Christophe Jaffrelot - Indian Muslims in an Era of Hindu Majoritarianism

Indian Muslims have always been under represented in the institutions of India, including the bureaucracy, the police and the judiciary. Since the rise of the BJP they have also been marginalized in the elected bodies – the national parliament as well as state assemblies. Similarly, they have never joined the formal sector of the economy in large numbers, partly because of their lack of education. But lately, they have experienced some educational decline in North India. They have also been the main casualties of Hindu majoritarianism in terms of access to the housing market, partly because of the role of vigilantes, partly because of new laws. The combination of these two factors also explain that inter religious marriages have become almost impossible. Since 2014, vigilantism and state actions converge for transforming Muslims into second class citizens.

Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior research fellow at CERI, Sciences Po; research director at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King’s India Institute. He has been Global Scholar at Princeton University, visiting professor at Columbia University, Yale and SAIS (Johns Hopkins). He also works at The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a Non Resident Scholar and is on the academic council of Ashoka University in India.

Among his publications are The Hindu nationalist movement and Indian politics, 1925 to 1990s (1999), India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (2003), Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (2005); and The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience (2015). In 2017, he co-edited Pan-Islamic Connections: Transnational Networks between South Asia and the Gulf. He graduated from Sciences Po where he obtained a PhD and the INALCO in Hindi.