A democracy with zero Muslim cabinet voices and no Muslim chief minister in 28 states has a legitimacy crisis
John Dayal
FOR the first time in recent history, Christian chief ministers head four of India’s 28 states, but none from the country’s largest religious minority, the Muslims.
In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 72-member council of ministers in New Delhi, all cabinet ministers are Hindu or Jain, with the junior ministers of state having two Sikh, two Buddhist, and a solitary Christian in their ranks.
Modi is the only prime minister in Indian history who has not had a Muslim minister in his government, though he had solitary ministers in his first two iterations.
From Jawahar Lal Nehru of the Congress to Atal Behari Vajpayee of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), senior Muslim ministers have had distinguished careers as education minister and foreign affairs minister, and two in fact have been presidents of the country — Zakir Hussain and Fakhruddin Ahmed.
Giani Zail Singh was the first and so far, only Sikh president of India. No Christian has ever been president or vice president, though the Constituent Assembly, which drafted the Constitution, elected Dr HC Mukherjee, a Christian, as its vice president with Dr Rajendra Prasad as the presiding officer.
There is at present a Sikh chief minister in the Punjab, and Christian chief ministers in Tamil Nadu and the north-eastern states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, but none in the vast Ganges and Brahmaputra hills and plains, or the central states.
There is no Muslim chief minister in India, and the few Muslim ministers are in states not governed by the BJP, which routinely does not nominate any candidates from the community in the elections.
Christian ministers, though they are more visible and have important ministries, are also in non-BJP states, including in the northeast, where governments are nominally pro-BJP.
The numbers do not lie, and what they reveal is a democracy that has become, in all but formal name, a Hindu majoritarian state where approximately 200-220 million Muslims and 28 million Christians are present as voters and taxpayers — and in jails — but absent as decision-makers, legislators, and governors, except in the northeast and the states of the southern plateau.
Muslim population hovers around 14.2-15% nationally, with Christians at about 2.3%. Together, they form nearly one in six Indians.
Yet in the 18th Lok Sabha (the upper house of the Indian parliament) elected in 2024, only 24 of 543 MPs — a mere 4.4% — are Muslim, the lowest shares since 1952. Not even one comes from the BJP, which dominates the government.
For Christians, representation is even more geographically confined to the northeast and the Telugu states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, rendering them invisible in the Hindi heartland that dictates national policy.
In the recently elected assembly of Kerala, a state where Christians have a solid political and economic control in half a dozen districts, the community returned 34 legislators from all parties but the BJP.
There are 35 Muslim members in the 140-member Kerala Legislative Assembly, almost exactly in proportion to their population.
Uttar Pradesh, with the largest Muslim population (more than 19 percent among the state’s 40 million people), offers the most damning indictment. In the 2022 assembly elections for the 403-member Assembly, only 34 Muslims were elected — about 8.4%, less than half their demographic weight, none from the ruling BJP.
The Yogi Adityanath government has no Muslim ministers. In 2002, when 64 Muslims sat in the assembly, to now, the decline tracks a deliberate squeeze — there are 143 constituencies with 20-40% Muslim voters, yet tickets and wins are throttled.
In Bihar (Muslim population 17%), their representation plummeted in the November 2025 elections. Only 11 Muslim legislators in the 243-seat assembly (4.5%), down from 19 in 2020 and 24 in 2015, with the victorious BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which has 202 seats, showing none on its benches.
Madhya Pradesh (Muslims 6.5%) is scandalous. After the 2023 elections to the 230-seat assembly, which the BJP swept without fielding Muslims, there are exactly two Muslim Legislators.
Christians fare no better outside pockets. In the Hindi belt and peninsular states, their 10-15 million are politically erased with no proportional tickets from national parties. Northeast Christians hold local power, but nationally and in core states, they are spectral.
Blame cannot rest solely on the BJP, which wears majoritarianism proudly, and fielded no winning Muslim candidates under Modi.
But the opposition’s betrayal is damning.
In the 2024 national election, the secular INDIA bloc fielded only 78 Muslim candidates (down from 115 in 2019), and the socialist Samajwadi Party in UP gave just four.
The Congress under Rahul Gandhi and party president Mallikarjun Kharge skipped Muslims in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh.
Other secular parties crave Muslim votes but fear the appeasement label and losing Hindu votes in highly polarized constituencies, treating the community as electoral fodder, not leaders.
West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress offered a regional exception (40 Muslim legislators) and paid for it by losing control of the assembly to the BJP in the latest state election.
The Justice Rajender Sachar Committee (2006) linked Muslim underrepresentation to deprivation — poverty like Dalits, low literacy/employment, and near-absence in services.
Two decades later, the chasm widens as the absent Muslim ministers mean no champions for welfare, and presence on the treasury bench voices mean less funding for minority areas, more bulldozers, anti-conversion laws, and foreign funding curbs on NGOs.
Since 1980, Muslim share fell in the Indian parliament from 10% to 4.4%. Their population rose in these years, and there should have been some 75-80 elected parliamentarians, roughly the same number as the Dalits, instead of the present 24.
Christians face similar invisibility plus targeted laws. The architecture — party selections, boundary redraws, fear — operates within law but produces exclusion. Representation is not cosmetic; it shapes resource allocation, rights, and recognition.
Worldwide, parliaments and provincial assemblies mirror the nation they govern, or else they distort policy toward those in the room.
A democracy with zero Muslim cabinet voices and no Muslim chief minister in 28 states has a legitimacy crisis. It claims consent while silencing some voices.
Activists note the silence from liberals, the complicity of opposition, and the normalization by the media to ignore the demand for a seat at the table, without which secularism remains a slogan, democracy a majoritarian sham. — UCA
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of Clarion India.
