How could we forget a violent massacre of such a massive magnitude that occurred at the very heart of the country? How do we read such a historical event in the wake of an authoritarian Hindu Raj and the making of contemporary Muslim discourses?

Although these are the same questions that I have been attempting to explore at a conceptual level throughout, the origins of such questions lie in the everyday lives of my interlocutors of the Police Action. My documentation of oral histories about the Police Action started in 2006 and came to an end in the first week of January 2020 when I witnessed a huge “million people march” in Hyderabad (Figure C.1) against the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Mass protests during this period have registered a “high visibility” of common Muslims in the public sphere of South Asia. As Akeel Bilgrami suggested, “The common Muslim has done what even Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, or Azad couldn’t.” Some of my interlocutors, since they were also active in the political sphere during their twenties, tried to make connections between 1948 and 2020 when the citizenship of Muslims metamorphosed into a “national problem.” As a result of Hindu nationalism or ethnonationalism, the being and belonging of Muslims in India have become a major “problem,” both empirically and theoretically. As Manan Ahmed noted: “To be a Muslim in India today is to be a problem. The Muslim is a theological problem, a social problem, a cultural problem, and critically, a geopolitical problem.”

While working on this book between 2012 and 2021, I also witnessed the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) in the USA. The question of why some lives do not matter became a major debate, as the minoritized voices of African Americans, Muslims, and women marched along the main streets throughout the nation. As a student who has an interest in the making of everyday religious lives of marginalized communities, particularly Muslims, I began to make a few connections of questions such as Muslim being and belonging, the idea of citizenship, and the hegemony of a nationalist narrative that became prominent in everyday debates in the USA and India too.