Who or which social group in this country does not have a
political party? The Hindus have it. The
Yadavs have it. The Dalits have it. The Kurmis have it. The Tamils have
it. The Maharashtrians have it. The Assamese have it. Name a social group,
a region or a caste and you have a political party bearing their tag. The
era of Gandhi, Nehru and Indira is an old story wherein a national leader
worked for the country and promoted the interests of Indians without
‘caste, colour or creed’ discrimination. Those were times when leaders of
stature, with a single national political party called the Congress, ruled
the roost – both at the national and the provincial level. Those were
times when Indians thought of and for India and not for caste, community
or creed. It was an era of the politics of service for the nation.
We now live in different times. We live in an age when
politics is largely the game of pygmies who win elections promoting a
caste interest or a community interest and no national interest
whatsoever. They indulge in less people service and more self-service.
Politics is now like any other trade or commerce where politicians jump
onto one political bandwagon or other political front and make hundreds
and thousands of crores as people are left waiting for the next election
so as to punish them.
Gone is the era of Big Dads in politics. And the time for
national parties is over. We live in an era of alliances when politics is
no longer national. It is not even provincial any more. Indian politics is
fragmented and is increasingly becoming caste and community oriented. So
in this competitive era of caste and communal politics even Muslims have
begun to think of forming their own political party. The logic being, if
Dalits can have it and Yadavs can have it, why can’t Muslims have it too?
After all, in terms of the population ratio Muslims are the second largest
group in the country. They played a crucial role in unseating the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from power in 2004, after the Gujarat
massacre, and threw out the Congress party in 1996, after Narasimha Rao
failed to protect the Babri Masjid in 1992. No political party can govern
India for long unless it enjoys Muslim support. Muslims have emerged as
kingmakers of a sort in Indian politics.
But even 57 years after independence their time in Indian
politics is yet to come. They have very genuine grievances. Muslims
complain that they are used as a ‘vote bank’ by various political
formations and once an election is over, no one cares for them. They are
left with the sole option of voting out a party in self-defence. Muslim
politics does not move beyond the game of survival wherein you vote out
one party only to protect your very identity. This is indeed shocking and
frustrating for the Muslim community. Not only are Muslims in India
victims of the worst kind of communal violence but they are also at the
lowest rung of development in the country. Their literacy rate is abysmal.
Their job representation in both the public and private sector is
shockingly low. Their representation in legislative bodies is also
dwindling. They have genuine complaints against Indian politicians who
have taken them for a royal ride a little too long. They are no longer
willing to vote for their security alone. They now want growth and
development as well.
The post-partition Muslim generation is impatient to catch
up with others in terms of development. It does not suffer from the
partition complex. It has contributed no less than any other community or
caste to the national development index – in every walk of life. Yet it
suffers from all manner of problems ranging from security to unemployment.
This generation of Muslims wants empowerment and is rightly disappointed
with all political parties. After all, it has been two years since they
came to power and even the Manmohan Singh government has done little to
solve Muslim problems.
Taking advantage of the general Muslim disenchantment with
traditional secular parties and the growing political fad for communal and
caste parties in the country, a group of Muslim politicians thought of
starting Muslim parties at the provincial level. The first man who sensed
the Muslim mood and cashed in on their growing disappointment with secular
politics was Badruddin Ajmal of Assam where Muslims living in different
pockets amount to more than 30 per cent of the population. Ajmal along
with the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind had backed the Congress party in the last
assembly and the last parliamentary elections. But the Gogoi-led Congress
government did exactly what other governments have done with Muslims in
the past. Once the elections were behind them, they did nothing to tackle
the problems facing the Muslim community.
Ajmal is a successful post-partition merchant who has made
it big in the perfume business. This apart, he was backed by the Jamiat
Ulama-e-Hind, which has considerable influence among Assamese Muslims.
With the Jamiat’s backing, Ajmal took the plunge and formed an ostensibly
secular party (the Assam United Democratic Front – AUDF) for the Muslims
of Assam, managing to win 12 seats in the legislature, two of these being
won by non-Muslims. He has been gloating over his success and claims to
have made it big for the Muslims of Assam. A dubious claim indeed as his
bęte noire, Gogoi, is in fact back as Assam’s Congress chief minister and
Muslim representation both in the state legislature and in the new
government is lower than the last time. Besides, both the Assamese Hindus
as well as the tribals feel threatened by a Muslim party. This may
generate a backlash against the state’s Muslims and may revive both the
BJP and the Asom Gana Parishad, (AGP), which have so far played the
anti-Muslim card in Assam.
The success of Ajmal’s political experiment in Assam
though dubious in real terms has generated a ripple effect in Muslim
politics, especially amongst the Muslims of Uttar Pradesh. Muslims
constitute a large chunk of the votes in numerous assembly segments in
Uttar Pradesh. If they vote as a united bloc, they can be the deciding
factor in many elections. Encouraged by the Assam experiment, two Muslim
outfits have been formed in Uttar Pradesh recently. Maulana Kalbe Jawwad
of Lucknow leads one, the People’s Democratic Front (PDF), and Imam Ahmed
Bukhari of Jama Masjid, Delhi, heads the other, the Uttar Pradesh United
Democratic Front (UPUDF). The PDF brings together the All India Muslim
Forum, National Loktantrik Party, Momin Conference of India, All India
Muslim Majlis, Parcham Party of India and the All India Muslim Mushawarat
among others. According to newspaper reports, soon after both fronts were
announced, they merged under the PDF banner. Both Jawwad and Bukhari swear
by the Muslim cause. Both blame secular parties for the ills befalling
Indian Muslims and both come from a religious background.
