Author:
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: October 23, 2004
"Maharashtra revealed how important
the Muslim factor has become in Indian elections. The key to success lies
in a party's ability to mollify the community and persuade its towering
individuals to give out advisories to their co-religionists in the hope
that such intervention would reduce the chances of a split in the Muslim
vote. Mulayam Singh Yadav fielded 95 candidates of his Samajwadi Party
hoping to capitalise on his success with vote banking in Uttar Pradesh
in the Lok Sabha polls. But Maharashtra's Muslims had other designs. They
constitute 15 per cent of the total electorate and play a decisive role
in 65 constituencies where they make up 20 per cent of the registered voters.
According to Mohamad Ishaq, spokesperson
of the Jamaat-I-Islami, Maharashtra, in The Times of India (October 12):
"We received detailed feedback from our units in 154 of the 280 constituencies.
Each unit recommended the name of a local candidate and the shura (advisory
council) decided to endorse the decisions." Most of those listed belonged
to the Congress-NCP combine while some were from the SP. The All India
Milli Council also decided to back the Congress-NCP. Harun Mojawda of the
Milli Council said: "Muslims have been asked to back the secular combine
in 274 seats.
From this it is clear that any move
to control and manipulate the Muslim pattern of voting is deemed as "secular".
This twisted logic goes on to label any Hindu backlash as "communalism".
The Hindu reported on October 12 that besides Nasib Mullah of Bhiwandi(
the father of a POTA detainee, Arif), 12 other leading Islamic scholars
as well as Muslim Development, which controls 788 organisations and societies,
issued a fatwa in favour of the Congress-NCP combine. According to a statement
issued by the union minister, Subodh Kant Sahay, the fatwa was backed up
by visits by over 50 teams of Muslim intellectuals and activists to 60
segments in the last weeks to persuade Muslim voters to support the chosen
political alliance. Sahay said that this was done with the specific intent
of countering the SP and BSP and thereby prevent the division of the "secular
vote".
Lo and behold, the Muslim vote is
"secular". Curiously, the Muslims vote en bloc in favour of the SP in the
Uttar Pradesh by-elections. The justification behind such strategic voting
is very simple. For the past 50 years, the Muslim mind has been fed with
fears of Hindu majoritarianism and chauvinism. The Jan Sangh, and later,
BJP, were painted as "anti-Muslim" and therefore, enemy number one. In
the pre-Partition era, the Congress led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal
Nehru had failed to get the community's support in the 1937 and 1946 elections.
Getting the Muslims to shed their obsession is the real challenge before
Indian nationalism. Till such time as Indian society remains divided, the
space for nationalism is very small indeed. The BJP is the political projection
of an all-India movement which believes in nationalism, positive secularism
and constructive action in all walks of life. But the Left-dominated media
has imposed the image of the party as a blood-thirsty, secret, fascist,
power-hungry, conspiratorial lot of people out to establish "Hindu raj".
The word "Hindu" was transformed by the British rulers of India from an
all-inclusive, geo-cultural concept into an exclusivist, religious connotation.
Today, that is coming in handy for the baiters of the BJP.
The irony of the situation is that
narrow, casteist and regional politics is viewed as "progressive", while
nationalistic politics is dubbed as "divisive". The BJP faces a real challenge
in correcting this image distortion. It is only the sentiment of nationalism
and not casteism, which contributed to the Jan Sangh's growth from two
seats in 1952 to 96 in 1977 and again the BJP's from two seats in 1984
to 182 in 1999. The BJP must strive to return to its original commitment
to idealism and the ideology of nationalism. The British parliamentarian
system has created a fragmented polity. The real crisis today is not of
ideology and leadership, but one of divisiveness and corruption which has
pushed India down a deep abyss. Can the BJP rejuvenate itself to lift the
nation out of this crisis?"
