Maidul Islam

Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta · Department of Social Sciences

This book focuses on Islamism as a political ideology by taking up the case study of Jamaat-e-Islami in contemporary India and Bangladesh. The book will address how, in a contemporary globalized world, Islamism constructs an antagonistic frontier and how it mobilizes people behind its political project. The book also deals with the Islamist critiqu...

Islamist extremism in Bangladesh emerged as a response to authoritarian populism and in the absence of a credible anti-establishment left-wing political project to articulate an alternative agenda to the existing status quo. Islamist extremists represent a politics of revenge and hatred with no clear objective to uplift the socio-economic condition...

Close to the turn of the century and almost 45 years after Independence, India opened its doors to free-market liberalization. Although meant as the promise to a better economic tomorrow, three decades later, many feel betrayed by the economic changes ushered in by this new financial era. Here is a book that probes whether India’s economic reforms...

This chapter looks at an essential feature of West Bengal politics, which is the limited influence of big national parties (the Congress and the BJP) in the state. Further, the chapter asks whether there is any possibility of increasing the support of those parties among the electorate of West Bengal especially after 2014 parliament and 2016 assemb...

This book evaluates the promise of human progress and secularism in grand political narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comparing counter-narratives of South Asia within the context of a fast-changing twenty-first century. The book embraces a broad range of sources and theoretical approaches that include political philosophy, fil...

This article examines the Narendra Modi regime in India. Often acerbic political rhetoric is attached to official policies of the regime, creating fear and hopelessness within sections of the population. In this study, five sets of political activities of the government are evaluated. First, cultural authoritarianism became apparent with complicity...

It is often alleged that Hindi cinema has misrepresented the past. In particular, the depiction of the Sultanate period, the Mughal period, and its aftermath in various films have been notorious. In contrast, this paper will highlight "The Tashkent Files" (2019), a film that deals with a more recent episode of contemporary Indian history during the...

An interview on the contemporary socio-economic and political situation of Muslims after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

An article that evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the communists of West Bengal in fulfilling the secular promises enshrined in the Indian constitution. Published in "India International Centre Quarterly" (Winter 2021-Spring 2022)

This paper develops the theme of the Local Exchange Trading System of Michael Linton, the new associationist movement of Kojin Karatani for producing workers’ cum consumers’ cooperatives based on the exchange principle of mutual aid and Gandhi’s boycott strategies as a site of popular mobilisation. In this respect, this paper complements the limita...

On 22nd August 2017, the Supreme Court of India delivered a landmark judgment, terming the pronouncement of instant triple talaq (talaq-e-biddat or heretical and irregular mode of divorce) as ‘unconstitutional’ by a 3:2 majority vote in a five-judge bench. In this respect, this paper will analyse the legal and the theological discourse that has bee...

Capitalism has been the dominant socio-economic system in the world over the last few centuries. Scholars within the two separate academic disciplines of political economy and political philosophy have been interested in thinking of a social structure beyond capitalism or constructing an alternative system to capitalism. This chapter will follow th...

This chapter examines the political rhetoric of rightwing populism, ideologically backed by the communal-fascist and the majoritarian nationalist forces in India in the context of the debates pertaining to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The contemporary debates on citizenship in India have a specifi...

The Indian Maoists and the largest contingent of India’s parliamentary Left started their political journey on two divergent paths from the late 1960s. The Indian Maoists aim to capture political power with an armed rebellion. In contrast, the parliamentary Left identified electoral democracy as a site of political struggle necessary to change soci...

The normative idea of justice has been debated within the long tradition of political philosophy. Since the ideas of justice and injustice have been contested from varied ideological positions and there is hardly any conclusive, comprehensive and consensual theory of justice; it is only fair to say that there can never be an adequate theory of just...

This chapter argues that the Hollywood blockbuster, Avatar (2009) directed by James Cameron, reflects various issues associated with the project of extractive capitalism and contemporary imperialism. After briefly analysing Cameron’s filmography, it proceeds to argue the strengths and weaknesses of the film in providing a critique of modern imperia...

This chapter seeks to conceptualise the specific form of state populism in India by examining the articulatory practices of Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party in India, and the rhetoric and government policies of Narendra Modi, the elected Prime Minister of world’s largest democracy. While populism is regarded as the equivalential logic of th...

In this chapter, the concern over private versus public is interrogated through an innovating reading of Islamic discourses. It precisely argues that the dimensions and boundaries of politics and religion seem to be fuzzy and artificial as the western modernist enlightenment tried to bifurcate between church and the state/politics. It further point...

This chapter will foreground two theoretical concepts of disagreement and dissensus as the starting point to understand public protests and political dissent. The chapter will then analyse the presence and absence of the ‘public’ in public protests. After doing a brief historical survey, the chapter will locate two different kinds of public protest...

