The Missing Institutions: Why India's Muslims Are Building Their Own Media

A conversation about survival, not grievance

Midway through a nearly two-hour panel discussion hosted by journalist Bushra Khanam Fahad, one of the panellists, Ali Javed, founding editor of the media organisation Nous, made a point that framed everything else said that evening: representation is not the same as institutions. India's roughly 200 million Muslims, he argued, have accumulated real gains since Partition — legal victories, cultural assertions, individual voices in journalism and politics — but those gains were never anchored in the kind of durable institutional infrastructure that ideological movements typically build for themselves: schools, universities, media houses, think tanks, legal apparatus. "Jab tak research nahi hoga, media mein bhi wahi baat aayegi," he said — until there is research, media coverage will keep repeating the same distortions.

The panel — Javed alongside Asad Ashraf, an independent senior journalist, and Aditya Menon, political editor at The Quint — had convened to ask a blunt question: twelve years into Bharatiya Janata Party rule, with anti-Muslim rhetoric now routine in both political discourse and prime-time television, why hasn't India's media landscape, including its avowedly oppositional "alternative" media, produced a genuine platform for Muslim self-representation? Fahad opened by describing what she called a slow "dehumanisation" of Muslims in public life — a process, she said, for which the mainstream media bears more responsibility than the ruling party itself, since it manufactures the daily pretext — the "jihad" of the week — that politics then exploits.

Mainstream media's manufactured consent

Fahad's opening argument set the terms for the discussion: the mainstream press, she said, functions as a factory for manufacturing suspicion, need not repeat overtly communal slogans to do damage — it simply needs to keep selecting topics that cast Muslims as a permanent, undifferentiated threat. Ashraf agreed, describing sections of the mainstream press as having become outright "collaborators" in the project rather than passive amplifiers of it.

Both journalists pointed to the asymmetry in how crime and suspicion are covered. When Muslims are detained on terrorism charges — Ashraf cited the 2008 Batla House case as a template — the arrests generate headlines for weeks; when the same men are acquitted, often eighteen or twenty years later, the exoneration barely registers. Fahad extended this to a more recent case: the arrest of activist Nida Khan, which she said proceeded despite evidence undermining the allegations against her, driven in her account by a complaint from a BJP worker rather than by verified wrongdoing. She also pointed to what she called the shift in who gets targeted — from poorer, less articulate Muslims in earlier "terror" cases to today's more affluent professionals, cast as agents of "love jihad," "land jihad," or, in the case of a widely discussed controversy involving Tata Consultancy Services, an alleged "corporate jihad" conversion racket. Ashraf argued that such theories succeed because they are pre-sold: once "love jihad" was normalised as a category in public discourse — a theory he traced to political actors in Kerala — each subsequent variant, however implausible, inherits the same credibility.

Alternative media's blind spot

If the panel had a shared villain in mainstream television, it also directed sustained, uncomfortable criticism at the very outlets it is closest to: the anti-BJP "alternative" YouTube media that has grown rapidly over the past decade. Menon, speaking from inside that world as The Quint's political editor, argued that alternative media suffers from two compounding problems. First, a representation problem: its senior editorial positions are still dominated by what he called "savarna liberals," while Muslims and Dalits remain scarce at the top even though, he noted, Muslim viewers make up a disproportionate share of the YouTube audience that keeps many of these channels financially viable. Second, a framing problem: alternative media tends to see Muslims through what Menon called "a limited gaze" — almost exclusively as victims of majoritarian violence, rather than as a community with its own internal debates, leadership churn, and emerging political and intellectual voices.

Ashraf extended the critique, describing a reluctance within left-liberal media to accept journalists who identify openly with a Muslim political or religious identity, as opposed to a purely secular one. Fahad, drawing on her own years inside mainstream outlets before leaving in 2019–20, offered a pointed anecdote: she recalled being told, when she used the word "Muslim" on air, to say "minority" instead — a policing of vocabulary she connected to Rahul Gandhi's own tendency to say "minorities" rather than name Muslims directly, even as he names Sikhs and Christians specifically when addressing them. All three agreed that the same instinct — Muslims should be grateful merely for having their victimhood acknowledged by upper-caste liberal sympathisers, rather than expecting the fuller repertoire of accurate description — is itself a form of majoritarian hegemony, wielded gently rather than harshly, but still a hegemony.

A missing vocabulary

The panel kept returning to a specific linguistic gap: alternative media, they argued, will not call lynch mobs what they are. Fahad was unequivocal: "Dey are not vigilantes, dey are terrorists, dey are killing people for no reason," she said, arguing that men who kill for someone's diet or dress ought to be described using the same vocabulary reserved for other forms of political violence. That vocabulary, she said, remains entirely absent, "missing from everywhere" — not just hostile media but sympathetic media too. She linked this omission to a broader failure of nerve: alternative media will platform Islamic commentary only when it can be mocked or made to sound extreme, while credible, internationally recognised Islamic scholars are rarely invited to debate questions like jihad, hijab, or representation on their own terms, because doing so would require engaging seriously rather than performing outrage on cue.

