheme in the 1950s used state resources to get children into school and improve their nutrition — a policy choice, not an accident of planning models. Uttar Pradesh's social indicators, by comparison, have remained dismal for seventy years. Gaya dismisses the standard blame placed on Nehruvian planners, calling it, in his words, "just frankly a distraction," and insists that what actually captured Uttar Pradesh's politics from the 1980s onward was not an ideological battle between left and right but a shift toward temple disputes, cow protection and anxieties about religious conversion — issues that cost the state's elite nothing and mobilised everything.

Pseudo-Secularism

This is the term Gaya uses for what Congress built instead of genuine equality. Postwar secularism, he explains, was originally sold as a unifying force meant to erase communal difference altogether, folding everyone into a shared, quasi-scientific civic identity that had no need for religion or superstition. In principle this looked neutral. In practice, Gaya argues, it operated asymmetrically: it discounted minority religious sentiment while leaving majority caste and communal structures largely intact.

The clearest evidence, in his reading, is what kind of group rights the Indian state has actually been willing to extend. Reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, later extended to Other Backward Classes and, more recently, to economically weaker sections among upper castes, all operate as recognised group entitlements within the Hindu social order. Muslims, by contrast, have no equivalent recognition as a community — the one partial exception, Muslim personal law, is treated by the Hindu right as evidence of appeasement rather than as the meagre concession it actually is.

Gaya's account of the Uniform Civil Code debate reframes it entirely around this same asymmetry. The provision that eventually relegated the UCC to a mere directive principle rather than an enforceable right was championed, he notes, by Sardar Patel — a politician nobody could accuse of pandering to Muslims. Patel did it, Gaya argues, to protect the coparcenary property arrangements of the Hindu Undivided Family, since a genuine uniform code would have forced open the question of how Hindu joint-family wealth was divided. The controversy around Muslim personal law, in other words, has always been entangled with a much larger, largely unexamined web of Hindu personal-law protections that deliver real economic benefits to Hindu families.

The 1985 Shah Bano case, Gaya says, exposed a matching hypocrisy on the other side. While the Hindu right wept over one Muslim woman's maintenance case, Hindu women had no equal claim to ancestral family property until the law changed in 2005 — sixty years after independence. He points to B. R. Ambedkar's failed attempt, in 1951, to reform Hindu personal law and give daughters equal inheritance rights, an effort the Congress establishment itself blocked. Muslim personal law's obstinacy over Shah Bano, Gaya concedes, was a real failure of Muslim leadership — but it also handed the Hindu right, in his words, "the bone which they have been chewing on" ever since.

A Constitution Built to Bend

Gaya's account does not stop at ideology and political economy; he traces the same imbalance into the structure of the constitution itself. India inherited the Westminster model's dependence on unwritten convention rather than hard checks and balances — an upper house, the Rajya Sabha, that functions mainly as a retirement home for the politically useful rather than as a genuine check on the lower house, unlike the American Senate. Conventions of restraint assume a shared code of conduct among "gentlemen," Gaya notes dryly, which sits awkwardly with legislatures where a majority of members, by some counts, face criminal charges.

The instruments of central overreach, in his account, have always been available and have simply been used more aggressively of late: Article 356, permitting the dismissal of elected state governments; the practice of governors sitting indefinitely on state legislation, which he says has become routine wherever an opposition party governs; and Article 3, which lets the Union redraw state boundaries, a power originally used to create linguistic states but equally capable of unmaking them. He cites the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta's warning that India risks becoming not a union of states but "a union of union states" — a bureaucratic euphemism for the slow death of federalism, exemplified by Kashmir's now-prolonged period under central rule.

Even public opinion, Gaya suggests, offers little resistance. He cites survey findings suggesting a striking majority of India's middle class expresses comfort with military or authoritarian rule — a preference, he argues, for a "great leader" who requires, and gets, an increasingly centralised polity impatient with opposition-run states.

Delimitation as the Cow Belt, Reborn

Gaya's final structural argument connects the 1940s debate over minority safeguards directly to today's fight over delimitation — the redrawing of parliamentary constituencies according to population. In the 1950s, a states reorganisation committee that included the scholar-diplomat K. M. Panikkar and Ambedkar himself considered splitting Uttar Pradesh into four linguistically coherent states. Ambedkar reportedly argued that leaving Uttar Pradesh undivided would pose an existential threat to Indian democracy. Govind Ballabh Pant, who chaired the process and who Gaya describes as a committed majoritarian, ensured it stayed whole — preserving, in one stroke, the demographic bloc that has anchored cow-belt politics ever since.

Delimitation, tying parliamentary seats more tightly to population growth, threatens to repeat the pattern at national scale, this time pitting the more populous, poorer north against a south that has both slowed its population growth and outperformed the north economically — the same southern states, Gaya notes, that already subsidise the north fiscally by a wide margin. The argument used against Muslims in the 1940s — that one man, one vote settles every question, and any deviation is undemocratic — is, in his view, exactly the argument now being redeployed against southern India. Representation, he insists, has never simply meant headcount; treating it as though it does is how majorities have historically justified overriding everyone else.

What Muslims Should Do Now

Gaya is notably cautious when the conversation turns from diagnosis to prescription. He resists the idea that India's Muslim question can be solved through state largesse — quotas, reservations, or entitlements modelled on caste-based group rights — arguing that such demands are unlikely to succeed politically and risk reinforcing the "particularism" that has made the community an easier target. He is openly sceptical of continued deference to bodies like the Muslim personal law board, arguing that Muslims in southern India, freed from some of this baggage, have generally fared better than their counterparts in the north.

Instead, he points toward community-built institutions — access to finance for small businesses, and education, citing with regret the demolition of an educational institution serving Muslims in Uttar Pradesh — alongside political alliances with other groups that share a stake in expanded rights and stronger federalism, rather than isolated Muslim advocacy. Above all, he argues, the immediate concern for Indian Muslims today is no longer economic upliftment alone, as it was when the Sachar Committee's 2006 report first quantified the community's deprivation, but basic physical and legal security — a shift he calls, without much comfort, a global phenomenon and not one unique to India.

What makes Gaya's account unsettling is less its politics than its timeline. The devaluing of federalism, the entrenchment of Uttar Pradesh's political weight, the redefinition of secularism to protect majority sentiment while disregarding minority sentiment — none of it, in his telling, began in 2014. It was built into the republic's design from the debates of the 1930s onward, through choices that felt, at the time, like reasonable compromises. The task he leaves his readers with is not simply to identify who is responsible, but to see how ordinary, incremental, and broadly popular each of those choices seemed when they were made.