Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a professor of political science at Ashoka University, has gained the support of the police and judiciary in India as the most recent hate figure. He is being asked to prove his innocence in a classic case of “guilty until proven innocent” because he has been accused of a crime Mahmudabad has not committed. The more he makes an admission of innocence, the more suspicion grows against him because the Supreme Court of India has already questioned his intentions and made disparaging remarks about him before creating a Special Investigative Team (SIT) to examine two Facebook posts with 1,530 words. Mahmudabad is expected to explain himself and dispel any doubts raised by the country’s highest court, despite the clarity of his posts.
In these posts, Mahmudabad criticized Pakistan for hosting terrorists while applauding India’s military assault on its neighbor. He cited the applause received by two Muslim female military officers when they presented India’s case on a global scale. He did point out that these oaths of inclusivity would continue if the ongoing Muslim persecution in India did not.
What Mahmudabad wrote had various expressions in the hands of many others before him. At a press conference, Haryana’s Women’s Commission head Renu Bhatia suddenly started expressing his anger and claimed Mahmudabad had insulted the two female officers. Many people were perplexed by her charges. Mahmudabad responded by thoroughly explaining his posts to his lawyers. Bhatia, however, dissatisfied despite disproving the evidence she had presented. She couldn’t find any words or phrases that would denigrate the female officers when questioned by a TV anchor to identify them. She continued to insist that her offended thoughts were sufficient evidence that Mahmudabad must have written something abominable. She claimed that the police had the authority to find offensive phrases and that it was her responsibility to do so.
Numerous people and media outlets scrutinized Mahmudabad’s posts after she was accused. No offensive or offensive material was discovered. Mahmudabad’s leaders rallied behind the institution to protest the Women’s Commission’s actions.
A member of the ruling Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), lodged a complaint with the Haryana police alleging that Mahmudabad had said something that hurt him and others as a result of Bhatia’s claims becoming public fodder. The complainant alleged that the same Facebook posts had offended him when they were repeated. The police charged Mahmudabad with serious crimes, including insulting religious groups, offending a community’s religious sentiments, and outraging women’s modesty. Mahmudabad was immediately detained.
Mahmudabad’s lawyers requested his release and a stay of the police investigation because they believed a close examination of his writings would expose the delusion of his accusations. However, 200 academics, including vice chancellors and heads of academic institutions, issued a statement before the hearing to urge the court to punish him. They claimed that Mahmudabad was trying to “destabilize communal harmony, undermine institutional integrity, and erode gender equality.” They urged the Supreme Court to take into account their wider socio-legal implications and characterized his posts as “veiled misogyny cloaked in pseudo-academic inquiry.”
The lawyer for Mahmudabad read the questioning posts aloud during the hearing. The court reacted sceptically, suggesting that his words sounded like dog whistles and had dual meanings. Someone who has an analytical mind will comprehend the language. The bench remarked that the words used could appear innocent but could be offensive to unintended audiences.
Three senior police officers “understand the complexity and properly appreciate the language used in the posts,” according to the Supreme Court, were then created as an SIT.
Thus, the Supreme Court’s rulings gave the impression Mahmudabad’s words could not be taken literally. Although his statements may seem benign, there must be a hidden purpose or motivation beneath his statements.
The court’s delegation of its interpretive duties to the police received a shocked public response. Was the court’s reading, analyzing, and understanding of the posts itself so challenging? Did the court’s members lack analytical minds to read and comprehend Mahmudabad’s writings? Wasn’t doing this their duty? Or did the court avoid making a decision on its own?
The SIT will operate in opposition to the court’s presumptions, which have already been refuted by Mahmudabad. How might he possibly shake such preconceived notions?
In the interim, Mahmudabad’s fog thickens. The police are looking into his family history, his devout Muslim identity, his ancestry in Pakistan, and his travels abroad. These variables will now serve as the context in which to interpret and read his posts.
Mahmudabad is being demonized by the media. Soon, the image of a devious, cunning, and plotting Muslim will appear in the collective imagination of Hindus, replacing his actual words with the dense fog of propaganda.
Mahmudabad has made an SIT appearance. The student wing of the BJP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), has also made it known that it intends to stage a public demonstration against him. Because of his writing in “antinational posts,” it is asking Ashoka University to fire him. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ruling BJP’s and ABVP’s parent organization, has joined the chorus in urging Mahmudabad to take action.
With the aid of the media, police, and judiciary, the same playbook is being used to denigrate scholars like Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, turning them into enemy figures within the BJP ecosystem.
One can only hope that the police officers read Mahmudabad’s plain lines with constitutional eyes and remain unwavering, unaffected by judicial remarks or shrill propaganda. His words, which were crafted by a Muslim mind, call for compassion, compassion, justice, equality, and dignity.
