How the Left Made Islam Criticism-Proof

There is a question that sits quietly at the edge of Indian “intellectual” discourse, rarely asked aloud in polite academic circles but increasingly impossible to ignore: how does a political tradition that champions atheism, gender equality, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the dismantling of religious authority find itself in sustained, structural alliance with one of the most theocratically assertive political communities in the country? 

This is not a rhetorical provocation. 

It is a genuine sociological puzzle, and the answer to it reveals something uncomfortable about the nature of Indian leftism and the uses to which the language of social justice has been put.

This article does not argue that Indian Muslims as a community are monolithic, regressive, or deserving of suspicion. The Vedic tradition, from which the majority of Indians draw their cultural and spiritual inheritance, has for centuries held within itself a concept called Sarva Dharma Sambhava, roughly translated as equal respect for all paths. That spirit of principled pluralism is precisely what makes the following observations worth making.

When Alliance Becomes Contradiction

Sociologist Robert Merton's concept of latent functions is useful here. 

In contrast to the stated, visible purposes of a social institution or coalition (its manifest functions), latent functions are the unstated consequences that serve different interests altogether. 

The Indian left's alliance with Muslim political organizations presents precisely this kind of split. The manifest function is the protection of a vulnerable minority from majoritarian pressure. The latent function, as this article will argue, is the maintenance of a political counter-weight against the Hindu-majority electoral bloc, in a manner that requires the left to suspend its own foundational principles.

Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony also applies. 

The Italian Marxist argued that ruling ideas maintain themselves not through force alone but through cultural consent. When a political movement chooses its alliances selectively based on electoral arithmetic rather than ideological consistency, it participates in the very hegemonic game it claims to oppose. The Indian left has, over several decades, built a cultural hegemony in universities, media, and civil society that frames critique of Hindu practices as enlightened rationalism while framing the same critique directed at Islamic practices as bigotry. 

This is not secularism. It is a hierarchy of permissible criticism.

The Shah Bano Moment and What It Revealed

Perhaps no single episode illustrates this contradiction more clearly than the Shah Bano case of 1985. Shah Bano, a 62-year-old Muslim woman from Madhya Pradesh, was divorced by her husband of 43 years through the mechanism of triple talaq. She approached the courts seeking maintenance. The Supreme Court ruled in her favour under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a secular provision protecting women across communities.

The ruling was self-evidently progressive. A woman had been abandoned after decades of marriage, left without financial support, and the court had extended to her the basic protections available to all Indian women regardless of religion. One would expect the Indian left, given its avowed commitment to gender equality, to have celebrated this unambiguously. Instead, the Rajiv Gandhi government, responsive to pressure from the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and a vocal section of the Muslim clergy, passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, which effectively overturned the Supreme Court's secular judgment and kept Muslim women outside the scope of universal maintenance law.

The left and the Congress, ideologically intertwined during this period, either supported or did not meaningfully oppose this rollback. The women's movement was largely outmaneuvered. The message, if one reads between the lines, was clear: A Muslim woman's right to justice could be sacrificed on the altar of minority vote-bank consolidation. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued that the public sphere demands that all claims be subjected to rational, open debate. The Indian left abandoned this demand precisely when it was most needed.

It took until 2019, under a government the Indian left vocally opposes, for triple talaq to finally be criminalized. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party supported the bill and defended the criminalization provision as necessary to protect the rights of Muslim women, while the Indian National Congress opposed the bill in its existing form, objecting primarily to the criminalization clause. Opposition parties from the left bloc largely voted against or staged walkouts during the passage of a bill that protected Muslim women from instantaneous, irrevocable divorce. Triple talaq could instantaneously, including in the form of a text message, leave a wife without a home, money, and her children. India was one of the last countries where the practice was legal. 

This is the company the Indian left chose on the question of Muslim women's rights.

The Hijab-Iran Asymmetry

Fast-forward to 2022. In Karnataka, a controversy erupted when Muslim students insisted on wearing the hijab inside classrooms where a uniform dress code was in force. The Indian left and a significant portion of the liberal-progressive ecosystem responded by framing this as a fundamental rights issue, an assault on religious freedom, a mark of Hindu majoritarian hostility. Protests were organized. Intellectuals wrote columns. International attention was mobilized.

