On March 9, Sharjeel Imam was granted interim bail in the Delhi riots ‘conspiracy case’. For over five years, Imam and fellow arrestee, Umar Khalid, have languished behind bars without trial under India’s anti-terror laws for their role in agitating against India’s CAA/NRC citizenship regime. 

The ensuing political, cultural, and legal battle over the legitimacy of their protest—and, more broadly, their critique of the Indian state’s violent majoritarian practices—has revealed the extent to which the state seeks to monopolize mainstream representations of dissent. In recent years, the machinery of the Indian state and its propagandists have worked to disparage Imam and his comrades as ‘anti-nationals’ acting against the security and integrity of the state.

In June 2025, Imam’s essay “On Islamic modernism, Jinnah, democracy and the systemic exclusion of Muslims in India,” offered a decisive response to these efforts. He wrote: “We should never judge anyone by how their adversaries represent them, especially when it comes to fellow travelers.”

The Adversarial State

The notion of a ‘conspiracy case’—with its colonial lineage and long use as an instrument of repression—is deeply familiar to the Indo-Pak political vocabulary. This is especially true for those who seek to imagine radically different futures for either polity, much as their predecessors did in British India. The ‘conspirators’ of Kakori (1925), Meerut (1929), and Lahore (1929) cases understood that it was their ideas, rather than their alleged ‘acts of terrorism’, that most threatened the colonial state. 

In both India and Pakistan, that adversarial state continues to frame the dissident through a similar logic, casting them outside the nation—even when they seek to remake that very category.

Reading Sharjeel Imam on his own terms offers critical lessons not only for India, but also for Pakistan, where solidarity with the systemic dispossession and marginalization of Indian Muslims often matters only insofar as it reaffirms Pakistan’s own national project, despite its many contradictions. Victims of mob lynchings, discriminatory citizenship regimes, and political disenfranchisement become useful to Pakistanis only as they allow for the vindication of Pakistan as a supposed safe haven for Muslims. Thus, while Pakistan extends self-serving respect to the likes of Sharjeel Imam and his comrades, it often avoids any sustained interrogation of its own parallel repressive actions against the dissident. 

The Pakistani state’s overhaul of and control over democratic and legal institutions, the persistence of enforced disappearances, the attacks on ethnic and regional grievances, and the criminalization of dissent under the guise of national security are only some of the issues that demand a popular confrontation. Reading Imam prompts this reckoning, while inviting the task of recovering, reconstructing, and understanding Pakistan’s dissident histories as politically generative. 

His work also offers us an entry into understanding the figure of the alleged ‘anti-national’ as sustaining a rigorous critique that unsettles the nationalist consensus, exposing the material truths the nation refuses to confront.

Sedition as an Archive of National Anxiety

By casting various forms of critique as ‘anti-national’, the Pakistani state has continued to qualify what the nation entails, delineating which national imaginaries are worthy of protection. If anything, Pakistan possesses a longer and more entrenched history of the ‘anti-national’. 

Since 1947, the succession of ‘conspiracy cases’ has served a dual purpose—as an unofficial timeline of the country’s most significant moments of dissent, and as an archive of national anxiety. The Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951 sought to root out an alleged communist-military plot to overthrow the Liaquat Ali Khan regime; the Agartala Conspiracy Case of 1968 charged East Pakistani leaders of conspiring with India to foment an armed rebellion against the Pakistani state; and the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case of 1975 placed National Awami Party politicians from erstwhile North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan on trial. 

Today, journalists, politicians, and academics are routinely charged with sedition. Political prisoners such as Mahrang Baloch and Ali Wazir remain behind bars indefinitely and denied bail, while the state’s propaganda apparatus accuses them of abetting terrorism and brandishing anti-nationalist fervour. Both have been vocal critics of state violence and the militarization of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, respectively. In late March, Wazir was granted bail and released from Sukkur prison, only to be swiftly re-arrested in a separate sedition case and placed back on judicial remand. 

Likewise, human rights lawyers Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chattha have been sentenced to 17 years in jail for posting ‘anti-state tweets’ in what was widely recognized as a sham-trial, and remains the latest addition to this long line of juridical oppression. Imran Khan, the country’s most popular political figure, remains in solitary confinement since he fell out with the country’s military establishment. A regime of enforced disappearances and securitized violence has rendered political activists, social movements, and organized parties perpetual victims of the state. 

