POLITICS-INDIA: Ruling BJP Tries Hard to Woo Muslims

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 29 2000 (IPS) - Worried about losing its traditional Hindu middle class support, India’s main ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has shed a radical stance to woo Muslims whom it had antagonised on the road to power.

“Muslims are the blood of our blood and flesh of our flesh,” declared the party’s newly chosen president Bangaru Laxman at a two-day BJP national convention in the central city of Nagpur this week.

Laxman went as far as to say that the emotive issue of building a Hindu temple over the site of the demolished Babri mosque at Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh state, had become “irrelevant” for the party.

The forcible demolition of the medieval Babri mosque in December 1992 by Hindu fanatics assembled there by the BJP’s radical affiliates, marked a turning point in Indian politics and the BJP’s meteoric rise to power in the 1990s.

The ‘Times of India’ daily commented that but for the campaign to demolish the mosque and erect a temple on the site, “it is doubtful if the BJP would have come to the forefront of electoral politics, much less gain the strength to form a government.”

But the BJP has been forced abandon its radical pro-Hindu stand mainly by its coalition partners who came on board only on condition that explosive issues like building the temple at Ayodhya, be set aside.

In his over two years in office, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee too has helped give a moderate face to the party.

“Atal Bihari Vajpayee seems to gain in popularity every day and essentially because he has proved to be ideologically flexible. For his party though, the reverse has been the case: Hazy ideology has meant unhappy rank and file and bad electoral verdicts,” the Times commented.

Although the party won over quite a few prominent Muslim leaders to its ranks, India’s largest minority community is still wary of the party.

Aslam Sher Khan, a prominent Muslim politician who had quit the BJP’s main rival Congress party to join the BJP a few years ago, however, soon got disillusioned with his new party.

Khan, a former Indian hockey team captain and a member of former Congress Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s government, subsequently left the BJP accusing it of denying political chances to Muslims.

“The fact is that the BJP can currently claim just one Muslim member of Parliament,” he said.

The BJP’s turning to the Muslims is attributed to mutinies by several of the party’s main vote-catchers, who complained of being sidelined by a clique of leaders close to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

In August, prominent BJP leader Uma Bharati quit the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), warning that both the BJP and the main opposition Congress party were doomed unless they met the aspirations of the large middle caste peasantry in northern India to which she belonged.

“There is turmoil in society, which is reflected in all parties,” Bharati said.

She said the BJP and the Congress must learn from the examples of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in eastern Bihar state, which champion the cause of the lower and middle castes.

These parties hold sway over sizeable chunks of voters among the 250 million people of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, having gained at the cost of the BJP and the Congress.

That the BJP is serious to address these concerns was evident from the new party chief’s appointment.

As a south Indian and a member of India’s lower-most caste, Laxman’s appointment was said to show the party’s anxiety to shed its persistent image as promoting the interests of upper caste Hindus from northern India.

Laxman, who is junior railway minister, was confident his appointment would “strengthen coordination between the government and the party and also expand the party’s geo-social base.”

The caste factor haunts the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state which is to elect a new assembly next year. Here the favourite is former Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, which is supported mainly by the Hindu peasant castes and Muslims.

To the BJP’s discomfiture, the Samajwadi Party has borrowed its ‘swadeshi’ (support for local manufacture) campaign, an electoral plank, which the BJP has been forced to abandon since taking office.

The BJP-led government’s push to economic liberalisation is under fire from BJP affiliates like the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).

Both Vajpayee and the new party chief found it necessary to assert at the Nagpur convention, that the government would not tolerate such interference in economic policy.

A resolution adopted at the party convention ignored the RSS and VHP criticism of the government’s privatisation plans, saying disinvestment was an “imperative of the times.”

However, the BJP’s offer of an olive branch to the Muslim community has angered one of its key allies — the Shiv Sena party of firebrand Bal Thackeray.

In an editorial in the party publication ‘Samna,’ Thackeray critcised the BJP’s “sea change in the policy towards Hindus.”

Thackeray described Laxman’s declaration that the Ayodhya temple issue had become irrelevant and advocacy of a ” soft line” on militancy in Kashmir, as attempts to “appease” Muslims.