Nearly seven years ago, I wrote this National Interest under the headline: “Do Muslims matter for Modi-Shah BJP, or India?” This is an important time to raise that question again.
On the evidence of the latest state elections, especially in West Bengal and Assam where Muslims constitute upwards of 30 percent of the electorate, the issue remains the same, if more compounded. The answers are more vexed. And politically, the conclusion would be, Muslims today matter even less to the Modi-Shah BJP than they did in 2019.
In West Bengal and Assam the BJP won two-thirds of the seats this time without fielding even one Muslim. Conversely, of the 24 opposition candidates who won in Assam, 22 are Muslim. This includes 18 out of the Congress tally of 19.
In West Bengal 40 of the 293 newly elected MLAs are Muslim. Of these, 34 are from TMC, about 45 percent of the party’s tally of 80. In effect then, in the two states (J&K isn’t a state) where Muslims have their largest population, they’re out of the power structure, cleansed out, and effectively forming the only opposition to the BJP. Irony or paradox, their leaders are still Hindus. And they’re all the losers in the fight with the BJP.
These elections mark the completion of the BJP-secular party divide purely on Hindu-Muslim basis. In Kerala, for example, of the UDF’s 102 newly elected MLAs 30 are Muslims and 29 Christians. The secular relief at knowing that the Muslims having their place at least in the Kerala sun needs to be tempered by the realisation that the BJP will now exploit this as evidence of minority rule, work on the Hindu vote and divide the Kerala Christians.
Nationally, this Lok Sabha, the 18th, has 24 Muslim MPs, or a mere 4.42 percent, while the community’s proportion in the national electorate is more than 15 percent. In the 16th and 17th Lok Sabha, there were 22 and 27 Muslim MPs, respectively. This, however, isn’t as big a surprise as it might seem from a first reading. Except 1980 and 1984 when Muslims won 49 and 45 seats, accounting for 9 and 8.3 percent, respectively, the percentage of Muslim MPs in the Lok Sabha has stayed around the 5-percent mark. But they were always represented significantly in the Union Cabinet—even Vajpayee had Sikander Bakht.
They were present in significant constitutional positions like President, Vice President, Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker, and occasional heads of armed forces and intelligence agencies. Today, there’s none. There’s no Muslim chief minister; J&K is a Union Territory. There’s one Muslim Governor, in Bihar, Lt General Syed Ata Hasnain. Among the nearly 100-strong list of central government secretaries, Kamran Rizvi (Heavy Industries) is the only Muslim. Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah is the only Muslim among the 32 Supreme Court judges today. The last Muslim CJI, Justice A.M. Ahmadi, retired on 24 March, 1997.
While on the one hand this list would give the impression of marginalisation of Indian Muslims, it needs qualification. More Muslims are entering the key professions: medicine, law, academia, science, software, banking, and of course entertainment and news media. The civil services and armed forces (including officers’ academies) are seeing Muslim selections rise. The qualification, therefore, has to be that this loss of representation is specific to politics.
The headline of that first column on the same theme in 2019 was drawn from a 1999 conversation with then BJP leader, intellectual/ideological spokesperson, and former Rajya Sabha MP Balbir Punj. He was also briefly my colleague at the Indian Express Group where he wrote for The Financial Express. Punj passed away last month.
He was furious after the second Vajpayee government lost its majority in Lok Sabha by one vote in 1999, after the 13-day government in 1996.
He was frustrated because no party that counted on the Muslim vote was willing to accept the BJP. This was the veto the Muslims had on who would rule India, and who wouldn’t. The Modi-Shah era has changed all of that.
These facts lead to three important outcomes:
● BJP’s rivals, or the so-called secular parties, are increasingly looking like ‘Muslim’ parties though their leaders are all Hindus. This is exactly where the BJP would want its opposition to be. A Hindu versus the rest equation is 80:20 in their favour. And they will keep working on the Christians in chosen geographies.
They’ve already conquered Goa and Kerala is a work in progress. The BJP has patience and time. In the Northeast they’ve built a comfortable compact with the Christian tribes. In none of these states has the BJP demanded a beef ban. That’s why Asaduddin Owaisi mocks their hypocrisy by taunting them with “UP mein gai mummy, Goa mein gai yummy”.
(In Uttar Pradesh the cow is mother, in Goa it’s yummy)
Some ‘secular’ parties, which still count on the Muslim vote, have become wary of even seeming to be speaking for them. Like the previous AAP government in Delhi during Shaheen Bagh protests and the communal riots that followed. The fear of being seen as ‘pro-Muslim’ kept them away.
● This puts the burden of saving Indian secularism squarely on the backs of Muslims. This is onerous, unrealistic and unfair. It’s the logic of Partition that the Muslim community is scattered and doesn’t have majorities in significant electoral geographies.
Today they’re being persuaded to vote for the candidate most likely to defeat the BJP merely on the hope that it might protect them physically. This is hopelessly minimalistic in a robust secular democracy. As the Sachar Committee showed, it’s done nothing for them. In fact, the report became Mamata Banerjee’s rallying call because it showed how miserably the Muslims had done under the Left in West Bengal. It’s for the ‘secular’ parties to build large enough coalitions with the Hindus to reach winning vote shares. In the past, the Hindi heartland parties did so by dividing the Hindus among castes and signing up large enough caste groups. That fortress has now been breached by Modi and Shah. Who has any new ideas here? Certainly, this Congress looks far from it. It has the bewildered look of a confused hare on a highway, frozen in the headlights of an onrushing truck.
● Owaisi has floated another idea. The Muslims form their own parties, choose their own leaders. This is unsustainable because all of India isn’t old Hyderabad. If Muslims float their own parties, they’ll be the BJP’s biggest force-multipliers. The remarkable fact is, after Jinnah, Indian Muslims have never trusted a Muslim as their leader. They’ve counted on Hindu leaders, from the Nehru-Gandhi family to the Yadavs of UP and Bihar, Mamata Banerjee, and the Left where it matters. Did it work for them? Not perfectly. But they were never as out of of the power structure as now.
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India’s Muslims, Hindus, and secularists all need to think afresh. The fear of being an outnumbered minority goes back to the era of Sir Syed Ahmed and ultimately led to the creation of Pakistan. Who it benefited or didn’t is a debate for another day.
It’s odd to put them in one category but just for our understanding, think Pakistan and Israel. One is an Islamic Republic and the other a Zionist one. Both have proportionate representation and though it works differently, it guarantees some seats for the minorities. A little bit of ‘jitni aabaadi, utna haq’.
(to each according to their absolute numbers)
India, a secular Republic, follows the first-past-the-post system and to expect any proportionality in elected representation is unrealistic. But, there’s a gap and an imbalance.
The only way of addressing it is for another enlightened leadership to rise and build a new coalition with a large enough section of the Hindus. Indian Hindus chose constitutional secularism and the responsibility of preserving it lies with them. Any credible challenger of the BJP will need to build trust with them.
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