BJP vis-a-vis INDIAN MUSLIMS AND INDIA ELECTIONS
http://mikeghouseforindia.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-crescent-in-lotus.html
This article has
made a sincere effort to present the current relationship between BJP vis-a-vis
Muslims, although it is not complete, it has the elements that Muslim and
Hindus will find agreement with.
A few Christians have a deep seated hatred for Jews, as the Christ Killers, and
it erupts every now and then in the form of blatant or subtle anti-Semitism.
Likewise, a few Hindus have carried hatred for Muslims from the ugly acts of
Ghazni, Aurangzeb and other tyrants, who shamelessly wore the Muslim label. Both
people have not taken up to understand that. We simply cannot carry this
ill-will forever; we have to shed this and come together on current terms. None
of the Muslims of today are related to those bad guys, nor are they beneficiaries
of those tyrants.
Neither Hindus nor
Muslims follow their own faith – if they understand and believe in the wisdom of
Bhagvad Gita and Quran, they would look up to each other as members of the
larger tent and not carry this venom.
The new generation of RSS members may not be as prejudiced as the old farts who
cannot purify themselves with the hatred formed over the years, I am sure they
have made sincere attempts to get mukti from their hatred for Muslims,
but unfortunately they are stuck, they cannot find freedom from that
bondage of hate, as it erupts now and then, and all we (Indians
together) can do is pray for them to be free.
The fact of the matter is a majority of Muslims and Hindu are reflecting and
struggling about it, while a few on both sides spew venom.
If BJP wants to be a genuine party of India, then it needs to act and represent
all Indians, include all Indians, and abandon the idiotic idea of treating Muslims,
Dalits or Christians as having lesser rights than themselves. Until the old
farts die off, and their poisoned children die, things will be difficult to
change, but if they raise the new generation with purity, then BJP can hope to
be a national party of Indians, by Indians for Indians.
Why should any Indian support a party that will tear up India? Is it good for
India in the long run? The few Muslims, who are joining BJP, must join as fully
contributing members of the nation with equal stakes in party’s outcomes – and not
as tokens or appeasement. If they cannot be treated as equal, they should not
join and suffer the humiliation. I feel sorry for them.
Mike Ghouse
The new generation of
The crescent in the lotus
What does it mean to be
a Muslim leader in the Bharatiya Janata Party? The author digs deeper to
understand how they are perceived by their party and the community
Archis
Mohan
April
19, 2014 Last Updated at 00:24
IST
In early March, Syed Shahnawaz Hussain,
the Muslim poster boy of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was
shocked out of his wits to hear that the party might field him from the
Kishanganj Lok Sabha seat in Bihar. The 45-year-old former civil aviation
minister soon discovered that Ashwini Kumar Choubey,
another BJP leader from Bihar, had convinced the party leadership that Hussain
contesting from the Muslim majority Kishanganj made more electoral sense than
making him the party candidate yet again from the predominantly Hindu
Bhagalpur.
Hussain, say party insiders, felt insulted. He was aghast that BJP would
subject him, the party's only Muslim face in the outgoing Lok Sabha and its
sitting MP from Bhagalpur, to exactly the kind of vote bank politics and
appeasement of Muslims that it criticises the so-called 'secular' parties for.
Hussain's argument appealed to the leadership. The engineer-turned-politician
was retained as the Bhagalpur candidate of the party, while Choubey, who had
eyed that seat, was asked to contest from Buxar.
But what hurt Hussain, say his confidants, was how none from the senior
leadership of the party so much as rebuked Choubey for the bigoted public
attack he had launched on the Muslim leader. "Choubey went around telling
people how Muslims shouldn't be allowed to take over BJP, and that our
(Muslim's) entry in the party should be restricted," says a close aide of
Hussain. A couple of senior leaders did, however, sympathise with Hussain and
apologised for Choubey's behaviour. "You journalists are quick to describe
us as masks but don't try to understand how much we endure," the Hussain
aide says.
A couple of weeks later, the other important Muslim face of BJP too landed in a
controversy. Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi
publicly protested against the entry of Janata Dal (United) discard Sabir Ali
in the party. "Terrorist Bhatkal friend joins BJP...soon accepting Dawood
(Ibrahim)", Naqvi tweeted on March 28 within hours of party president
Rajnath Singh accepting Ali in the BJP fold.
