The protests in Jammu against the admission of Muslim students to the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence (SMVDIME) in Jammu and Kashmir did not arise in a vacuum. They belong to a longer and troubling genealogy of movements in post-Independence India, where public institutions, whether for jobs, housing, education or anything, are repeatedly claimed as the preserve of a particular linguistic, regional, caste or religious group.
What has changed over time is not the impulse to exclude, but the idiom of exclusion. Where once the language was regional or linguistic, today it is increasingly civilisational and religious.
Understanding this trajectory is essential if the Indian State is to meaningfully arrest the centrifugal forces now pulling the society apart.
‘Sons of the Soil’ politics
The earliest and most influential template for exclusionary mobilisation in modern India emerged in Maharashtra in the 1960s with the rise of Shiv Sena under Bal Thackeray. The Sena’s core demand was not religious but regional: Preferential employment for “Marathi manoos” by exclusion of South Indians, Gujaratis and later North Indians from jobs and economic spaces in Mumbai.
Public sector employment, municipal jobs and even private enterprise were pressured, sometimes violently, to conform to an identity-based entitlement. While couched as protection of local dignity, this marked an early shift from constitutional citizenship to ethno-cultural proprietorship.
Crucially, the State often responded not with firm constitutional enforcement but with accommodation, setting a dangerous precedent that street power could rewrite equal-access norms. Political myopia had taken root.
This model soon replicated itself across India, mutating to suit local anxieties. The Assam Movement reframed citizenship through ethnicity and language, culminating in long-term social fault lines. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana saw “Mulki” and later domicile-based agitations, which sought preferential access to education and government employment.
In Karnataka, periodic demands emerged for “Kannadiga first” policies in jobs and higher education. Hill states and North-East regimes saw local reservations, some constitutionally sanctioned, others informally enforced, which blurred the line between protection and exclusion.
In each case, constitutional equality yielded ground to negotiated identity claims, often justified as historical correction or cultural survival.
Caste reservation, a political battleground
The Mandal era institutionalised caste as a central axis of public policy. While constitutionally grounded in social justice, it also normalised the idea that access to opportunity is primarily a function of group identity.
Subsequent agitations, whether Jat, Patidar or Maratha, further blurred the distinction between remedial justice and competitive entitlement. The streets became arenas where groups sought inclusion or exclusion through pressure rather than principle. The courts looked away, indicating suo motu power.
This matters because it conditioned society to accept that numerical strength and agitation can override meritocratic or neutral legal frameworks.
Identity claims to religious exclusion
What distinguishes the SMVDIME agitation from earlier movements is its explicit religious character. Here, the demand is no longer “reserve some seats for us,” but “exclude Muslims entirely because they are Muslims.”
A demon in hiding, wearing camouflage, has shed all pretence and emerged from the shadows of a covert political agenda.
The assertion that a public medical college, established by statute, funded and regulated by the State, should admit only Hindu students because pilgrims donated to a shrine marks a profound constitutional rupture that the judiciary must address immediately and firmly if it is to remain relevant.
The demand recasts citizens as beneficiaries of religious charity and public institutions as sectarian assets, subordinating merit to claimed faith.
This is a decisive step beyond “sons of the soil” politics. It gestures toward religious proprietorship over State functions, something the Constitution was expressly designed to prevent. If the constitutional courts still choose to look away, we will not need to be told why: in the law of evidence, we learn that conduct reveals intent, reveals state of mind or belief.
A national warning
When protestors demand that Muslim students be “shifted elsewhere,” they echo a logic seen historically in far darker chapters of world history: weaponising a segment to separate and displace “the other,” then “sanitise” an area, legitimising loot, murder and mayhem against that other.
Former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah was, therefore, not making a partisan statement when he reminded the public that admissions were mandated to be merit-based and secular. He was articulating a constitutional red line. If crossed, the horrendous implications are national: tomorrow, linguistic groups may demand exclusive universities, religious majorities may claim hospitals built with “their” donations, and regions may insist courts, schools or markets reflect demographic dominance. At that point, the Republic dissolves into competing moral ghettos.
What the State must learn
The lesson from six decades of identity-based mobilisation is stark. Accommodation without principle breeds escalation. To curb this trajectory of disintegration, the State must act with historical awareness and constitutional resolve. What must it then do?
Draw an unambiguous boundary.
Regional or cultural pride may be expressed democratically, but exclusion from public institutions on identity grounds must be non-negotiably prohibited.
Two, stop treating unconstitutional agitations as legitimate.
There is a difference between protest for rights and protest for the denial of rights. The latter must face firm legal and judicial response, not political negotiation. When the executive goes overboard, as in the case of regularizing unauthorized constructions, doesn’t the judiciary negate and junk all such efforts? Then, in such matters of grave national significance constituting threats to the integrity of the nation, is the same judiciary without any responsibility?
Three, de-communalise public institutions.
Shrine boards, religious trusts, and cultural bodies must have zero influence over admissions, recruitment or policy in State institutions.
Fourth, restore the moral authority of merit and Constitution-based entitlement.
Merit is not elitism; it is the only neutral language in a diverse society. Undermining it invites endless conflict.
Fifth, invest in constitutionalism, not parochial pseudo-nationalism.
The State must actively teach, and not merely assume, why India chose secular citizenship over civilizational statehood. Silence allows myth to replace law. A state that chooses to ignore directive principles of State policy in making legislation effectively illegitimises itself.
Analysis: The moment of truth
From the Shiv Sena’s linguistic exclusionism to today’s faith-based demands, India’s social fractures reveal a consistent pattern: when identity becomes entitlement, the Constitution becomes optional.
Majoritarian claims of junking the constitution of a secular state to create a distorted Avatar in allegedly theological colours is nothing but a fraud upon the Constitution, a fraud not just upon the minorities: the Muslims, the Christians, the Sikhs, the Parsis, but in fact on the Hindus as well as atheists who batted for a secular Constitution.
The SMVDIME controversy is therefore not about Hindu versus Muslim, nor Jammu versus Kashmir. It is about whether India remains a constitutional republic or becomes a patchwork of aggrieved majorities claiming ownership over the State, with hate of the other as their illegitimate basis.
History shows that once exclusion becomes acceptable in principle, it never remains limited in scope. The Constitution’s framers foresaw this danger. The only question that remains is whether the present crop of politicians proves to be Statesmen or continue in their self-assumed role of political pygmies, and whether a State through its judiciary and executive still has the will to defend it.
Jai Hind.
| 
