Once again, the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has drawn national attention. Over the past three weeks, students were protesting against an arbitrary fee hike and the long-delayed restoration of the Students’ Union. The protest intensified when Uttar Pradesh Police intervened during a peaceful Juma Namaz at the Bab-e-Syed protest site and detained a few students. During this intervention, the university’s proctorial team attempted to disperse the protesters forcibly, also by manhandling female students. However, after more than fifteen days of sit-in protest and five days of hunger strike, the university administration and vice-chancellor agreed to conduct students’ union elections in December and revisit the fee hike. Four proctorial team members, who allegedly were involved in allowing Police on campus and manhandling students, also resigned. Nevertheless, this protest has brought to the surface the unresolved fault lines of higher education in India. At stake is not simply a question of fee structures or campus politics, but the very future of AMU as a Muslim minority institution.
During my visit to the protest site at Bab-e-Syed, the university’s main entrance, I spoke to students about what is at stake. I stressed the fact that the fee hike was arbitrary and unjust, putting an undue burden on students from the oppressed Muslim community, which forms a sizable demography of AMU. I also argued that the revival of the Students’ Union is not a procedural demand but is imperative for protecting students’ rights and the democratic culture of the campus. Moreover, crucially, I located these issues within the broader historical and political context of AMU as a Muslim minority institution under increasing state pressure and campus militarization.
Not surprisingly, this framing attracted criticism. A history professor, alongside his students, reacted through the reductionist secular-liberal lens, accusing me of “Islamizing” or “communalizing” the protest. Such criticisms are not new; instead, they have been the result of a longer intellectual tradition that has tended to ignore the particularities of Muslim experience in India, reducing the complexities of history and politics to a single secular-liberal narrative. As a matter of fact, this social media outcry drew the attention of a local Hindutva outfit. Nearly a week after I visited AMU, this outfit accused me of having worn a black-and-white keffiyeh patterned with the Palestinian flag and raising pro-Palestine slogans at the protest site, subsequently filing an FIR against me for allegedly “threatening social peace and harmony in the city.”
While different in how the violence is enacted, these two responses are not fundamentally different. The former can be seen as a kind of violence in the name of intellectualism, delegitimizing student protest, and the latter reacts to the same protest by deploying its hegemonic apparatus of Hindutva power.
These “intellectual” critiques includes Yanis Iqbal’s piece, written from a reductionist Marxist perspective, and Bhavuk Sharma’s take on the agitation’s “rightward” direction, backed by Prof. Sajjad’s opinion on whether AMU has turned into a graveyard, labeling the AMU students’ protest as “Islamist”, “communal”, or Muslim “right-wing” controlled. The critiques present themselves as secular progressive corrections. However, the approach undermines student concerns while establishing problematic frameworks restricting Muslim dissent. The repeated use of terms like “Islamist” or “right wing” is not analytical but pejorative, collapsing diverse forms of religious-cultural expression into a singular danger. This discursive regulation, control, and disciplining of Muslim subjectivities is a power mechanism. It subjugates the lived experiences, language, and vocabularies of self-expression of Muslim students.
Misleading parallels
The term “right wing” is overused beyond meaning. Right-wing politics connotes the projects of domination, exclusion, and theocultural hegemonic Hindutva power in the Indian context. The demands of the AMU students to have affordable education, a democratic campus with the elected students’ union, and to resist state policies that restrict prayer cannot be compared to the Hindutva politics of Hindu supremacy.
Sharma draws a parallel between the students offering Friday prayer at the protest site and the Ganesh Utsav and Shivaji festival organized by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, which was historically seen as consolidating Hindu communalism. This analogy is faulty. Hindu festivals were to become majoritarian spectacles in colonial India, and Muslims were explicitly excluded. A minority group praying during a protest against a fee increase is not comparable, particularly in a hostile political environment. Dr. Ishtiaq Hussain, an alumnus of the Department of History, AMU, rightly argued in his article that the comparison of Friday prayer at AMU with the use of Hindu festivals by Tilak as a means of political mobilization is one of the most misplaced analogies in the write-up. This contrast is historically unsound. Tilak’s approach went beyond the question of mere celebration, and this is why he was labeled as communal. It is said that he has intentionally injected communal undercurrents into the celebrations that are held in the country, mostly leaving out Muslims. e.g., provocative songs were sung in these festivals. He also timed the Ganpati festival to coincide with Muharram, clearly to foment communal discord.
