Muslims aren’t panicking over BJP’s 2026 assembly polls results—Liberals are

It was Liberals, and not the Muslims, who actually benefited from the vote bank politics | PTI

As the Modi juggernaut rolls on, the aftermath of elections has predictably become a season of mourning for the liberal-secular establishment. After every election, they count the number of Muslims elected and go into a tizzy of lamentation at their growing political irrelevance. One wonders whether this beating of breasts is at their own irrelevance or the Muslims’. Under the BJP’s rule, the lot of the Muslim has been more or less the same as that of Hindus across every comparable category and socio-economic index.

If anything, along with other Indians, they have also seen unprecedented prosperity. This is evident not only from regular parameters of growth but also from the mushrooming madrasas, the mass production of maulvis, and the pervasive construction of swanky mosques with tall, slender minarets.

But Muslims are less interested in economic prosperity and more in political parity with Hindus. Thus, during the “Jungle Raj” in Bihar, they didn’t ever complain as the state descended into dystopia, because they lived under the illusion of being co-rulers alongside the Yadavs. But under BJP rule, even as they consume more Biryani per capita than ever before in history, they are most worried about India’s “falling GDP”, simply because this party doesn’t give two hoots about their vote bank.

For the liberals, however, the new grammar of politics has spelled a tragic story. It was they, and not the Muslims, who actually benefited from the vote bank politics. It’s the liberals, and not the Muslims, who lost power as the elementary arithmetic of democracy put paid to the hallowed calculus of secularism. 

As the dialectics of the Muslim vote bank created its inevitable antithesis, the liberals lost both their bark and their bite. After every election, when they lapse into mandatory mourning at the diminishing number of Muslims elected, they actually mourn their own fate. They grieve the loss of their own relevance when they condole the Muslims for the irrelevance of their vote bank.

The Ashrāf obsession with power

After every election, Muslims display a peculiar obsession with tallying the numbers of their co-religionists elected. They do the same, year after year, when the UPSC announces the results of the civil services examination. This strange fascination with counting the number of MPs, MLAs, IAS and IPS officers, etc, is not without reason. 

The Muslim political discourse, rooted as it is in the power theology of Islam, has been shaped by the descendants of the old ruling class—the elite Ashrāf class. Their gaze has remained fixed on the seats of power. As the economy grows, education spreads, and society becomes prosperous, the number of Muslim doctors, engineers, lawyers, accountants, academics, journalists, and entrepreneurs has also grown exponentially. Yet these professions, no matter how important, are not considered significant indices of the community’s growth. The reason: these are not the sovereign domain of the state. Muslims want power, not prosperity.

It may be asked what one measures when one counts the number of Muslims elected. Does one measure the depth of Indian secularism, or the relative strength of two religions at war? Is it about the willingness of Hindus to vote for Muslims, or the ability of Muslims to attract Hindu votes? What is at stake — the secularism of Hindu voters or of the Muslim candidates? 

In the first-past-the-post system, if the people of one religion vote for candidates from a rival religion, it’s nothing short of a civilisational miracle. And this has routinely happened in India as Hindus have regularly voted for Muslim candidates. Indeed, most of the Muslims in the national parliament or the state legislatures have been elected from Hindu-majority constituencies. 

Former governor Arif Mohammed Khan takes pride in highlighting how he has been repeatedly returned to parliament by an overwhelmingly Hindu electorate. One may contrast this with the behaviour of the Muslim electorate: constituencies with a Muslim majority seldom return a non-Muslim candidate. In fact, in most cases, they elect hardline Muslims. If they want the Hindu majority to elect Muslims, shouldn’t they, then, be setting an example by electing Hindus from Muslim-majority constituencies?

The ruler-subject psyche

This, however, is an unrealistic expectation as the relation between the two communities has never been one of equality and reciprocation. Muslims, having been conquerors and rulers for centuries, have nurtured a sense of entitlement which Hindus are expected to meet for the validation of their secularism. The ruler-subject dynamic persists in the deeper psyche of both. 

Muslims expect Hindus not only to elect them in good numbers, but to elect the kind of Muslims who play communal politics. They resent it if nationalist and Hindu-friendly Muslims are elected. The situation is stranger than Catch-22: Should Hindus elect communal Muslims to prove their own secularism, or elect secular Muslims and invite the charge of communalism? The liberal intelligentsia — the guardians of official secularism — should advise accordingly.

Whom are the Muslim legislators supposed to represent — their constituents or their community? Could a Muslim elected by a majority of Hindu voters be called a representative of Muslims? If so, won’t it be a betrayal of those who actually elected him? In any case, is our legislature a “Congress of Religions” where all faiths are equally represented, or a body deliberating worldly matters of life and livelihood?

Syed Ahmad Khan, the most influential Muslim in the post-Mughal age, registered the Muslim opposition to electoral politics in his famous 1888 Meerut Speech. He argued that even if every Muslim voted for a Muslim candidate, they would still be defeated by the sheer volume of Hindu votes. 

For him, India was a continent of different nations and religions rather than a single nation. In a system of joint electorates and simple majority voting, he predicted that since Hindus outnumbered Muslims four to one, the legislature would be a permanent “Hindu-majority” body. Since he couldn’t so much as imagine Muslims voting for Hindus, he harboured the misapprehension that Hindus wouldn’t vote for Muslims either.

The way liberals have framed the debate of religion-based representation for Muslims, it reeks of a revival of the separate electorate. Muslim MLAs and MPs are not required to advance the interests of their constituents — what political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin called “substantive representation” in her 1967 classic, The Concept of Representation. Instead, they are sought for what she termed “descriptive representation” of communal identity. 