Few in the party took notice of Naqvi's tweet. Fewer still could make sense of
Naqvi's opposition to Ali becoming a BJP member. None could fathom why Naqvi, a
Shia from Uttar Pradesh, should have any problems with the entry of Ali, a
leader of the backward and predominantly Sunni Muslim weavers of Bihar? The BJP
leadership, including Singh and its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi,
had hoped Ali would bolster BJP's electoral chances in Bihar.
Party leaders were alarmed the next morning when Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
spokesperson Ram Madhav echoed Naqvi's statement. "Sabir Ali's induction
has caused great resentment. Party leadership has been apprised of the strong
views of the cadre and people against it," tweeted Madhav. Ali was thrown
out of the party within 24-hours of having joined it.
The incident left the leaders, who thought they had won in Ali a valuable
electoral trophy, upset with RSS. It was also evident that RSS had wanted a
Muslim to oppose the entry of another lest it was, yet again, painted as
anti-Muslim.
Both incidents, says a Dalit BJP leader, illustrate the tenuous relationship
the Sangh Parivar has with party leaders who represent marginalised communities
like the Muslims and Dalits. "Much has changed in the party's approach to
Other Backward Classes (OBCs) because of the emergence of leaders like Kalyan
Singh, Uma Bharati and Modi. But the party is still learning to engage with
Dalits and Muslims more effectively," says the leader. He admires Modi for
having initiated the process of inducting more Muslims and Dalits into the
party.
But this lack of trust leads Muslim leaders of the party to constantly feel a
need to prove their allegiance to the Sangh Parivar. They feel, confessed a BJP
Minority Morcha worker, that their conduct is perennially under the microscope.
It further weakens their position within the party that the Muslim community
doesn't give the BJP's Muslim leaders the same respect that it would accord to,
say, an Azam Khan of the Samajwadi Party or a K Rehman Khan of the Congress.
"Both Muslims and Dalits need to continuously engage with the Sangh
Parivar as also their own communities to change attitudes and carve out a
bigger space for themselves in BJP," says the Dalit leader.
Journalist Shahid Siddiqui agrees with the assessment. "More and more
Muslims need to engage with BJP. My community needs to get out of the voting
ghetto that it has become for the so-called secular parties," he says.
Siddiqui, who edits Urdu weekly Nai Duniya, says it was likely BJP will give
representation to more Muslims if the community were to join it in larger
numbers. Until now, the party has just two Muslim MPs, Naqvi and Congress
discard Najma Heptullah, in the ranks of its 46 Rajya Sabha members.
Hussain was the lone Muslim among BJP's 116 MPs in the outgoing Lok Sabha. He
is likely to remain the party's only MP in the next Lok Sabha as well despite
the party having fielded as many as five Muslims this time. The other four are
contesting from Anantnag and Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir, and Tamluk and
Ghatal in West Bengal - seats the party has never won and is unlikely to win
this time either.
Such is the party's lack of confidence in its ability to attract Muslim voters
to its side that it didn't field a single Muslim candidate in Uttar Pradesh,
where many of the 80 Lok Sabha seats have a Muslim population sizeable enough
to determine the result.
Over the years, both BJP and its earlier avatar, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, have
struggled to find credible Muslim faces that they could accommodate in their
frontline leadership. Journalists M J Akbar and Aijaz Ilmi, inducted in BJP in
mid-March, are the latest entrants to the very small club of the party's Muslim
leaders.
Incidentally, Ilmi is the brother-in-law of Arif Mohammed Khan, a well-known
Muslim leader whose entry into BJP in 2004 was considered a coup of sorts for
the party. Arif's stay in the party was shortlived and is instructive of how
the saffron party treats its Muslim leaders differently when in power and when
out of it.
Arif Mohammad Khan, with an impeccable image of a progressive Muslim who had
quit the Rajiv Gandhi government on the issue of the latter's handling of the
Shah Bano case and the decision to open the gates of Ram Janmabhoomi in 1986,
had joined BJP when most expected the party to return to power on the strength
of its 'India Shining' campaign.
Explaining his decision to join BJP, Khan had cited Muslim social activist Sir
Syed Ahmad Khan who had come to the conclusion in 1857 that it was not possible
for the Muslims to fight the British because they were much superior in all
aspects. "Therefore, Sir Syed said instead of fighting, befriend them,
learn, overcome your drawbacks, and then see if you can create goodwill.
