A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

by Harsh Gupta 'Madhusudan'

Hamid Dalwai, a Marathi Muslim who faced ostracism from his community for being a radical reformist, understood this. He advocated women’s emancipation through education and employment at the social level, and for a liberal–secular government at the political level. In his 1969 book Muslim Politics in Secular India, he critiqued minority politics for continuing to further the separatist mindset of the pre-Partition Muslim League.8 The real problem, Dalwai wrote, was Muslim obscurantism. Dalwai also argued that the right answer to Muslim communalism is not its Hindu variant, but genuine secularism. Hindu communalism is largely reactive whereas the Muslim opposition to the separation of State and religion is centered on theology, a reality that is globally observable today. Despite this reality, the Left-leaning intelligentsia attempts to falsely draw an equivalence between both. Dalwai wrote that Indian Muslim intellectuals are more likely to blame Hindus rather than introspect. As early as 1967, he led a protest march demanding that the government should end the practice of triple talaaq.9 On 20 March 1970,10 he founded the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal to bring about social reforms in the Muslim community. Speaking at a function of the Samajwadi Mahila Sabha in March 1973,11 he said that purdah should be legally banned, and family planning made compulsory. Rejecting claims that Sharia laws were made by God and thus must not be changed,