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The latest video from The Print, narrated by Amana Ansari and framed under a conveniently misleading headline by Shekhar Gupta, is not journalism. It is political damage control dressed up as introspection. The headline-“Why should only Muslims be responsible for defending secularism?” – entirely changes the crux of the discussion.

That distinction matters. But precision is rarely useful when the objective is to rewrite political memory.

The video begins with a carefully curated anecdote. At around [01:43], the narrator claims there is supposedly no “single Muslim political mind” in her family, no collective instruction, no unified electoral impulse, even questioning why such a perception would exist in India at all. One almost expects the audience to collectively forget seventy years of electoral arithmetic overnight.

India did not invent the term “Muslim vote bank” out of thin air. It emerged because political parties themselves cultivated it, relied upon it, and publicly strategised around it. After Congress’s initial success until the 1990s, from Uttar Pradesh to Bihar to West Bengal, so-called secular parties built entire coalitions around community consolidation. The Samajwadi Party perfected the “M-Y equation.” Congress sustained minority consolidation as a moral instrument against “communal forces.” The TMC openly benefitted from bloc voting in Bengal for years while presenting itself as the final barrier against the BJP. Yet now, after the arithmetic has started failing, we are suddenly told the consolidation never truly existed. Remarkable!

More remarkable, however, is the selective amnesia about who actually engineered fear politics. At roughly [03:22], the video itself admits that Muslims were politically conditioned to believe that if certain parties lost power, “something terrible would happen.” Yet notice the sleight of hand: the parties that manufactured this permanent siege mentality are never seriously interrogated.

Who reduced Muslims to a fearful electoral commodity? Was it Owaisi? Or was it decades of Congress tokenism, SP symbolism, RJD theatrics, and TMC-style emotional blackmail? By [04:21], the narrator concedes that these parties essentially offered “symbolic protection” while demanding total electoral loyalty. They preserved clerical intermediaries, encouraged dependency politics, and treated genuine socio-economic reform as electorally inconvenient.

Yet the blame, astonishingly, is redirected toward Asaduddin Owaisi around [05:05] — a leader whose practical influence remains geographically limited compared to the national footprint of Congress or the entrenched regional machinery of SP and TMC. Owaisi becomes the designated villain because he is rhetorically useful: Muslim enough to blame, but politically isolated enough to sacrifice.

This is the classic secular ecosystem reflex. Shield the establishment architects of identity politics while projecting fringe or peripheral figures as the real problem.

Even more intellectually dishonest is the attempt to portray Muslims as unfairly burdened with “saving secularism.” At [03:06], the central premise becomes: “Why should only Muslims be responsible for defending secularism?” But that is a complete strawman. The criticism has never been that Muslims voted for secularism. The criticism is that secularism itself became electorally transactional. Over time, it stopped meaning equal citizenship and started meaning strategic consolidation against one side of the political spectrum.

And here lies the real discomfort.

For decades, political messaging in many regions effectively boiled down to: “Vote collectively, or the BJP will destroy you.” That fear-based politics created short-term consolidation but also triggered predictable counter-polarisation among the majority electorate. Eventually, a consolidated Hindu vote emerged not in a vacuum, but as a reaction to openly acknowledged caste-community arithmetic practiced for decades by secular parties themselves.

Now that this formula is yielding diminishing returns, the narrative has shifted dramatically. Yesterday’s muscular “Stop BJP at all costs” politics is today repackaged as wounded victimhood: “Why are we being excluded politically?”

Because politics, unfortunately, has consequences.

The most revealing part of the video is its attempt to frame Muslim electoral sidelining entirely as a product of Hindutva rhetoric. At [07:01], Suvendu Adhikari’s statement about working only for those who voted for him is cited as evidence of democratic exclusion, and by [07:09], the discussion escalates into the claim that Muslims are being pushed outside the “shared nation.”

But this conveniently ignores the fundamental democratic principle of electoral reciprocity. If a community votes overwhelmingly and consistently against a party, that party — once electorally dominant — is unlikely to view the community as politically indispensable. One may dislike that reality morally, but pretending it emerged from nowhere is intellectually fraudulent.

The tragedy is not that Muslims are being “excluded” from Indian politics. The tragedy is that secular parties ensured they remained electorally useful but politically dependent. For decades, they were mobilised emotionally, not empowered institutionally. Education, entrepreneurship, representation in modern sectors, and integration into broader aspirational politics took a backseat to fear-driven mobilisation.

And now, after the old arithmetic has collapsed against a consolidated majority, the same ecosystem seeks a graceful exit. Hence this new rhetorical pivot: deny bloc voting, blame Hindutva, scapegoat Owaisi, and erase the historical role of the secular establishment itself. The problem with rewriting history, however, is that voters remember it better than journalists imagine.