Mr. Narendra Modi has been sworn in as India’s Prime Minister Modi Cabinet for the third time. This occasion is huge because, interestingly, since autonomy in 1947, every one of the 71 seats in his bureau has been filled by non-Muslims.
The omission mirrors the outcome of the just-ended election for the Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament, where not one of the winning candidates from Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition was Muslim. Twenty-four Muslims were elected over all, but none from the party that now controls Parliament and will set the course for India for the next five years. There had been Muslim members in Mr. Modi’s previous cabinets: one in 2014 (Najma Heptulla) and two in 2009 (Mr. Naqvi and K.R. Chaudhary).
But this cabinet does not include any at all — not even among its ministers of state. The surprise is only relative. After all, during a campaign that often seemed less like an ideological contest than an identity brawl. With religion especially front and center as never before under Mr. Modi’s leadership. He was criticized more for what he didn’t say about Indian Muslims than what he did.
As it dawns on everyone that four out of five Indians are not Hindu — though nearly four out of five members of Parliament are — many have wondered how they can represent diverse constituencies if their government doesn’t look like those constituencies do.
Muslim Ministers and Political Constraints
It cannot be said enough that no Muslim minister serving at the pleasure of a prime minister who owes his vast power to majoritarian politics would dare speak up against anything while still in office anyway.
So what might they say? That this mark another stage in India’s drift toward officially sanctioned second-class citizenship for its largest minority community?
That it flies in the face of Mr. Modi’s calls for inclusion and, yes, secularism — made most audibly in his previous life as chief minister of the state of Gujarat but also since?
BJP’s Muslim Representation Issue
It puts the lie to the insistence that his party is merely a more muscular version of its predecessor. Which also won national elections by and for Indians who are Hindu — even though Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet. Did it include Muslims among its 70-plus ministers?
That, anyway, what could be more explicitly sectarian than setting up an iteration of the cabinet in which everyone is presumed to be from some religion except Islam?
All that might have been said by Muslim ministers if there had been any. If there were not, they would say none of it while still in office. Or else risk being accused of speaking only for their community.
But they would have spoken for all those Indians who believe that no government can claim to represent them. Unless it looks like them or at least looks out for their interests. They would have given voice to all those Indians. Who wanted their government to work on behalf of all Indians regardless of religion.
And now? Now, Mr. Naqvi and his colleagues must speak louder than ever before. Now, they must ensure that someone in this government does so much for everyone. Indian — not just Muslims — that he cannot help but promote from within a community. Whose absence from these corridors has never been louder or clearer.