Historically, then, the succession of conspiracy cases and sedition charges offers a critical lens for understanding how the nation has deteriorated, shedding the facades of sovereignty, territorial integrity, national ideology, or even religion, ideals which are still ritually invoked. In Pakistan, the military-elite nexus has, perhaps more openly than ever, claimed the national category to itself, much like Brahmanical majoritarianism has done in India. 

Both states have thus come to resemble the ‘vain-glorious God’—that the socialist anticolonial revolutionary and political thinker Bhagat Singh cautioned against in his essay “Why I Am an Atheist”—a figure placed above contestation, and upheld through belief as an obligatory practice of citizenship. 

Recovering the National Antagonist

Imam’s work rejects these statist articulations, marking a significant departure from many prevailing political vocabularies. His essay meanders through reflections on family, faith, and loss, efforts to imagine systemic overhaul to protect Indian minorities, ruminations on Muslim modernism and revolutionary Islam, and references to canonical Urdu poetry. He is wary of “paying lip service to equality and secularism,” but acutely conscious of the dangers of “reducing everything to class,” noting that both frameworks have failed Muslims in India. 

It is within this broader critique that Imam emphasizes Jinnah’s relevance to confronting majoritarianism in contemporary India, even though he understands Indian Muslims to have been the foremost victims of the Partition. In this regard, Imam’s work reaches a high point of critique, fearlessly invoking the need to ‘absolve’ Jinnah against a nationalist consensus and the historical narratives it propagates. Even beyond the realm of popular rhetoric and propaganda, the substance of Jinnah’s arguments has remained historically contested, complex, and, to many, ambiguous. 

His invocation here, however, serves another purpose: to trace forms of opposition—however contentious—to the twin problems of statist centralization and rampant majoritarianism that, in Imam’s reading, converged with the project of “secular Gandhian nationalism” in the pre-independence era. Situating Jinnah in this way allows Imam to clarify the genealogical origins of a postcolonial state that sought to absorb and domesticate political differences, especially in the aftermath of the Partition. 

The communal and its political manifestations came to function as a term of contempt, as Imam argues elsewhere, emptied of any positive implications for systemic safeguards and the protection of minorities. Thus, while the rise of Hindutva signaled an “emerging fascist ecosystem,” the history of Muslim disenfranchisement in India did not begin in 2014. Rather, Imam locates its roots in the postcolonial Nehruvian state, with an earlier precursor in the form of ‘secular’ Gandhian nationalism. 

By claiming that the ideas of India’s chief historical antagonist remain crucial, if not indispensable, to any conversation about the “decentralization of power” and the protection of minority and community rights, Imam stakes out a line of critique that is easily rendered ‘anti-national’. For many Pakistani nationalists, the immediate temptation is to celebrate this apparent validation of Jinnah, reading Imam selectively, as though he merely confirms the prescience of Pakistan’s founding moment. Such a reading forecloses the more unsettling, yet generative, implications of Imam’s argument and historical method. 

In Imam’s work, the search for answers to contemporary problems in unlikely places, paired with challenging the distortions of nationalist historiography, emerges as a form of political practice that demands emulation across the border. What this method invites in Pakistan, too, is a willingness to revisit disavowed figures and inconvenient genealogies, now relegated, at best, to the ‘anti-national’ footnotes of nationalist history, to confront the country’s own historical crises of ideological exclusion, coercive state consolidation, and the systematic dispossession and silencing of ethnic and religious minorities. 

It requires a reckoning with the significance of recovering figures such as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and G. M. Syed, along with their contemporary interlocutors, many of whom remain behind bars, if Pakistan is to confront the contradictions within its imagination of a collective future. Any attempt to articulate an affirmative vision for Pakistan without such a reckoning would remain historically hollow.

The Muslim Political Subject At a Time of Crisis

Yet, Imam’s turn to history is only one facet of his political writing. Equally central for him is the task of restoring “political agency” to India’s Muslim masses, a project he sees as necessary if Muslim fundamentalism and anti-democratic reactions to modernity are to be checked together. 

