31 Oct 2026
During the CAA protests of 2019, I made it a point to engage with young students, activists, first-time protesters, and, on one occasion, a group that included former ABVP members. I asked them directly,”What do you see as the problems with Muslim communities in India?” The answers came easily, rehearsed almost – polygamy, animal cruelty, triple talaq, large families, hyper-religiosity, lack of interest in education and modernity, unclean practices, and disloyalty to the Indian nation-state.
Then I pushed further. Suppose Muslim communities addressed every one of these grievances, worked on each, and resolved them over time. Would the state’s posture toward Muslims shift? Would the response of dominant societal forces change?
They smiled. One said, quietly but clearly, “No. New issues will emerge.”
That answer has stayed with me as a precise diagnosis of how Islamophobia functions in contemporary India, not as a response to Muslim conduct, but as a racialized governmentality (Sayyid, 2014) or governing technology (Kumar, 2012; Kundnani, 2014) that requires no justification from reality. The grievances are not the point. The point is the framework of permanent suspicion that makes new grievances always available. We have watched this grammar generate new accusations with clockwork regularity, love jehad, thook jehad, land jehad, UPSC jehad, corporate jehad. And now, in the Home Minister’s latest lexical invention, jehadi drugs. The list is not closing. It is a serial production.
Islamophobia as governance, not sentiment
To understand this pattern, we need to move beyond the popular view of Islamophobia as prejudice, as a failure of individual tolerance, or an excess of communal emotion. The more analytically useful frame, developed by scholars like Deepa Kumar and Arun Kundnani, is Islamophobia as a governance technology, a systematic practice through which the state manages populations, mobilizes political coalitions, and deflects accountability for structural failures by directing anxiety onto a designated enemy community (Kumar, 2012; Kundnani, 2014). The enemy need not do anything specific to qualify. Their existence, or rather the political construction of their existence as threatening, is the condition that makes governance possible.
In this frame, the “jehad” suffix is not a description. It is an administrative tool. Each new allegation opens a fresh front of surveillance, prosecution, and social discipline against Muslims while simultaneously satisfying the Hindu nationalist electoral base. The content changes; the grammar remains identical. When my ABVP interlocutors predicted that new issues would emerge, they were not cynics confessing. They were, perhaps unknowingly, articulating a structural insight about how power reproduces itself.
The drug war as the contemporary front
The narcotics domain is the newly listed and, in some ways, the most revealing application of this grammar. In May 2026, following the first-ever seizure of Captagon by the Narcotics Control Bureau through Operation RAGEPILL, Union Home Minister Amit Shah publicly described the drug as the “so-called Jihadi Drug,” framing the consignment as part of a transnational Islamic trafficking network (Manral, 2026). The rhetorical move transforms a complex public health and regulatory failure into a civilizational conflict, and positions Muslims as its agents within India’s borders.
The political use of this framing deserves scrutiny precisely because the empirical reality runs in the opposite direction. India’s drug crisis is substantially a domestic, pharmaceutical story. The 2019 national survey by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, the most comprehensive study of its kind, found pharmaceutical sedatives and opioids to be accounting for close to half of all drug use nationally (Ambekar et al., 2019). The Vidhi Center for Legal Policy’s landmark study, From Addict to Convict, based on 13,350 judgments from Punjab’s Special NDPS Courts, found that cases involving pharmaceutical drugs had a majority share in total drug abuse cases across several Punjab districts, with the share exceeding 80 percent in Gurdaspur and Pathankot (Singhal et al., 2018). India is, after all, the pharmacy of the world, home to over 10,500 pharmaceutical companies.
The Pulitzer Center’s investigation into India’s drug regulatory failures documented how systemic institutional lapses enable the mass diversion of controlled substances into illicit markets, with a retired Drug Controller General describing government crackdowns as exercises “done to generate press,” leaving structural failures entirely intact (Krishnan & John, 2025). This is the inconvenient reality that the “jehadi drugs” narrative is designed to obscure.
The numbers that tell the story
One striking indication of the potential religious disproportionality in drug enforcement emerges from Assam. Under Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s Mission Assam Against Drugs, the state reportedly arrested 20,293 individuals under the NDPS Act and seized or destroyed narcotics valued at approximately ₹2,604 crore between May 2021 and May 2025 (The Sentinel, 2025; India Today NE, 2025). More controversially, Organizer Weekly reported, citing unnamed sources monitoring the operations, that close to 90 percent of those arrested were Muslim men, while approximately 95 percent of the arrested women belonged to the Muslim community (Bordoloi, 2025). These reported figures are particularly noteworthy in a state where Muslims constituted 34.22 percent of the population according to the 2011 Census (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, 2011). Although the religious composition of those arrested has not been independently verified through official disaggregated data, the reported disparity raises important questions about the intersection of religious identity, policing practices and drug-law enforcement in Assam.
This is not aberrant policing. It is patterned enforcement consistent with the broader machinery documented by the South Asia Justice Campaign’s India Persecution Tracker across several states. Law, order, and national security frameworks were being used in ways that disproportionately affected Muslims, and the process itself, the tracker observed, functioned as punishment even when cases eventually collapsed (South Asia Justice Campaign, 2026). Drug enforcement sits within this ecosystem, not as an exception but as one instrument in an interlocking apparatus of communal control.
