Mediating Muslim citizenship? AIMIM and its letters

Many scholars of the Indian State now argue that, given its limited resources and capacities to recognize and service its citizen-subjects, it relies on numerous mediators, including political parties, to administer, govern and rule its populace. The discourse of Indian citizenship meanwhile has moved towards the principle of ethnicity, making Muslim citizenship – as a legal status, a bundle of rights and entitlements, or a sense of identity and belonging (Jayal, 2013, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2) – an increasingly fraught terrain. Located in this theoretical context, our paper examines the political mediation process put in place by the Hyderabad based Muslim political party, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM). Drawing on fieldwork at its office, known as Darussalam, during 2010–2011, we argue that this organized mediation is a response to the marginalization of Muslims in the region, which has also evolved to respond to the needs of another marginalized population, Dalits. As such it should be read as a likely form that political representation of the marginalized and Muslims could take in post-colonial India.