Ashoka University academic Ali Khan Mahmudabad, arrested by the Haryana police on Sunday over his remarks that allegedly “disparaged women officers in the Indian armed forces and promoted communal disharmony” is a political scientist coming from the family of the Raja of Mahmudabad in Uttar Pradesh.
Mahmudabad’s peers see him as a multilingual political scholar. “He is an expert on Muslim political thought in late colonial India, on which he wrote a book. He is multilingual–he knows Hindi, Urdu and English well–which is rare among scholars these days. He also studied at both Cambridge and Damascus in Syria, which offers him a rare depth and cross-cultural understanding,” said a veteran political scientist who knows Mahmudabad and Ashoka University well but did not want to be named.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad was born on December 2, 1982, and did his initial schooling at La Martiniere College, . He then went to England to study at King’s College School till 1996. He graduated from Winchester College in 2001 and subsequently earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK.
Mahmudabad was a national spokesperson of the from 2019 to 2022 after joining the party in 2018. He was considered among the closest associates of SP president till he was active in the party. Since 2022, Mahmudabad has not had an official post in the party and has been inactive in politics.
Mahmudabad is the son of Mohammad Amir Mohammad Khan “Suleiman”, popularly known as Raja Sahib Mahmudabad, who spent about 40 years of his life in a legal battle to reclaim his ancestral property seized by the government under the Enemy Properties Act. Suleiman also went to Cambridge in 1965 and studied mathematics.
Suleiman also had a political stint and was a former two-term Congress MLA from Mahmudabad and a popular politician in the Awadh region of Uttar Pradesh.
His properties include several huge pieces of land in the heart of Lucknow, including the iconic Butler palace, a large section of Hazratganj market, Halwasiya market, Mahmudabad Qila–all worth several thousand crore rupees. The properties of the Mahmudabad family are spread in Lucknow, Sitapur, and Uttarakhand’s Nainital.
Suleiman passed away in October 2023 after a prolonged illness. He was the only son of Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan, the last ruling Raja of Mahmudabad–who was among the wealthiest land-owning zamindars in pre-independence India. Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan was a long-time treasurer and a major financier of the Muslim League in the years leading up to the partition of India.
In February 2020, Ali Khan Mahmudabad released a book named Poetry of Belonging, which tries to chart out Muslim imaginings of India between 1850-1950. He has written multiple books on the Sufis of Awadh, Lucknow, the Shias, and Muslim imaginings of India.
Many eminent intellectuals signed a petition defending Mahmudabad’s right to speech two nights ago.
Mahmudabad’s arrest followed a on May 12 taking suo motu cognisance of his comments where he called the optics of the media briefing on Operation Sindoor by Colonel Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh important but said it would be “hypocrisy” if it did not translate into reality on the ground. The commission has interpreted the social media remarks as “an attempt to vilify national military actions”.
During his time in Uttar Pradesh, he covered politics, crime, health, and human rights among other issues. He did extensive ground reports and covered the protests against the new citizenship law during which many were killed in the state.
During the Covid pandemic, he did extensive ground reporting on the migration of workers from the metropolitan cities to villages in Uttar Pradesh. He has also covered some landmark litigations, including the Babri Masjid-Ram temple case and the ongoing Gyanvapi-Kashi Vishwanath temple dispute.
Prior to that, he worked on The Indian Express national desk for three years where he was a copy editor.
Rehman studied at La Martiniere, Lucknow and then went on to do a bachelor’s degree in History from Ramjas College, Delhi University. He also has a Masters degree from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia.
Vikas has taught as a full-time faculty member at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai; Symbiosis International University, Pune; Jio Institute, Navi Mumbai; and as a guest professor at Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi.
Vikas has authored a book, Contesting Nationalisms: Hinduism, Secularism and Untouchability in Colonial Punjab (Primus, 2018), which has been widely reviewed by top academic journals and leading newspapers.
He did his PhD, M Phil and MA from JNU, New Delhi, was Student of the Year (2005-06) at ACJ and gold medalist from University Rajasthan College in Jaipur in graduation. He has been invited to top academic institutions like JNU, St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and IIT Delhi as a guest speaker/panellist.