These ideas hold currency well beyond India. The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran have renewed interest in Islamic resistance and Muslim anti-imperialism. In the wake of the attacks on Iran, demonstrations broke out across Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Karachi, decrying political quietism in the face of what many understood as an assault on both faith and society. 

Imam’s engagement with South Asia’s Muslim “modernist” tradition speaks to the urgency of this moment. For him, the entanglement of the political and the religious remains central to any form of liberatory politics—one that, though rooted in a particular historical context, finds resonance across the present moment. 

To this end, his reading of Iqbal, Ali Shariati, Hasrat Mohani, and Akbar Allahabadi helps shape a Muslim political subjecthood that takes discourses on political marginalization and victimhood as a point of departure, yet moves beyond them. In another article, he writes that he stands at the intersection of a ‘political’ and ‘religious’ set of ideas. The political set, he argues, attempts a “fuller appraisal of the systemic flaws in our system and appraisal of that poisonous ideology called nationalism and a fuller understanding of democracy, social justice, socialism, minority rights, and federalism.” 

The religious set consists of ideas that agitate against the ‘clerical hold of Islam’ and other “vestiges of the bygone era: sectarianism, nativism, casteism, patriarchy, and arbitrary limits on individual freedom.” By recovering the egalitarian, inclusive, and, in his words, “revolutionary” contours of Islam, Imam grounds his critique of India’s systemic flaws in a universal vision that prioritizes justice and its social realization above all. 

In Pakistan, by contrast, the state-sanctioned fusion of Islam and the political sphere has taken on a distinctly conservative orientation. 

Over a long history, the state has sought to capture religious orthodoxy, most recently on display at the National Ulema and Masaikh Conference in December 2025, where clerics publicly pledged allegiance to the state. Much of what is cast as anti-national is also charged with being anti-Islam, collapsing multiple sites of opposition, including indigenous political movements, into a single register of threat. That ‘Islam is in danger’ remains a constant orthodox refrain, making the task of recovering, reconstructing, and reimagining alternative articulations of inclusive and revolutionary Islam all the more pertinent. 

Such articulations are not unknown to the Pakistani imagination. Though not without contradiction, proponents of ‘Islamic Socialism’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s drew on a related tradition of thought to inflect the relationship between Pakistan and Islam, often assumed to be uniformly conservative, with progressive possibilities. This project, too, emerged from a longer genealogy of Muslim liberationist thought, including the work of reformers, Marxist maulanas, and attempts to imagine a Muslim nationalism attuned to a socialist and anti-imperialist milieu.

Beyond Resistance: On Dissident Political Thought

Too often, however, dissidence is reduced to an act of negation, read only through its resistance to the state’s coercive vocabulary. Imam’s writing offers something more demanding, while also foregrounding the basis of our solidarity with his struggle. His work seeks to recover alternative ways of imagining a radically different political order grounded in agency, justice, and radical critiques of nationalism itself. 

What the state brands as ‘anti-national’, then, is not only oppositional but also generative. Through their political articulation, dissidents assemble symbols, lineages, and vocabularies that can help conceive a different future. It is this work that must be read on its own terms, understood in context, and recognized as an attempt to bring such worlds into being. 

Hence, to read the dissident solely through the narrowing frame of the nation—and the beliefs it demands—is to arrive at an incomplete understanding of their ideas, and of the commitments that bind them to their struggles. 

On this side of the border, Pakistanis must be especially wary of such a reading. Any meaningful solidarity with the systemic disenfranchisement of Muslims in India remains superficial unless accompanied by a sustained interrogation of those same dissidents who contradict the prevalent idea of Pakistan itself. The task before us, then, is to move beyond adversarial, state-mediated representations of the dissident and to craft our own reading of their work, grounded in a serious appraisal of systemic exclusion, hegemonic dominance, and material oppression. 

Imam writes: “My words will remain, even if the fascists want to erase them.” 

At a time when the state narrows the definition of the nation and vilifies the dissident, ‘anti-nationalism’ is not merely a threat; it is a site of intellectual and political imagination. We should treat it as such.