Deep down, it’s not about representation; it’s about a share in power.

The preference for patronage

If the Muslim interest in politics was about substantive representation, the best path would be through participatory politics, that is, active involvement in day-to-day politics from the ward level upwards. Instead, even in those “secular” parties that Shekhar Gupta, in his National Interest column last week, called Muslim parties with Hindu leadership, the community’s representation, even at the level of primary membership, is neither in proportion to their population nor commensurate with the number of votes they bring. 

Muslims are as sparse in the leadership of these parties as they are in legislatures. The harsh fact is that if there are not enough Muslims among the members and workers of a party, there is a limit to the number of tickets they can be granted for elections to the Assembly or Parliament.

It is in this context that one should understand the BJP’s inability to field Muslim candidates. The Muslims are inveterately hostile to the BJP; so much so that those who incline towards it are considered traitors to the community and apostates from Islam. Their politics has only one agenda: defeating the BJP. 

In such a fraught situation, if the party were to field a Muslim candidate, would the ordinary Muslims vote for this “traitor”? And, if Hindus voted for him, wouldn’t Muslims consider it a hostile act? Both Muslims and their ideological mentors, the liberals, understand this only too well; yet, just to score a brownie point, they keep pillorying the BJP for not fielding Muslim candidates.

While the debate about elections may continue, one may pause to ask: what do Muslims want — election, or nomination, to high offices? Interestingly, in the aforementioned Meerut Speech, Khan made his preference clear for a system of nomination to high offices as a matter of entitlement for his Qaum, rather than the popularity test of elections.

Shekhar Gupta recalls a time when Muslims “were present in significant constitutional positions like President, Vice President, Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker, and occasional heads of armed forces and intelligence agencies.” He forgot to mention that in the 1970s and early 80s — besides the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir — there were Muslim chief ministers in many Hindu-majority states and a Union Territory as well: Syeda Anwara Taimur in Assam, Abdul Gafoor in Bihar, Barkatullah in Rajasthan, Abdur Rahman Antulay in Maharashtra, Alimuddin in Manipur, C H Mohammed Koya in Kerala, and M O H Farook in Pondicherry.

All of them were nominated to the high office by their party, the Congress, which then enjoyed total political domination and unchallenged ideological hegemony across much of India.

The revival of separatism

One may ask: how was it possible then, and why not now? According to Arif Mohammed Khan, the answer is that, notwithstanding the trauma of Partition, by the 1960s, and particularly after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, the Hindu community had largely healed and was ready to accept Muslims in the high offices of the state.

So, if today, the same Congress cannot think of having a Muslim CM in the states it rules, is it because of the BJP? Or, something fundamental changed on the ground, in which Congress, too, has played a part? Not to mince words, that change has been the revival of separatist politics from the mid-1980s, when the Muslim leadership went to war with the Indian state and the Hindu community on the Shah Bano and Ram Janmabhumi issues.

The new Muslim politics has been “Muslim League Plus”. In the name Identity (Tashakkhus), it revived the Two-Nation Theory. This time, however, it had a more elaborate ideological apparatus at its command. The Political Islam of Maulana Maududi and Jamaat-e-Islami, the radical piety of Tablighi Jamaat, and the violent fanaticism of Wahabi Salafism — all the strands converged to make the new Muslim politics more lethal than it was in the run-up to Partition.

A reaction was bound to emerge, particularly when the perverse logic of vote bank anointed Muslim communalism as the mainstream secularism and sanctified it as the “Idea of India”. The polarisation that followed turned Indian politics into a “two-religion system”, in which secular parties began to protect and promote Muslim communalism. To repeat Shekhar Gupta, secular parties came to look more and more like Muslim parties headed by Hindu leaders.

The situation has come to such a pass that in the recently concluded Assembly elections in Assam, of 19 MLAs elected on the Congress ticket, 18 are Muslim; all from Muslim-majority constituencies. Does it look any different from the Muslim League winning 86.7 per cent of seats from Muslim constituencies in the 1945-46 elections?

It raises further questions: how is it that only Muslim candidates are elected from Muslim-majority constituencies, and why do secular parties field only Muslim candidates in such areas? If Muslim-majority constituencies do not elect Hindu candidates, why should Hindu-majority constituencies be expected to elect Muslim candidates? The BJP cannot field Muslim candidates because Muslims will not vote for such “traitors.” But what stops secular parties from fielding Hindu candidates in Muslim-majority areas? Is the separate electorate back?

Shekhar Gupta expects an enlightened leadership to rise among the Hindus to preserve what the founding fathers built: Constitutional Secularism. One must ask, would such an enlightened leadership ask the Muslims to liquidate the vote bank; secularise their politics; focus on assimilation rather than identity; recognise their Indian destiny, and stop being delusional about the Global Ummah; discard the Personal Law for Uniform Civil Code? 

It’s no secret that most of the secular parties today do the opposite, and therefore, calling a spade a spade, one must name them for what they are: Muslim communal parties under Hindu leadership. And we also know that there is a party that ticks all the boxes listed above. Its name is BJP. 

Sir, maybe you have been missing what is in plain sight. Modi is that enlightened leader, and the BJP is the party that you visualise for preserving Indian secularism. The sooner we recognise this, the earlier we free ourselves from the warp of Hindu-Muslim bi-polarity.

Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets @IbnKhaldunIndic. He can be reached by email at [e-mail]. Views are personal.

Editor’s note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.

(Edited by Saptak Datta)