In the same year, Iranian women were burning their hijabs in the streets. Mahsa Amini had died in the custody of Iran's morality police for wearing hers incorrectly. Hundreds of thousands of women across Iran risked their lives to demand the right not to wear the garment. 

The Indian left's response was notable for its near silence. The same voices that had spent months defending the right to wear the hijab in a Karnataka classroom had very little to say about women dying to remove it in Tehran.

This asymmetry is not accidental. It follows a recognizable pattern that social psychologists might describe using the concept of motivated reasoning, where conclusions are decided first and evidence is selected accordingly. When the hijab can be used as a symbol of resistance against a Hindu-majority government, it becomes a feminist cause. When it requires criticism of Islamic governance, it is quietly set aside. 

The women of Iran, and the Muslim women of India who privately dissent from clerical authority, are the invisible casualties of this calculation.

And, the Asymmetry Nobody Discusses

Hindu temples in India are subject to government control, while mosques, churches, and gurudwaras are free from such government intervention, managed by their respective trusts and communities without any interference from the state. 

Over 100,000 temples, particularly across the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu, are administered by state-appointed officials under the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, a colonial-era statute that independent India chose to retain and extend.

States not only collect taxes, manage assets, and impose state control in temples, but they also often appoint non-Hindus, or even individuals’ hostile to Hindu practice, as bureaucrats or administrators over Hindu temples. Revenue collected from the devotion of Hindu worshippers has been directed toward non-Hindu institutions in several documented cases. One state-level audit revealed that temple funds amounting to dozens of crores were returned only in single-digit crore amounts for repair and maintenance, while simultaneously granting separate allocations to madrasas and churches.

This is the paradox: the majority community is routinely denied full religious and financial autonomy, while minority institutions like mosques, churches, and gurudwaras remain untouched by such state control.

The Indian left, which speaks extensively about institutional discrimination, the redistribution of resources, and the autonomy of marginalized communities, has produced almost no sustained critique of this structural arrangement. The absence is telling. 

In Marxist terms, one would expect an analysis of the material conditions of Hindu religious institutions: how state capture of temple economies disempowers ordinary devotees, redirects communal resources, and strips the Vedic tradition of financial self-determination. That analysis does not come, because it would require applying the same critical framework to the state's relationship with Hindu institutions that is readily applied to every other domain.

Foreign Flows and Domestic Silence

India's small Ahle Hadith and Wahhabi communities have expanded with the construction of new madrasas and mosques funded by Gulf Arab governments and individuals. The expansion of Gulf-funded religious infrastructure in India, documented by scholars across the political spectrum, has produced a particular strain of conservative Islamic practice that is demonstrably more intolerant on questions of gender, caste, music, and pluralism than the syncretic South Asian Islamic tradition it often displaces.

The left, which is acutely alert to foreign funding when it reaches Hindu organizations (the IDRF controversy, the scrutiny of RSS-affiliated charities receiving NRI donations), has applied no comparable analytical energy to Gulf-origin funding of mosques, madrasas, and Islamic civil society organizations in India. 

The Enforcement Directorate and the National Investigation Agency have documented, in court filings, the financial architecture of organizations like the Popular Front of India, which was ultimately banned in 2022. The main accusations against the PFI involved the funding of terrorism and terrorist activities, organizing training camps for providing armed training, and radicalizing people to join banned organizations. The left's response was largely to frame the ban itself as politically motivated, rather than engage with the documented evidence of radicalization.

It is worth noting here that the Vedic tradition, whatever its internal contradictions and the legitimate critiques that can be made of caste discrimination within Hindu society, does not maintain a global funding architecture linked to states with theocratic constitutions. The RSS and its affiliates, for all the criticism directed at them, are domestically rooted organizations. The question of foreign influence on India's religious ecosystem is not symmetrical, and the left's selective alarm about foreign money is a political choice, not a principled one.

The LGBTQIA+ Silence

Nowhere is the contradiction sharper than on the question of queer rights. The Indian left has invested significant intellectual and activist energy in supporting LGBTQIA+ rights in India. This is, in itself, admirable and consistent with any coherent progressive politics. But this commitment is applied with a remarkable community-specific filter.

When Section 377 was discussed, decriminalized, and debated, the left's criticism was directed overwhelmingly at the Hindu right. When religious conservatism on homosexuality was at issue, Hindu texts and temples were examined. 

The position of Sharia on homosexuality, which in classical jurisprudence across most schools is unambiguous and punitive, was almost never subjected to the same analytical scrutiny by the same voices. 