On the face of things, in this age of caste and communal
politics, a Muslims-only party sounds both logical and appealing. After
all, even nearly 60 years after independence, no secular party is willing
to work towards the uplift of Muslims. So what do Muslims do? But the
problem with Indian Muslims is that they are not Yadavs or Dalits. They
are a community that carries the baggage of history. It is a community
that has in the past played the communal card and carved Pakistan out of
the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, Muslims who live in India have nothing to
do with Pakistan. They played no role during partition nor do they have
any lingering sympathy for Pakistan.
But history, as TS Eliot wrote, has ‘cunning passages and
contrived corridors’. Those cunning passages and contrived corridors of
history are essentially the collective neurotic memory of a tragic past
that generates a false sense of siege amongst a large group even long
after the actual threat has disappeared. Hindu communal forces led by the
RSS and the BJP take advantage of those ‘contrived and cunning passages’
of history to transform Indian Muslims into the ‘Hindu enemy’ working to
carve out another Pakistan.
Over the past two decades all of us have seen how
successfully the sangh parivar worked on this Hindu siege mentality and
managed to build a Hindu vote bank as also to marginalise Indian Muslims
in Indian politics. So deep-rooted is the post-partition Hindu sense of
siege that Narendra Modi could successfully paint Gujarati Muslims as ‘Mian
Musharraf’, managing even to win an election on hate politics in
December 2002. No amount of secular cajoling, even by liberal Hindus,
could persuade the Gujarati majority to shed their sense of siege and
defeat Modi who masterminded the most cynical and worst ever massacre of
Muslims in independent India. Gujaratis saw Modi as their defender and
voted overwhelmingly to bring him to power to defend them from the
‘terrorist Pakistani Muslims’ living in their midst.
Among Hindus this false sense of siege is based on the
collective memory of the formation of Pakistan. Once tickled, it revives
the partition trauma when some Muslims led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah had
‘worked against the Hindus’ and partitioned their motherland – the
ultimate refuge for the security of a nation. This neurotic memory is
revived only when Hindus perceive Muslims as coming together to promote
‘their cause’ much as Jinnah had done for them once before. At once, the
Muslims among them become the enemy within and those who stand up against
the Muslims become Hindu heroes.
These tactics surface only when Muslims come together on a
common platform and start indulging in the politics of cacophony. It has
happened in recent times between 1986 and 1992 when India’s Muslims first
came together under the All India Muslim Personal Law Board to protect
their personal law after the Shah Bano judgement. Soon after, once the
gates to the Babri Masjid were unlocked in 1986, the All India Babri
Masjid Action Committee was formed to protect the mosque. Both the Muslim
Personal Law Board and the Babri Masjid Action Committee ostensibly worked
to defend the Muslim cause but in actual terms they only indulged in the
politics of cacophony using high decibel Muslim rhetoric. This tickled the
Hindu sense of siege and it was the BJP that soon became the Hindu hero.
The rest is recent history. We have been witness to how
one-time political outcasts, the BJP, turned overnight into a party of
Hindu heroes and grabbed power, leading eventually to the massacre in
Gujarat. If there had been no Muslim platform, there may well have been no
Hindu platform either. This is a crude historic and psychotic factor that
Indian Muslims have had to live with it.
Now let us put aside the debate about the pros and cons of
a Muslims-only party and take a look at the current political scenario.
The BJP lost power in 2004 and has since been undergoing the worst kind of
crisis; it is divided down the middle and its credibility is at its
lowest. The average Hindu priority is growth and development, not
identity. There seems to be little chance of the BJP coming to power or
its leadership sinking its differences to revive the party in the near
future.
Amidst this politically hopeless scenario for the BJP, if
Muslims start indulging in the politics of cacophony as they did in the
1980s and 1990s, there are bright chances of the Hindu sense of siege
being revived. The formation of not one but many Muslim political parties
under a traditional conservative leadership with demands such as
reservations for Muslims in legislative bodies, etc. is bound to reawaken
the Hindu fear. It will undoubtedly encourage the RSS parivar to use every
trick in its kitty to revive the BJP as an alternative to a Muslim
platform. Besides, various Muslim formations in different states will
undoubtedly split a united Muslim vote bank, much to the advantage of the
BJP, which then, even with minority Hindu backing, would manage to corner
power for itself as it did until recently – by splitting the secular and
the Muslim voters. So forming a Muslim political party today means serving
the BJP and its actors like LK Advani and Narendra Modi.
But for how long should Muslims put off working towards
the interests of their own community, and this merely out of fear for the
BJP? Well, a sensible and mature community would or should first like to
finish off its principal enemy to ensure permanent security. If Muslims
vote unitedly in yet another election and the BJP loses power for another
term, Hindu communal forces could well be marginalised for a long, long
time to come. But if the Muslims are divided as they were in Assam, with
their own parties working for them in most states, the BJP may soon be
back with a bang. It is for Muslims to decide whether or not they should
first work for their security, which must, ultimately, lead to their
progress and development as well. Or whether they should, as in the 1980s,
commit the blunder of forming their own platforms and lose both security
as well as the little progress that security necessarily brings.
Backing Muslim parties in the prevailing scenario could
only mean hara-kiri for the Muslim community. One hopes and prays
that better sense will prevail amongst Muslims, who have committed too
many mistakes in the past and have had paid dearly whenever their leaders
have indulged in the politics of emotional hyperbole rather than the
mature politics of good sense. Communal Muslim players are once again
hawking aggressively for a Muslim party. Such a move will only help revive
Hindu communalists. It is time for ordinary Muslims to be cautious of such
Muslim players. Else every Indian province could produce at least one Modi
to ‘teach Muslims a lesson’ as indeed happened so tragically in Gujarat. n
(Zafar Agha is a regular columnist for several
newspapers.)
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