Muslim Political Representation in India

Thanks to the generous support from the Abbasi Program, I was able to spend time this year developing my dissertation project. This project considers how minority groups gain political representation with a focus on the case of Muslims in India, the world’s largest democracy.

The portion that I have focused on studies how Muslim political parties in India select candidates to field and how they ultimately perform in elections. I specifically examine the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party (MIM) in the November state elections in Bihar, India. Because of travel restrictions, I focused my time on understanding the processes of candidate selection remotely. This involved speaking with party workers regularly about the timeline of nominations, the candidate selection process, and the relevant factors that drove the candidate selection. I am working to obtain the specific data from the party to help me further explore this candidate selection process.

Since the election results have been released, I have been examining the success of the party in certain constituencies. I plan to combine this with the candidate selection data. I also plan to use the second release of the Abbasi funding to fund fieldwork to better understand this topic once travel is permitted.

I’m very grateful for the support of the Abbasi Program in helping me develop this project. I hope that the findings from this research will inform a broader set of work on how minority groups gain power in multi-ethnic democracies and how Muslim political parties represent the interests of Muslim citizens. Overall, this work will help expand our knowledge of Islam and Muslim societies by studying Muslim in a minority context.