Muslims made their vote count. This time Hindus built a coalition with them

Muslim vote is BJP’s biggest worry. Knives are already out and probing its most critical fault line. Without recovering UP, BJP’s decline threatens to become chronic, and progressive.

Illustration by Prajna Ghosh | ThePrint

The headline least acknowledged out of this general election is the return of the Muslim vote. Not Muslim political power, the rise of a new Muslim leadership. Just a rediscovery of the power of the Muslim vote.

Significantly, the results came just days after the prime minister lamented in one of his many TV interviews that many Muslims still believed they could determine who’d rule India. Speaking to Times Now, he said : “I am saying it for the first time to Muslim society, to its well-educated people. Introspect. Why are you falling behind, what is the reason? Why did you not get any benefits in the Congress era? Introspect (aatma-manthan kijiye). The feeling you harbour, that you will determine who to install in power or remove from it, is ruining the future of your children. Muslims are changing all over the world.”

Doesn’t look like the Muslims listened to him? See the results in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, for example. In both, the INDIA bloc’s constituents have a larger vote share than the NDA this time. It was never going to be achieved without the Muslims voting for it en bloc. Because all previous data from exit polls and other research tells us Muslims always vote strategically to defeat the BJP, we need to ask why they have been so spectacularly successful this time, especially in Uttar Pradesh. Further, why did this not work in Bihar and Assam, two more states with a sizeable number of Muslim voters and a strong INDIA challenge?

Please note that in none of the three Lok Sabha elections in the Modi era — 2014, 2019 and 2024 — nor in the Vidhan Sabha polls of 2017 and 2022, has the BJP fielded even one Muslim candidate for any of UP’s 80 Lok Sabha or 403 Vidhan Sabha seats. Yet, it’s been securing almighty majorities. So what brought about this dramatic turnaround?

This is also the BJP’s biggest worry. Knives are already out and probing the party’s most critical faultline, for and against Yogi Adityanath. Without recovering Uttar Pradesh, the BJP’s decline threatens to become chronic and progressive.

The West Bengal result has destroyed exit pollsters’ reputations and astounded both the BJP’s supporters and adversaries. Unlike UP’s 20 percent (all figures are rounded off and approximate since we haven’t had a census since 2011), Muslims make up about 33 percent of West Bengal’s population. Yet, the BJP had won 18 of its 42 seats in 2019 and seemed poised for many more this time. What reduced it to just over half of the earlier tally?

In all states where it can get seats, the BJP follows a simple formula. Get more than 50 percent of Hindus to vote for you and you are home. This is what worked for it in Uttar Pradesh, rendering the 20 percent Muslims politically irrelevant. In West Bengal and Assam, the larger Muslim percentage required that the party get about 60 per cent of the Hindu vote.

These outcomes, especially in UP and West Bengal, reverse a decade-long phenomenon of the Modi-led BJP’s politics making the Muslim vote irrelevant in the big, national picture.

The answer to all the questions we have raised so far about the turnaround in the power of the Muslim vote is a very simple one: the Hindu vote.

It is a well-established fact that since Muhammad Ali Jinnah left India with his Pakistan, Indian Muslims have never accepted someone from their faith as their leader. Not even Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. They have always looked for Hindu leaders they could trust.

It was mostly the Congress until 1989 when the faith broke with the unlocking of the Babri-Ayodhya site. The vote banks then moved to other forces that promised the same protection — mostly the old Lohiaites in the Hindi heartland, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the Left in West Bengal. In Maharashtra and Kerala, and other parts of the south in the absence of alternatives, the Muslims generally stayed with the Congress. Some pockets of Muslim leadership emerged in distant geographies.

The Muslims were not able to gift power to their newly chosen leaders by themselves. It is the leaders who built coalitions with a sufficient number of Hindus. Mulayam and Lalu with Yadavs and some other backward classes, the Left with Bengal’s large Hindu underclass and the Congress with its own concretised vote banks south of the Vindhyas.

It worked in the Hindi heartland as long as the vote was split three-and-a-half ways (SP/RJD, BSP, BJP and Congress). You could then rule a state like UP or Bihar with just about 28-30 percent of the vote in that split, as Mulayam (2002), Mayawati (2007), Akhilesh (2012) and Lalu repeatedly showed. The trick was to get at least one or two caste-based Hindu vote banks to add to the Muslims and you were home. The rise of Narendra Modi shattered this formula. More Hindus moved to him, leaving the Yadav and Mayawati fortresses.

So, what changed in this election? First, the same Hindu leaders of the Muslims changed their discourse over the past five years, almost never aggressively talking up Muslim issues.

If the BJP fielded only one Muslim in this Lok Sabha election, following seven in 2014 and three in 2019, it is understandable. But the Samajwadi Party fielded just four and the Congress two in UP, and Mamata six in West Bengal. The effort was to play down or mask their dependence on Muslims. The Muslim clergy, radical voices, all stayed quiet. The BJP was denied the space to play with polarisation.

Think about why the BJP ratcheted up the issue of “atrocities against women” in Sandeshkhali the way it did? All data tells us that the reason Mamata is able to deny that 60 percent of the Hindu vote to the BJP is the loyalty she commands among women. The BJP thought Sandeshkhali would dent that. It failed. Now you also know why Mamata gave about four out of ten seats to women. We have the results.

There are straws in the wind elsewhere. In Assam, Badruddin Ajmal drew a blank. A delimitation exercise had been carried out in a way that a lot of the Muslim vote was concentrated in one constituency, Dhubri, instead of influencing about three. In a straight duel, the Congress party’s Rakibul Hussain didn’t just defeat Ajmal, he won by the largest margin for any candidate in India.

In my book, this is a good example of the shift in the Muslim mind to the old normal. A return to parties capable of collecting a sufficient number of Hindu votes to build genuinely secular coalitions and vote banks. Assam and Bihar are easy to explain. In the first, the absence of caste division denied the Congress more Hindu space. In Bihar, BJP allies Chirag Paswan and Jitan Ram Manjhi kept the Dalit vote together, unlike Mayawati in UP.

It is for all these reasons that we see the return of the power of the Muslim vote — in partnership with enough Hindus — as the standout indication for future politics.