Ashraf offered a structural explanation for why. Genuine debate about jihad's theological meanings, about the lived experience of hijab as an expression of religious identity rather than mere "victimhood," or about internal community debates on caste and patriarchy within Muslim social life, has no natural home: mainstream media has no appetite for it, and alternative media has, at most, limited space, because its own organising logic still runs through a victimhood frame borrowed from a secular-left vocabulary. Javed situated this in a longer intellectual history, arguing that a hundred years of "secularisation" — as distinct from secularism as a constitutional value — had, across the world, tended to erase the possibility of taking any religious tradition's own internal reform debates seriously in public discourse, leaving communities without the tools to negotiate their rights on their own terms.

The "sectarian mobilisation" hangover

A large section of the conversation turned to electoral politics, prompted by the panellists' disagreement over how to read Asaduddin Owaisi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and its five seats in the 2025 Bihar assembly election — a result Fahad noted could easily have been six, given how narrowly one AIMIM candidate lost. Fahad argued that secular alliance partners cannot credibly complain about "vote-cutting" after ignoring repeated requests from AIMIM to be included in seat-sharing talks before the election. She framed resistance to Muslim political parties — AIMIM, the Social Democratic Party of India, the Indian Secular Front — as inheriting an unexamined "hangover" from Partition-era anxieties: any assertive Muslim political mobilisation is read as inherently "sectarian" or "separatist," a suspicion, she argued, that is never extended to Dalit political mobilisation of the kind that produced Kanshi Ram's Bahujan Samaj Party and, eventually, Mayawati as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh — even though Dalits, too, are not a majority.

Menon pushed back with a more qualified position. His objection to Owaisi's politics, he said, was not that AIMIM contests elections, but that Kanshi Ram spent decades building grassroots community organisation against caste atrocity before entering electoral politics, giving the BSP's later ascent a social base that AIMIM's newer expansion largely lacks. He questioned whether the party's mobilisation was translating into practical gains for Muslims beyond symbolic representation, contrasting Owaisi's combative television appearances with the example of veteran CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat physically confronting a bulldozer demolition — an image that circulated internationally — and asking why more Muslim leaders were not seen making similarly visible interventions at demolition sites. Javed's rejoinder was that the debate fixates unfairly on Owaisi as a proxy for all Muslim political expression, when the more important question is why Muslim-majority constituencies should not be contested by Muslim parties at all, and why regional, non-majoritarian political expression is treated as suspect specifically when it originates from Muslims — pointing, by contrast, to the normalised expansion of the Aam Aadmi Party from Delhi into Punjab and Gujarat without equivalent scrutiny.

Internal hegemonies

Perhaps the panel's sharpest turn was inward. Javed argued that the largest obstacle to institutionalising a genuine Muslim political and intellectual expression today is not the BJP and not the Congress, but resource-rich, decades-old Muslim organisations themselves, which he said are reluctant to share the human and financial capital needed by newer, younger formations — political, intellectual, or media — that have emerged from a rising Muslim middle class with only loose ties to established religious bodies. Legacy institutions, he suggested, tend to satisfy themselves with three familiar activities — running a mosque or madrasa, running a school, and running relief work — all necessary, but none of which negotiates rights or builds the applied skills of local advocacy that would let a new generation speak in a language of its own rather than one borrowed wholesale from the secular left.

Fahad connected this reluctance to a generational and emotional cost: the massive young Muslim population's frustration and energy, she argued, is not being given institutional expression, leaving it to be "contained" rather than "channelled" — a dynamic she said applies symmetrically to radicalising currents among Hindu youth, since in both cases the underlying failure is the same absence of legitimate outlets, not any inherent tie to religious doctrine.

Contesting the historical record

Some of the discussion's most granular material concerned how Partition history is retold in public discourse today. Javed took issue with popular claims — attributed in the discussion to television commentary — casting the eighteenth-century reformer Shah Waliullah Dehlawi as India's "first separatist," calling it a statement that ignores the internal reform history of Muslim scholarly tradition. He offered a counter-history built around Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's 1882 novel Anandmath and the song Vande Mataram: the novel, he argued, obscures how Muslim and Hindu fakirs and sannyasis fought together against British policy during the 1770s–90s famines, before recasting Muslim rulers as the primary oppressors once the British had become the more immediate colonial adversary. On this reading, Vande Mataram's enduring symbolic status for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, more central to it even than V. D. Savarkar's own writing, reflects the ideological utility of a founding narrative built on "two colonisations" — one Islamic, one British — that lets an anti-colonial vocabulary be redirected against a domestic minority.

What the panel wants built

The panel closed by trying to convert critique into a programme. Fahad proposed five overlapping priorities for Muslim institution-building: giving ordinary Muslims a shared vocabulary and rapid-response capacity for moments of crisis; presenting an accurate, textually grounded account of Islamic theology to counter distorted mainstream portrayals of the Quran and hadith; building independent research and educational institutions; building media houses capable of sustaining this work commercially; and holding existing, long-funded community institutions accountable for what they are actually producing with the resources — including religious charity — they already receive. Javed cautioned against expecting to sequence these priorities neatly, describing institution-building as a "very, very long process" that has to run on multiple tracks simultaneously, comparing it to countering misinformation, a task he said would take not months but decades of sustained effort. Fahad, closing the discussion, said the conversation was not an attempt to draw battle lines against any individual outlet or journalist, but an attempt to sketch what she called "a roadmap" — acknowledging that the panel had only begun to open a debate about representation, institutions and vocabulary that she said would need further conversations, including one already planned on how Bollywood and streaming platforms shape public perception of Muslims through entertainment.