The position of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board on queer rights has received a fraction of the attention that any comparable statement from a Hindu religious organization would attract.

This is not a call for the left to abandon its support for Muslim communities. 

It is an observation that genuine solidarity with LGBTQIA+ people would require applying the same critical lens to conservative religious positions wherever they appear. The queer Muslim exists in India, navigating both communal hostility and religious intolerance within their own community, and they deserve advocates who do not go selectively silent when criticism might inconvenience an electoral alliance.

The Concept of False Consciousness

Marx himself wrote about false consciousness, the condition in which a group internalizes an ideology that does not serve its actual material or social interests. It is one of the ironies of Indian intellectual history that the concept applies so neatly to the Indian left itself. A movement built on atheism, scientific rationalism, and the critique of religious authority has allowed itself to become a defender of clerical power when that clerical power is exercised within Muslim communities.

The political scientist Rajni Kothari observed decades ago that Indian secularism was always more about managing inter-community power than about the principled separation of religion from public life. The left inherited and reinforced this tradition. Its secularism was never the French laicite, the strict removal of religion from the public square. It was a selective application of irreverence, enthusiastically pointed at Brahminical Hinduism, considerably more cautious when directed at Islam.

The Vedic tradition, for its part, has within its philosophical inheritance a concept particularly resistant to this kind of institutionalized hypocrisy. The Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda, one of humanity's earliest texts, opens with the acknowledgment that even the gods may not know the origin of creation. This is a tradition comfortable with uncertainty, hospitable to doubt, and historically capable of internal critique without external imposition. It does not need the left to defend it. It asks only to be treated with the same anthropological curiosity and the same standards of critique that are applied to every other living tradition.

What Honest Solidarity Would Look Like

None of this is to suggest that Indian Muslims do not face real discrimination, that communal violence is a fiction, or that the anxieties of a religious minority in a nation where majoritarian politics has become increasingly assertive are not legitimate. 

They are. 

The Vedic tradition at its best, the tradition of Vivekananda, of the Upanishads, of the deeply pluralist philosophical schools that flourished on this subcontinent for millennia, would extend genuine hospitality to those anxieties and address them with integrity.

The problem is not the left's concern for Muslim citizens. 

The problem is the transactional nature of that concern, and the intellectual compromises it demands. 

A genuine progressive politics would demand gender justice within Muslim personal law without waiting for a government it disliked to do it. It would scrutinize Gulf funding of Indian religious infrastructure with the same energy it applies to Hindutva-aligned charitable networks. It would speak for queer Muslims and Muslim women with the same volume and consistency it speaks for queerness and women's rights elsewhere. It would question state control of Hindu temple economies as the structural anomaly it plainly is. 

And it would stop confusing the defense of a community with the defense of conservative clerical authority within that community.

Social theorist Nancy Fraser drew a distinction between affirmative and transformative remedies for injustice. Affirmative remedies address the outcomes of inequality without disturbing the underlying structures. Transformative remedies address the structures themselves. 

The Indian left has consistently offered affirmative cover to Muslim political organizations while declining to apply transformative critique to the conservative religious structures that often dominate those organizations and harm the most vulnerable members of the community, particularly women, queer people, and those who dissent from orthodoxy.

Political alliances always involve compromise. That is the nature of democratic politics. 

But there is a difference between strategic compromise and the abandonment of first principles. 

The Indian left built its legitimacy on the claim that it applied rational, universal standards to the critique of power and tradition. That claim is now difficult to sustain when the evidence shows, across three decades of documented episodes from Shah Bano to triple talaq, from the Hijab controversy to Gulf-funded radicalization, from temple control to selective fury about foreign funding, a pattern of asymmetric scrutiny that follows the logic of electoral arithmetic rather than the logic of consistent principle.

The followers of the Vedic tradition, a tradition that has survived colonialism, partition, and centuries of external pressure through a combination of philosophical depth and extraordinary cultural adaptability, do not require the left's approval. They ask for something simpler: the same standards. The same curiosity. The same willingness to examine institutions, funding, gender practices, and legal frameworks without adjusting the focus depending on who is inside the viewfinder.

That request is neither communal nor extreme. It is, in fact, the most basic demand of any serious intellectual tradition: consistency. 

And consistency, it turns out, is the one thing that the coalition between the Indian left and political Islam cannot afford to permit.