Friday prayer is not a festival or a political act but a religious duty, a widespread and common culture of the Muslim students at the Indian universities all over the country. More to the point, Friday prayer has always been performed at the Bab-e-Syed whenever there is a protest in the AMU. In the past as well, Friday prayer at AMU protests have never been restricted to Muslim students only; non-Muslim peers have often joined in, protecting their fellow students, making a human chain, during prayers as a show of solidarity. Even during the protest, the collective duty towards Allah, the steadfastness and fight against injustice are also symbolised by Friday prayer in protest at AMU. This collective act of faith and solidarity is a testament to the students’ resilience and determination in the face of adversity.
The most quoted example of “Islamist hijacking” is the use of Islamic slogans in protest, especially “Islam Ki Dawat Zinda Hai.” Critics allege that such language is communal by nature. This, however, is a misconception of the AMU’s very spirit. The very insignia of AMU is a verse of the Holy Qurʾān: “Taught man what he knew not.” (96:5). The institution’s motto, architecture, and history cannot be dissociated from its Islamic civilization. It is not a departure from the spirit of AMU to invoke Islam in the language of protest, but a continuation of it. The slogan asserts dignity, resilience, and knowledge as living traditions. This is clearly a violent move to equate this with Hindutva sloganeering. Hindutva is a project of majoritarianism that aims at eliminating minorities, especially Muslims, and transforming India into an exclusionary Hindu nation. In comparison, Muslim students who use Islamic idioms are claiming belonging, survival, and self-respect in a hostile political environment that often seeks to marginalize them. The power relations are not equal; to equate them is hypocritical and violent, and is used to propagate an Islamophobic agenda by these “intellectual” critiques.
Branding Muslim students as “Islamist” or “right-wing” is not an objective scholarly act; it has practical implications. These framings actually disenfranchise the voice of Muslims in politics by presenting their identity articulations as either communal or threatening. So why is it that when Dalit students invoke caste or Adivasi students invoke indigeneity, it is hailed as emancipatory, yet when Muslim students invoke their agency, it is derided as communal? These “intellectual” critics not only celebrate but also endorse slogans like “Laal Salaam!”, “Jab laal laal lehraayega, tab hosh thikane aayega”, or “Laal Qile par laal nishaan, maang raha hai Hindustan” in the most “secular-liberal-progressive” campuses like JNU and HCU. However, when a group of Muslim students in AMU says Takbeer, the same critics are quick to label it as “Islamist” or “right-wing”. These discursive processes not only contribute to the state discourse that has stigmatized Muslim institutions as the centre of radicalism, but also undermine a broader solidarity due to the isolation of Muslim students within these narrow frames.
The idea of public space
The framing of public and personal spaces by Sharma reveals a kind of conditioning by dominant caste Hindu mindsets, which is further buttressed by the professors who seek to legitimize themselves through the limited, majoritarian idea of secularism. In the case of Sharma, the religious symbols like hajj photographs or a tilak on social media are not problematic. However, the performance of Namaz in a protest space is considered offensive. This contradiction reflects not only a superficial conception of what a public sphere is but also the unwillingness to accept Muslim religious practices as valid in it.
Iqbal and Sharma overlook that Hindu religious activities already occupy the public space in Kanwariya processions, Jagratas, Durga Pujas, Bhandaras, Matki Phodna, etc. Even the most ideal, secular, and diverse campus in their and Professors’ perception, the JNU, celebrates Holi without being labeled as “Hindu right-wing”. However, when Muslims mark their presence, their practices are quickly pathologized, evoking a strong sense of injustice. What is celebrated as culture by the majority is often labeled communal when practiced by minorities.
A notable aspect of the two articles and the position of Prof. Sajjad is that they do not mention structural injustices. The order issued by the UP government banning roadside Namaz is termed as discriminatory, but it is soon bracketed out, as though it is not the core of the protest. Students who oppose this unfair order are accused of “Islamizing” their movement, whereas the order itself is not subject to severe criticism.
Shallow secularism
This protest has also revealed the systemic biases against minority identities, particularly Muslims, and the limitations of Indian secularism. The only forms of Muslim dissent deemed secular are those devoid of any religious expression and intelligible to liberal discourse. This dual standard indicates the hegemonic role of Hindu culture in the national discourse since the practices of Muslims are constantly put to the test.