Likewise, today I feel the same thing after having spent so much time in
Gujarat," Arif Mohammad Khan had said. He argued that the Muslims should
also increase their engagement with a BJP that was growing politically stronger
by the day. But BJP failed to make it to Delhi, and three years later in 2007
Arif Mohammad Khan quit the party complaining that BJP had ignored him.
Khan was possibly the tallest Muslim leader to join BJP after Sikander Bakht
and Arif Baig. Bakht, a founding member of BJP when it was launched in its new
avatar in April 1980 and somebody happier to stay in the shadows of Atal Bihari
Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, passed away in 2002. He was the party's
pre-eminent leader in Delhi, was a cabinet minister in both the 13-day
government of 1996 and then in the 1998 and 1999 governments before becoming a
governor. Meanwhile, Baig had quit the socialists to join the Bharatiya Jana
Sangh in 1973. He famously defeated Shankar Dayal Sharma as the Janata Party
candidate in 1977 and was a BJP MP from Betul in 1989. When he quit the party
in 1996, Baig told the media that the party was "unwilling to accept any
Muslims" and only wanted people with Muslim sounding names. Baig returned
to BJP in 2003 but couldn't convince his Muslim supporters to vote for the
party. He was the only Muslim BJP candidate in the Madhya Pradesh assembly
elections of 2013 but lost to the Congress' Arif Aqueel.
Apart from these two, the Jana Sangh had several Muslim leaders in Delhi. Urdu
litterateur Imdad Sabri represented it in Delhi Metropolitan Council and became
Delhi's mayor. Other local level leaders were cleric Maulana Ikhlaq Hussain
Qasmi, Anwar Ali Dehelvi, Begum Khurshid Kidwai and Md Ismail. All of them
represented the party from Muslim majority areas.
BJP has continued the trend of giving Muslims representation at the municipal
level. Currently, there are 100 Muslims representing the party in urban bodies
across Madhya Pradesh. There are four Muslim MLAs in Rajasthan. In Gujarat,
between 2009 and 2013, the party nominated 297 Muslims for local body
elections, of whom 142 (48 per cent) won. Surprisingly, the party denied
tickets to Muslims in the assembly elections of 2012.
Many, like party's in-house psephologist GVL Narasimha Rao, have argued in the
past that BJP shouldn't bother with the Muslims. In 2012, Rao pointed out how
the party bagged 52 of Uttar Pradesh's 85 seats in 1996 and 57 seats in 1998 on
the strength of a consolidated Hindu vote. He claimed the party won despite the
vehement opposition from the Muslims and their tactical voting against the
party. But a year later, the party's tally dipped to 29 seats in the 1999
elections, exposing the limits of its vote catching abilities in times of
religious calm.
Muslims like Nai Duniya editor Siddiqui believe it is in times of such calm
that more and more of his co-religionists should engage with BJP. He says
neither the party nor the Muslims should wait for the other to make the first
move. "It is like a chicken and egg situation. BJP feels why give tickets
to Muslims when the community doesn't vote for the party. The Muslims think
they would rather not give their votes to a party that doesn't represent them
or talk of their interests," says Siddiqui. "Muslims engaging with
BJP will be healthy for a secular democracy." BJP, he adds, also needs to
take a few more steps to win the hearts and minds of the Muslims.
Mumbai-based social activist Pheroze Mithiborewalla, however, disagrees with
both Siddiqui and Khan. He says Muslims continue to suffer in Gujarat and are
denied democratic freedoms like holding public rallies. "These Muslim BJP
leaders and that party's outreach to the community aren't to get Muslim votes,
but to fool centrist and secular Hindus into believing that BJP has changed.
Unfortunately, it cannot change its anti-Muslim core," he avers, adding
that BJP's Muslim faces were mostly seen as opportunists within the community.
Zafar-ul-Islam Khan, editor of the Milli Gazette, says the Muslims would be
willing to support the saffron party and its Muslim faces if only it showed
sensitivity to Muslim concerns. He cites how the Gujarat government is yet to
give compensation to the victims of the 2002 riots in Gujarat, the absence of a
minority commission in that state and the Gujarat government's refusal to allow
scholarship scheme for minorities as examples that BJP remained unchanged in
its stance. "Our community," says Khan, "is not their enemy. Let
them show us that that they have our interest at heart."