Corporate complicity and the political economy of deflection
The Islamophobic drug narrative also serves capital. By directing enforcement and public attention toward cross-border Muslim networks, the state insulates the domestic pharmaceutical industry from accountability for its central role in the addiction crisis. The pharmaceutical sector is among India’s largest export industries and a significant political constituency. A drug policy that scapegoats Muslim communities at the border while leaving pharma supply chains and regulatory failures largely untouched is a policy working precisely as designed, for the corporate interests it shields.
This is what Vivek Chibber’s analysis of Hindu nationalism identifies as its double movement, the mobilization of cultural and religious panic to cement majoritarian coalitions, running simultaneously alongside the protection of ruling-class economic interests (Chibber, 2013). The Muslim drug peddler is doubly useful in this arrangement, as an electoral rallying point and as a structural deflection from the boardrooms, distribution networks, and regulatory offices where India’s addiction crisis is actually being generated.
Conclusion: The infinite grammar
Returning to that conversation in 2019, what those young men intuited, and what we are now witnessing across every domain of public life, is that the “jehad” frame is not a list of complaints awaiting resolution. It is a generative syntax. You cannot satisfy it, because it is not making demands of Muslims. It is making demands of the state, demands for an endlessly renewable enemy whose management justifies power, deflects accountability, and produces electoral solidarity.
“Jehadi drugs” will join love jehad, thook jehad, and land jehad in this expanding lexicon. And if drug enforcement is somehow resolved, or if the pharmaceutical reality becomes too embarrassing to ignore, something else will be named. The grammar will persist because the grammar is the point.
India’s drug policy, viewed clearly, is not primarily about drugs. It is about a form of governance that requires the permanent production of Muslim culpability, a state that needs its Muslim problem more than it wants to solve it.
Dr. Ajazuddin Shaikh is a researcher and activist working on the issues associated with substance use among adolescents and marginalized communities. The views presented here are his personal.
References
Ambekar, A., Agrawal, A., Rao, R., Mishra, A. K., Khandelwal, S. K., and Chadda, R. K. (2019). Magnitude of Substance Use in India. New Delhi: Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India.
Chibber, V. (2013). Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso.
Kumar, D. (2012). Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Kundnani, A. (2014). The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. London: Verso.
Krishnan, V. & John, A. (2025, March 12). The Massive Failures of India’s Drug Regulatory System. Pulitzer Center. Retrieved from The Massive Failures of India’s Drug Regulatory System | Pulitzer Center
Sayyid, S. (2014). A measure of Islamophobia. Islamophobia Studies Journal, 2(1), 10-25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/islastudj.2.1.0010
South Asia Justice Campaign (2026). India Persecution Tracker: 2025 Annual Overview. Retrieved from https://southasiajusticecampaign.org/ipt2025
Manral, S. M. (2026, May). What is ‘Jihadi Drug’? NCB seizes Captagon worth Rs 182 crore for 1st time, says Amit Shah. The Indian Express. Retrieved from What is ‘jihadi drug’? NCB seizes ‘Captagon’ worth Rs 182 crore for first time, says Amit Shah | India News – The Indian Express
Singhal, N., Mitra, A., & Sanyal, K. (2018). From Addict to Convict: The Working of the NDPS Act in Punjab. New Delhi: Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. Retrieved from From Addict to Convict
ANI. (2025, May 20). Drugs worth over Rs 2,600 cr seized, more than 20,000 arrested in Assam since 2021: CM Sarma. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/drugs-worth-over-rs2600-crore-seized-more-than-20000-arrested-in-assam-since-2021-cm-sarma/articleshow/121283106.cms
Bordoloi, D. K. (2025, May 22). Assam govt intensifies war on drugs: Over 20,000 arrested in last 4 years; Data reveals 90 per cent are Muslims. Organiser. https://organiser.org/2025/05/22/293520/bharat/assam-govt-intensifies-war-on-drugs-over-20000-arrested-in-last-4-years-data-reveals-90-per-cent-are-muslims
India Today NE. (2025, May 20). Himanta: Drugs worth over Rs 2,600 cr seized; 20,000 people arrested in Assam since May 2021. https://www.indiatodayne.in/assam/story/himanta-drugs-worth-over-rs-2600-cr-seized-20000-people-arrested-in-assam-since-may-2021-1216669-2025-05-20
Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. (2011). Census of India 2011: C-01 population by religious community, Assam. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. https://censusindia.gov.in/
The Sentinel. (2025, May 21). Assam: War on drugs nets 20,000 people, yields drugs worth Rs 2,600 crore. The Sentinel. Retrieved from https://www.sentinelassam.com/topheadlines/assam-war-on-drugs-nets-20000-people-yields-drugs-worth-rs-2600-crore
About the author
Dr Ajazuddin Shaikh
Source https://countercurrents.org/2026/10/drug-problem-and-the-infinite-grammar-of-islamophobia/
Categories: Asia, India, Islamophobia, Muslims