The BJP has been trying to distance itself from Muslims, an analysis of its candidate list for recent assembly elections shows.
New Delhi: Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje has finally had her way with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) brass, securing a ticket for her loyalist and cabinet colleague Yunus Khan, a Muslim leader, in the party’s last list of candidates for the state.
Khan will be the BJP’s lone Muslim candidate in the upcoming Rajasthan assembly election, with the Congress fielding 15. He will be contesting against Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee chief Sachin Pilot from Tonk.
Raje is believed to have the support of a few central ministers in pushing Khan’s case. However, the kind of resistance Raje faced within her party and from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) over fielding a Muslim candidate underlines the BJP’s efforts to distance itself from the minority community and burnish its credentials as a Hindu nationalist party.
Of the 230 candidates the BJP has fielded in Madhya Pradesh this election season, only one is Muslim — Fatima Rasool Siddiqi will contest against the Congress’ serial winner Arif Aqueel from Bhopal North. In Chhattisgarh, not one of the BJP’s 90 candidates is Muslim, while the party has fielded two in Telangana.
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A clear message?
Notwithstanding the ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’ slogan of the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre, the saffron party has been averse to giving tickets to Muslims.
The BJP didn’t field a single Muslim candidate in the election for the 403-member Uttar Pradesh assembly last year, though it inducted a Muslim minister in the state government.
“If you want to lose your seat, get one Muslim to sit in your office or man your booth,” a senior BJP leader had said at the time. “No one can save you from losing then.”
ThePrint analysed the BJP’s list of candidates for the states that went to the polls over the past couple of years, including Goa, Gujarat, Punjab, Manipur, Himachal Pradesh, Tripura and Uttarakhand, and noticed a similar pattern.
The party fielded just one Muslim candidate each in Manipur, Tripura and Punjab, and none at all in Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. Except for Punjab, the BJP went on to form the government in each of the states.
Though the BJP has been projecting development — and Narendra Modi as its mascot – as its core agenda in assembly elections since its grand rise to office in 2014, the polarisation of Hindu votes has been a mainstay of its campaign strategy.
With another Lok Sabha election around the corner, the party is being increasingly seen getting more assertive about its image as the ‘Hindu party’, with the party and the RSS seeking to galavanise the community’s voters on issues such as the Ayodhya Ram temple, and Bangladeshi infiltrators (read Muslims) in border states.
Vasundhara Raje and Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan — the two BJP chief ministers not known to pursue politics along religious lines — may have secured a Muslim candidate each in their states, but the reluctance and resistance of the BJP brass in ceding tickets does throw clear hints about the BJP’s blueprint for the Lok Sabha elections, political observers said.
Also read: Rajasthan polls: How Vasundhara Raje managed to have the final say in ticket allotment
An earlier version of the report misspelt Sachin Pilot’s name. The error is regretted.