When New Delhi’s push to bring Pakistan to the table on state sponsored terrorism in 2015 was turned down, by then late External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj stood firm, insisting the dialogue focus squarely on cross-border terror. Islamabad however walked away cancelling the NSA level talks. Into that moment of diplomatic deadlock stepped an unexpected voice from within India’s establishment. The former Planning Commission Member, Syeda Hameed who chose to echo Islamabad’s position on the equation wrote in NewsBlaze India, asserting and propounding the narrative; “Islamabad is prepared to come to Delhi for a comprehensive agenda but will not tolerate India dictating all terms and conditions,” a statement that closely mirrored and resonated with Pakistan’s official stance.
More concrete and striking evidences of her ideological positioning against the Indian State may be sniffed from patterns that cannot be ignored and the cumulative picture is stark. A career nurtured in part by a Pakistani political stalwart, a marriage anchoring her personally to Karachi, a publishing debut facilitated in Pakistan after rejection in India (as reported), and public interventions that align with Islamabad’s narrative on sensitive bilateral issues, all combine to expose a network of connections and sympathies that go far beyond mere “peace activism.
Hameed’s links to pro-Pakistani stance is neither incidental nor peripheral. Her uncle, Dr Mubashir Hasan (1922–2020), was no ordinary figure. A prominent member of the Pakistan People’s Party, he served as Finance Minister under Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto between 1971 and 1974 and was a close ally of Bhutto during Pakistan’s post-1971 reorientation, a period that shaped the country’s economic and ideological trajectory.
It was under his “watchful eye” that Hameed embarked on her literary career. Her seminal book on Maulana Azad was reportedly refused by reputed Indian publishers but found a home in Karachi. Oxford University Press Pakistan published it in 1998 under the title Islamic Seal on India’s Independence. A later expanded edition was reissued as Maulana Azad, Islam and the Indian National Movement. The fact that her first major historical work could only find publication across the border is telling of the intellectual sympathies that nurtured her career.
Hameed’s marriage further deepened her Pakistan connections. Her husband, Syed Mohammad Abdul Hameed, a professor of Business Studies from Karachi, met her while studying in the United States. In several of her writeups she has herself admitted to travelling “twice annually to visit family in Pakistan”.
To add on, her long standing engagements with cross-border initiatives such as Aaghaz-e-Dosti, reinforces her position as a prominent voice of the “peace lobby”, a lobby that often downplays Pakistan’s role in fomenting terrorism while emphasizing India’s supposed intransigence. In 2017, she launched ‘The Peace’ magazine in Delhi after it had already been introduced in Lahore, Toba Tek Singh, and Peshawar. The accompanying “Peace Calendar,” unveiled at the India International Centre, was framed as a cultural initiative but coincided with her continued calls for parity between New Delhi and Islamabad. She has also been a prominent face at cross-border dialogue platforms, a pattern that distinctly aligns with her longstanding habit of questioning Indian policy while soft-pedalling Pakistan’s role in fostering discord.
It is against this backdrop that Syeda Hameed’s latest remark has struck a raw nerve. To her critics, it is not an isolated comment but part of a long continuum, a continuum that began with her family and intellectual ties to Pakistan, extended through her alignment with Islamabad’s positions in moments of Indo-Pakistani crisis, and now manifests in Assam’s most sensitive debate… ‘the indigenous identity crisis’. As protests gather momentum and political narratives sharpen ahead of the 2026 polls, Assam has been thrust into fresh socio-political conundrum after Dr. Hameed in a public gathering asserted… “Bangladeshi nationals can also stay in Assam. They are not depriving anyone of their rights. Saying that they are depriving someone of their rights is troublesome, extremely mischievous and detrimental to humanity Assam has become like a monster. This has become a dangerous place.”
Such distasteful declarations strike at the very heart of Assam’s long and arduous struggle against illegal migration by portraying the presence of Bangladeshi settlers, encroachers and socio-cultural trespassers as benign and by likening Assam itself to a “monster”. Dr. Hameed, by such preposterous demeanour, not only maligned the state’s image but also trivialised the historic Assam Agitation which culminated in the 1985 Assam Accord, marked by the supreme sacrifices of 855 martyrs who gave their lives to preserve the cultural and demographic integrity of the region. Her words, therefore, are not mere commentary; they constitute a repudiation of Assam’s collective memory and a dismissal of its most hard-won socio-political accomplishment.
