India: Outrage after Cambridgeeducated Muslim academic arrested over online post
Outrage has erupted in India after a Muslim professor was arrested over a social media post which praised India's military operations against Pakistan while criticising attacks on Indian Muslims.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad, 42, is a British-educated associate professor of political science at Ashoka University. He studied at Winchester College, a boarding school in England, and earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2014.
Mahmudabad was arrested on Sunday in New Delhi after a complaint was filed against him by a youth leader of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Rights groups and prominent commentators have erupted in outrage.
Aakar Patel, the chair of Amnesty International India, said: "Mahmudabad is in jail not because of what he wrote but because he's Muslim."
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The academic was arrested under sections of the criminal code pertaining to acts prejudicial to maintaining communal harmony, the incitement of armed rebellion or subversive activities and insulting religious beliefs.
Ashoka University's faculty association released a statement condemning his arrest on what it called "groundless and untenable charges".
The university, by contrast, issued a statement distancing itself from the academic's social media posts.
But more than 1,000 academics have signed a letter of support for Mahmudabad, including prominent historians Romila Thapar and Ramachandra Guha.
The Print, a major Indian news outlet, said that the "vicious hounding and egregious arrest" of Mahmudabad was a "shameful insult to our millenia-old democratic tradition".
'Vicious hounding and egregious arrest'
Mahmudabad, who was born in 1982, was a national spokesperson of the left-wing Samajwadi Party from 2019 to 2022.
He hails from north Indian nobility, and his grandfather, Mohammed Amir Ahmed Khan, was a nobleman and prominent member of the All India Muslim League before the partition of the subcontinent.
He was arrested over a Facebook post on 8 May. In the post, Mahmudabad responded to a press conference given by Colonel Sofiya Qureishi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh, two spokeswomen for the Indian Armed Forces, on India's military operation against Pakistan.
'Mahmudabad is in jail not because of what he wrote but because he's Muslim'
- Aakar Patel, Amnesty International India
"I am very happy to see so many right wing commentators applauding Colonel Sophia Qureishi," Mahmudabad wrote, "but perhaps they could also equally loudly demand that the victims of mob lynchings, arbitrary bulldozing and others who are victims of the BJP’s hate mongering be protected as Indian citizens."
Qureishi, an Indian Muslim, had been widely praised in the Indian media. Mahmudabad argued that "the press conference was just a fleeting glimpse – an illusion and allusion perhaps – to an India that defied the logic on which Pakistan was built."
He added that "the grassroots reality that common Muslims face is different from what the government tried to show but at the same time the press conference shows that an India, united in its diversity, is not completely dead as an idea."
He also criticised the Pakistani military, saying it "has used militarised non-state actors to destabilise the region for far too long while also claiming to be victims on the international stage."
'Utterly condemnable'
India's most prominent Muslim politician, Asaduddin Owaisi, slammed the arrest as "utterly condemnable", noting that "a mere complaint by a BJP worker" provoked the police to take action.
Internet personality Ramesh Srivats, who has nearly 4m followers on social media platform X, remarked that he could see no issue with Mahmudabad's post.
"Maybe these days, even long sentences can lead to long sentences," he said.
The arrest came days after the state of Haryana Women’s Commission claimed on Monday that Mahmudabad's statement "disparaged women officers in the Indian Armed Forces and promoted communal disharmony", and summoned him.
Mahmudabad responded that "there is nothing remotely misogynistic about my comments that could be construed as anti-women".
On Wednesday 7 May, India launched a deadly attack on Pakistani territory on Wednesday morning, which Pakistan said killed at least 36 people, including civilians.
India said Pakistani shelling killed at least 16 people, civilians among them, in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
After that came nearly four days of intense aerial incursions and shelling between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, until US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the two countries had come to a ceasefire.
Conflict over the divided former princely state of Kashmir has caused three wars between India and Pakistan. Both countries accuse the other of occupying the region.
India currently claims the region as "integral" to its sovereignty, while Pakistan calls for a plebiscite - including in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir - to give Kashmiris the right to self-determination.
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