This chapter is going to interrogate the idea of the ummah by examining two sets of events in modern South Asia, a region with the largest concentration of Muslims in the world. Firstly, it will trace the debate between the idea of ‘composite nationalism’ and strong defence for Indian nationalist discourses in Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani and Maula...

Is there a difference between majoritarian nationalism and rightwing populism? How do we assess the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the centre? Is it majoritarian nationalist or rightwing populist? This chapter will attempt to answer such questions in the context of the post-2014 political scenario...

This chapter primarily analyses the politics of Muslim particularism. This politics is predominantly focused on the issues of Muslim identity (such as personal laws, blasphemy, minority status of educational institutions, and so on) and security. The chapter is also concerned with delineating the limits of such a narrow sectarian politics. It argue...

The Prologue contextualises the socio-economic conditions of Muslim minorities in contemporary India. It points out severe income inequality as the most significant feature of contemporary India, which is governed by the logic of neoliberal economic policies. This chapter reviews the political, policymaking, and academic discourses in the socio-pol...

The Epilogue argues that a politics of social justice with core democratic demands for affirmative action and representation needs to be complemented with a politics of distributive justice that has a concern with equity. Thus, to address the issue of marginalization, a progressive politics needs to articulate the arguments of both ‘redistribution’...

Chapter 1 points out the socio-economic backwardness of Indian Muslims while analysing various data sets from the Census and NSSO reports, the India Human Development Report, various reports prepared by several important committees appointed by the government of India along with and other relevant literature. The chapter argues that the Muslim ques...

Chapter 3 assesses the underlying political logic of community-based affirmative action and reservation that is promoted as the new ameliorative policy, addressing the deprivation of Indian Muslims under conditions of economic reforms. It does so by engaging with the findings and policy prescriptions of the Sachar Committee Report, the Ranganath Mi...

This chapter depicts the nature of image constructions of Indian Muslims by the ideological state apparatus of popular Bollywood cinema. It argues that a constant process of vilification of Muslims in Hindi cinema has produced the image of a ‘Muslim Other’, which is contradictory to the image of a law-abiding citizen. Such a cultural process of hom...

The Islamic belief in the universal identity of Muslims, as primarily a religious one, is related to the Islamic faith in the homogenous concept of the umma (international or global community of Muslim believers). However, the empirical reality is that the Muslim umma is fragmented and heterogeneous not only in terms of distinct theological sects l...

This essay argues that the Hollywood blockbuster, Avatar (2009) directed by James Cameron reflects various issues associated with the project of extractive capitalism and contemporary imperialism. After briefly analysing Cameron’s filmography, it proceeds to argue the strengths and weaknesses of the film in providing a critique of modern imperialis...

This essay primarily deals with three key moments in the historical evolution of the concept of jihad. While the first two moments will be traced to the early and late colonial context of South Asia, the third is a brief analysis of the contemporary, or what is today known as the idea of ‘global jihad’.

This essay briefly engages with the life and works of the Argentine political theorist, Ernesto Laclau.

Indian Muslims neither own the major means of production nor control the policy making decisions of the state. Rarely do we find the presence of big capital and big landlords among the Muslim community in contemporary neoliberal India. The partition led to the migration of Muslim elites to the then West and East Pakistan leaving behind majority of...

This paper seeks to answer whether ‘community identity’ of Muslims in contemporary India can be politically articulated in a struggle to transform ‘group identity’/‘communal identity’ to a secular identification of the Muslims along the lines of ‘socio-economic deprivation’ and ‘progressive politics’. The neglect of class issues involved in ‘commun...

This essay attempts to locate the political dimensions of Islam and the politics within Islamic traditions and history. In this regard, the paper is primarily anchored by two theoretical frameworks: (a) psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan and (b) post-Marxist combination of Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek who are indebted to the Freud...

The questions of antagonism, hegemony and imperialism are missing in Amartya Sen's treatise The Idea of Justice. One cannot comprehensively understand the notions of justice and injustice without addressing these core issues.

Can we argue the Muslim question in India as a class question given the current situation of overall socio-economic and political marginalisation, deprivation and backwardness? Even within the progressive academia, the class issues, related to the social mobility of Indian Muslims have often been unheard. The articulation of class dimensions in add...

This article critically argues that Hindi cinema originating from Mumbai, popularly known as Bollywood cinema, has more often than not misrepresented the Indian Muslims in terms of characters and protagonists. Hindi films have wrongfully portrayed the Muslims either as non-modern feudal characters or as anti-national, terrorist, villain, or anti-so...

This paper will locate some critical reflections on the Sachar Committee report besides arguing against the rhetoric of ‘Muslim appeasement’ and other myths. In the context of overall socio-economic backwardness of the Indian Muslims that largely defeats the rightwing argument of ‘Muslim appeasement,’ the Sachar Committee made some recommendations...

This paper is a review of the literature on postmodernism, cultural theory and globalization. It attempts to theorize how postmodernised forms of cultural globalisation threatens folk cultural practices.