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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the discourses, languages and vocabularies of political participation articulated by marginalized Muslim communities in India, particularly Miya Muslims in Assam. Based on ethnographic fieldwork it situates these expressions within the Indian state’s polarizing citizenship regime

Paper long abstract

The paper examines how members of the Miya community conceive of themselves as active political subjects through the act of voting, in a context where fear of not voting is intertwined with fear of not being documented and thus rendered invisible or suspect within the documentary, political, and social imagination of the Indian nation-state. This fear is believed to have shaped the community’s relationship to the Indian state.

By locating the discourses surrounding participatory democracy and political subjectivity in India, the paper aims to unsettle this trope of Muslims as a monolithic, scared or easily appeased ‘vote bank’. Fieldwork with the Miya Muslim community reveals varied motivations for voting: maintaining community belonging, avoiding social isolation, building documentation trails to facilitate mobility and avert citizenship trials, upholding neighbourhood harmony in mixed localities, or feeling anchored in the social world. These motivations are rarely framed solely in the language of rights, duties, or good citizenry. Instead, voting emerges as a textured social and political practice embedded in everyday life.

Voting thus functions as a political ritual shaped by locally grounded meanings of citizenship that do not always align with normative ideals of ‘good citizenship’. Participation often emerges from everyday concerns such as maintaining neighbourly relations, signalling one’s place in the community, and performing belonging within family, gendered households, and village life. Citizenship is thus articulated less through fear, party politics or polarized ideologies than through social expectations, relational obligations, and the desire for inclusion in both local society and the imagined nation-state.