At the time of writing this book, the Muslim minority identity itself seems to be under existential threat in India. With the passage of the Constitutional Amendment Act and the impending countrywide National Register of Citizenships, the Muslim minority stands to be shorn of whatever little rights it possessed in Indian democracy. This Act facilitates the naturalisation of migrants belonging to ‘Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian’ communities and migrated to Indian from ‘Afganisthan, Bangladesh, or Pakistan’ who entered India on or before 31 December 2014. This is yet another legislative move in a long history of marginalisation and otherisation of Muslim minorities by the purported secular, liberal Indian state. But it is more salient than earlier legislative interventions. Pratap Bhanu Mehta observes that this is the first time since India's Constitution was enacted in 1949 that the Parliament has ‘explicitly linked religious identity to citizenship’. Mehta observes that the act redefines Indian national identity ‘emphatically in the direction of becoming an ethnocracy’. He argues that this is the culmination of the long desired ideal of Hindu nationalists to remake India ‘as a homeland for Hindus, embracing an idea of nationhood similar to the Israeli model’. This is an extension of the ‘unfinished business of partition that Hindu nationalists’ want to complete as they want to signal to ‘Muslims inside India that they don't have an equal claim to belonging here’. In addition to the implementation of the CAA, the expansive and arbitrary use of anti-terror laws in the recent past has led to widespread incarceration of Muslim youth. There has been a concerted effort to police inter-faith marriages by several state governments using legislation that penalises such marriages by linking them to religious conversions. Muslim youth in interfaith relationships have largely been the target of such legislation. The trope of love-jihad has been invoked by the Hindu right in India to demonise Muslim men marrying Hindu women; Muslim men are considered to be participating in a larger project of converting Hindu women to Islam.

Along with the Constitutional Amendment Act, there is an impending proposal to initiate a nation-wide National Register of Citizens, a document which is meant to categorise the legal citizenship status of all individuals in India. Scholars have pointed out that this could lead to a genuine humanitarian crisis in India, a country where poor people find it very hard to access identification documents.