The precariousness of Muslims also becomes visible here, as even in the so-called safe minority sites like AMU, the cultural and religious expression of Muslims, such as chanting of lā ilāha illallāh, or Allāhu Akbar, and offering of Friday prayer, comes under the scrutiny of dominant Hindu thought, even internalized by the secular Muslim elites. These “safe minority sites” are institutions or spaces where minority communities should theoretically feel secure in expressing their religious and cultural identities. However, the reality is that even in these spaces, such expressions are often viewed through a lens of suspicion and subjected to scrutiny.
Elsewhere, beyond these safe havens, Muslims are violently repressed. The majority and secular elites are disturbed by the very presence of cultural markers like dadhi, hijab, kurta, and topi. They are even attacked for offering Friday prayers. Such violence is further aided by the imposition of Hindu nationalist identities, including enforced chants of Bhārat Mātā kī Jai or Jai Shri Rām that work as disciplinary systems to incorporate minorities into a majoritarian order.
Further, the pressure to divest Muslims of their religious beliefs as the condition to becoming modern or secular is also an epistemic and cultural violence, which does not have any other effect than the legitimization of India as the Hindu nation. Secularism in India has always been taken in a narrow sense, and it is being used to legitimize Hindu cultural hegemony in everyday life, coupled with the restraint of minority expressions. The minority institutions, such as AMU, are therefore the most important places where students fight to prevent erasure and to defend their rights, not as a display of supremacy but as a defense of constitutional guarantees.
The question of what constitutes legitimate use of a public space then begins to govern the debate. Sharma, Iqbal, and Sajjad point to the communalization of the movement by performing Namaz on the protest site. However, this presupposes that the public sphere is pluralistic, which is not the case. This contradiction shows that secularism in India frequently requires the removal of symbols of the minorities and the naturalization of those of the majority. The critics of Sharma, Iqbal, and Sajjad fit into a long history of policing of Muslim politics by means of selective secularism. They dismiss student protests as communal positions, distort history, overlook structural oppression, and utilize double standards in Muslim expressions.
AMU is not just another University
AMU has always been more than a university. It is a movement with a history of struggle, aiming for educational, social, and political empowerment of the Muslim community. Over the years, it has been a blessing for marginalized Muslim students who are left out of the mainstream of the Indian education system. It is a marker of strength, hope, and the existence of Indian Muslims. To stand up in its defence is not communal – it is necessary. To look at any student protest at AMU without considering this background would be to deny its very spirit.
Consequently, to imply that fee increases at AMU can be explained outside such lived conditions of Muslim marginalization is to deny history. Today, when the Muslim enrolment in higher education is among the lowest in the nation, any financial or administrative policy that introduces obstacles to access needs to be questioned as part of this systematic exclusion.
Students not only oppose the economic burden when they reject the increase in fees but also protect their constitutional right to affordable education in a Muslim institution that was specifically established to secure their future. To overlook this is to universalize and erase the particular experiences of the Muslims in India and reduce them to a genericity that fails to appreciate the burden of their communal marginalization.
Also, the demand to restore the Students’ Union is not procedural. It is necessary to reclaim a democratic institution that has played a vital role throughout history in shaping the Muslim politics in India. The critique is also conveniently ignorant of the growing accustomedness of police presence and governmental interference in AMU. This is not an objective process but one element of a larger trend towards the contraction of Muslim self-determination. It has to be linked to the securitization of Muslim institutions in India as a whole. From Jamia Millia Islamia to AMU and MANUU, Muslim universities are gradually militarized. It is not just a law and order problem, but a political move to delegitimize the Muslim space. It is not communalizing the protest or the campus that students are bringing up this issue. It is an acknowledgment of reality about what it is like to be a Muslim student in India today.
A truly democratic system should enable Muslims to express their reality in their own terms, whether it is religious, cultural, or political, without being imposed into a pre-packaged ideology of others. These critiques demonstrate the unease that Indian academia feels towards Muslim political subjectivity and expose how tenuous and exclusionary these frameworks are and how they ultimately wipe out the distinctive histories, identities, and ambitions of the marginalized groups. The path ahead of AMU should not be on rejecting these realities, but the need to embrace them openly. These protests are not only about the right to immediate grievances, they are about the right of a community to imagine its educational and political future. A critique that fails to dwell on this context or reduces it to abstract categories does violence to the lived experiences of students at AMU.
(Talha Mannan is an alumnus of the Aligarh Muslim University and is currently pursuing PhD from the Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.)
