POLITICS-INDIA: Pro-Hindu Ruling Party Woos Minority Muslim Votes

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 22 2004 (IPS) - It is difficult to ignore Syed Ahmed Bukhari because he is the hereditary ‘Shahi Imam’ (Imperial Priest) of Delhi’s sprawling Jama Masjid or mosque, one of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan’s many creations in sandstone and marble.

But Bukhari was at his compelling best when he recently declared that he no longer considered the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a ”political untouchable”.

This means that members of his flock- from India’s Muslims who are the minority in this Hindu-majority country – are free to vote for Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s pro-Hindu party in the four-stage parliamentary elections that began Apr. 20.

Asked to clarify what he meant, Bukhari told IPS in a telephone interview that he was only telling Muslims that they were ”not anybody’s enemy and that they needed to give the BJP a chance.”

Bukhari’s stance has not gone down well with prominent secular and liberal-minded Muslims.

Commented Imtiaz Ahmed, one of India’s leading sociologists: ”To support an ideologically radicalised party like the BJP is to court disaster.”

Ahmed, who has several important academic publications to his credit, said popular Muslim opinion in the country is bound to go against Bukhari and possibly even the very institution of the ‘Shahi Imam’.

”Mercifully, Bukhari does not carry much weight beyond a small coterie in the Jama Masjid area of Delhi and then he has not quite issued a fatwah (religious ruling),” he said.

In the past though, the ‘Shahi Imams’ were known to actively influence voting patterns in Delhi and adjacent Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state. Both states are yet to go to the polls in the staggered elections.

While Delhi votes in the fourth and final phase of the elections on May 10, voters in Uttar Pradesh will cast their ballots on Apr. 26, May 5 and May 10. Uttar Pradesh alone accounts for 80 of the 546 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lawmaking lower house of Parliament.

According to Ahmed, the ”real tragedy” for India’s Muslims, who make up 12 percent of India’s billion-plus population, is that the community has ”too many contractors who were claiming to speak on their behalf”.

He counted Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, official spokesman for the BJP and Syed Shah Nawaz Hussein, a minister in the Vajpayee cabinet, and now Bukhari, as being among the contractors who ”were only interested in personal gain”.

”The fact is political parties in India have always been ready to accommodate the real issues facing Muslims such as widespread illiteracy, poverty, backwardness and unemployment. But instead these contractors were always raising emotive issues which helped nobody,” he said.

Current estimates say that 60 percent of India’s 120 million Muslims live below the poverty line and place the literacy rate among India’s largest minority at a low 40 percent.

However, in India’s polity that fractured by caste and other considerations besides religion, Muslims can easily swing outcomes in favour of particular candidates by strategic voting. This is particularly so in northern Uttar Pradesh, where the community forms 18 percent of the 170 million population.

Set smack in the Hindi-speaking heartland, Uttar Pradesh is considered the political crucible of the country. High-profile contestants there in the current elections include Vajpayee himself, opposition leader and Congress party president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi.

After exit polls conducted at the end of the first phase of the elections on Apr. 20 suggested a reduced margin for the ruling BJP and its smaller allies in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a renewed attempt to woo voters, particularly Muslims, has been launched in Uttar Pradesh.

On Wednesday was unveiled the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Himayat (Advisory) Committee, which includes several important members of the Muslim clergy, and leaders like Amman Rizvi, a former member of the Congress party and ex-chief minister of Uttar Pradesh who will help the BJP campaign in the state.

Vajpayee has already been able to wean several important Muslim figures away from the Congress party. Prominent among these are Najma Heptullah, vice-chairwoman of the Rajya Sabha or upper house of Parliament.

Many regard Vajpayee’s relative moderateness within the Hindu fundamentalist BJP as an asset for the party in the present elections, in which regional parties once again are set to play a key role.

In Uttar Pradesh, for example, the BJP’s fortunes will depend greatly on an informal understanding it has forged with the avowedly secular Samajwadi Party. This commands the loyalty of Muslims as well as sizeable section of the Hindu community.

It was in Uttar Pradesh that the BJP began its meteoric rise in Indian politics by whipping communal feelings over the disputed Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya town and demolishing it in 1992. The incident polarised the Hindu and Muslim communities.

The Babri mosque was said to have been built by invading Muslims over a temple that marked the birthplace of the Hindu warrior deity Rama, although historians and archaeologists are yet to finally settle the issue.

By 1998, the BJP was in power at the center, displacing the Congress as India’s biggest political party. But its influence in Uttar Pradesh itself has been on the decline and last year, it suffered a humiliating defeat in state elections.

Said Vajpayee at the launch of the Advisory Committee that carries his name: ” I want the Muslims to feel secure. I want to say that Muslims should never feel separate in this country. We have to stay together and we have a common future.”

His party has chosen to put on the backburner the emotional issue of rebuilding a Hindu temple at the site where the Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya – at least for the current elections.

Arif Mohammed Khan, one of Uttar Pradesh’s prominent politicians and a former union minister, said he joined the BJP ahead of the elections because he wanted to ensure that conflicts between India’s two most prominent communities do not lead to situations like the anti-Muslim pogrom in BJP-ruled western Gujarat state in 2002.

At least 2,000 people died in the pogrom that followed the torching of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya by a crowd of Muslims near Godhra station on Feb. 27, 2002. A total of 59 people burned to death as a result.

Said Khan: ”I will work with the BJP and make sure that Gujarat never happens again.”