Jiro Jennings

An article has been circulating in the print media, written by an IPS officer who goes by the name of Ibn-e-Khaldun Bharti, questioning Sharjeel Imam’s politics by branding him anti-secular, Islamist, reductionist, conservative, and everything else that can be deployed to delegitimise a political subject without seriously engaging with his ideas. One cannot help but wonder why the author chooses to conceal his identity behind a pseudonym. To understand Sharjeel Imam, one must engage with critical theory, political philosophy, metaphysics, and the historical conditions that shape political thought. One cannot reduce his politics to the familiar binaries of secularism and communalism, or expect complex questions of Muslim political identity, representation, and resistance to yield to such convenient categories. It is particularly disappointing that many academics who understand these complexities choose to remain silent, even as public discourse increasingly turns into an exercise in labelling, vilification, and intellectual simplification. Sharjeel Imam’s critique of the Constitution, or his questioning of the political order it sustains, does not automatically amount to a rejection of constitutionalism. The Constitution itself provides for its amendment, while democratic politics must retain the space to question existing institutions, arrangements, and constitutional assumptions. A constitutional democracy that cannot accommodate fundamental criticism of its own framework risks reducing dissent to a privilege granted at the convenience of those in power. His invocation of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Iqbal must also be understood within the larger history of Muslim political thought in the subcontinent. They are part of our pre-Partition intellectual and political history, however uncomfortable that history may be. We cannot simply erase them from our historical consciousness because their ideas, political choices, or legacies are contested. To invoke Jinnah is not necessarily to endorse Jinnah, just as engaging with a political thinker does not amount to an uncritical acceptance of everything they believed or represented. History cannot be understood through selective remembrance, nor can political thought be evaluated through guilt by association. The task is to interrogate, contextualise, and critically engage with these legacies, not to banish them from legitimate discourse. The easiest thing for political polemicists to do is to call Sharjeel Imam an Islamist, reduce his arguments to a convenient ideological label, and present that label as sufficient justification for his political and social exclusion. In a climate where such labels can have consequences far beyond intellectual debate, this is a particularly dangerous exercise. Defending Sharjeel Imam does not require agreeing with every argument he has made. It requires defending the right to engage with his ideas seriously, to examine them critically, and to resist the impulse to replace argument with accusation. The question is whether we are willing to confront the complexity of Muslim political thought in India, or whether we would rather consign it to a set of labels that make it easier to condemn than to understand. #SharjeelImam