In a fierce showdown to such malicious misadventure, Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma, a strong statesman and an unapologetic crusader of the indigenous cause, launched a blistering attack on Syeda Hameed, slamming her of legitimising illegal infiltration and attempting to advance what he described as the unfinished project of Jinnah … ‘making Assam a part of Pakistan!’. Denouncing her proximity to the Gandhi family, Sarma declared that Assamese identity stood “on the brink of extinction” because of the tacit support extended by voices such as hers. Evoking the legacy of Bir Lachit Borphukan, he vowed that the people of Assam would resist “till the last drop of blood” to safeguard their land and cultural inheritance. Asserting that Bangladeshis had no rightful claim to Assam, the Chief Minister bluntly warned that those inclined to sympathise with them should accommodate them “in their own backyards,” reiterating in unequivocal terms that Assam was not, and would never be, open to illegal encroachment. Union Minister Kiren Rijiju too joined the attack, calling Hameed’s remarks “misleading in the name of humanity” and stressing that the issue was about land, culture, and survival of indigenous communities.
The debate over Hameed’s statement comes at a time of visible democratic shifts in the state wherein indigenous identity and land rights are emerging as central electoral themes ahead of the 2026 polls. Adding to the tinderbox are questions of land, demographic alteration and deliberate inter-constituency migration with official data suggesting that lakhs of bighas of government land including khas land, satra land, forest areas and wetlands are under organised encroachment. While the government has devised land reclamation as both a development policy and a cultural imperative, eviction drives have become frequent flashpoints across districts, with the government sniffing that large-scale inter-district migrations are being carried out with the intent of tempering with Assam’s demographic balance and achieving political dominance. As protests gather momentum and political narratives sharpen, the issue of migration and identity appears certain to dominate the state’s turbulent political discourse once again.
At this juncture, it is equally important to observe the hypocrisy and indifference that Dr.Hameed personify as a women activist and her opportunistic stance owing to her allegiance to the Gandhi family . Despite flaunting herself as a champion of women’s rights, Syeda Hameed’s longstanding proximity to the Gandhi family has largely insulated her from taking a principled stand against policies that were widely criticised as regressive. A striking example is the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, enacted during Rajiv Gandhi’s premiership. The legislation was passed in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment in the Shah Bano case (1985), which had upheld the right of divorced Muslim women to claim maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, a secular provision applicable across religions. The Court’s judgment was hailed as a progressive step towards gender equality, but it provoked a strong backlash from conservative sections of the Muslim clergy. Rather than defending the Court’s ruling, the Rajiv Gandhi government yielded to the pressure, introducing the 1986 Act that effectively nullified the judgment and restricted a divorced Muslim woman’s right to maintenance from her husband to the iddat period, roughly three months after divorce.
Feminist groups and legal experts condemned the Act as a major setback to the struggle for equal rights, arguing that it institutionalised gender discrimination and placed Muslim women outside the purview of universal constitutional protections. The legislation was seen as a capitulation to vote-bank politics and a betrayal of women’s rights movements of the time.Yet, through this period, Syeda Hameed, despite her supposed positioning as an activist for women’s empowerment, did not voice any public opposition to the Act or the politics that produced it. In reward, her career, that was deeply intertwined with the Congress establishment, advanced significantly in the years that followed. After returning from Canada in 1984, she was swiftly inducted into influential roles in India’s policy and intellectual landscape. By 1997, she had been appointed to the National Commission for Women, and in 2004 she rose further to join the Planning Commission under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
This juxtaposition therefore confirms that while the passage of the 1986 Act remains a defining moment of institutionalised compromise at the expense of Muslim women’s rights, Hameed’s silence and political alignment during that period highlight the dissonance between her proclaimed advocacy and her record when real political choices were at stake.
Syeda Hameed’s trajectory therefore can be seen revealing a pattern of selective activism shaped less by principle than by political patronage. On similar lines, her recent remarks on Assam’s migration crisis must be seen not in isolation but as the culmination of a political and ideological lineage long shaped by her proximity to the Gandhi family, the pro Pakistani ancestry and marked by a recurring irresponsibility towards the national discourse. Worth mentioning is the fact that, throughout her career, she has carried forward the same culture of doublespeak that marked Congress’s approach to difficult national questions masking expediency with rhetoric and prioritizing opportunity over integrity while refusing to confront hard realities. By trivialising Assam’s historic struggle against illegal migration and belittling the sacrifices made during the Assam Agitation, Dr. Hameed has revealed how this inherited hypocrisy manifests in practice with her words reflecting not principled activism but a continuation of a legacy where political loyalty outweighs truth, and where the preservation of narrative matters more than the preservation of national integrity. This, therefore, is exactly where the ‘Comment’ and the ‘Controversy’ deserve a delve into the picture ‘Beyond’.
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