5 - Rethinking Minority

Summary

This chapter recalls the origins of the CMRA – a bill applicable to all religious communities in India – in the Hindu Child Marriage Bill and showcases the procedural and epistemic minoritization of Muslims and Islamic principles in the Legislative Assembly and the public sphere that took place during this transformation. This chapter complicates the so-called Muslim demand for exemption from the CMRA by pointing to the heterogeneity of Muslim opinions on the bill, as well as the multiple sources of dissent – ranging from a movement to reform of Muslim custom that resembled the motivations behind Sarda’s bill, on the one hand, and a protest against the procedural minoritization of the community during the passage of the bill, on the other. This chapter shows how “the Muslim” was rendered into a political minority, and attributed a backward sexuality, just as Hindu reformism assumed the mantle of secularism and the CMRA became recast as the collective goal of the nation.