It appears that the Muslim community is in a deep slumber basking in the glory of its chequered past and harping on composite culture. It's high time Muslims take stock of the situation and make preparation to handle their future or be prepared for the worst.
Syed Ali Mujtaba
THERE have been incessant complaints that in constituencies with a large number of Muslims, delimitation exercise is carried out to marginalise the electoral strength of the community. This exercise is done through a commission almost once in ten years ostensibly to block Muslim representation in parliament and state legislative assemblies.
Besides this strategy, concerted efforts are being exerted to reserve the constituencies with a decisive Muslim electorate for Hindu Dalits. As a result, such constituencies won’t elect Muslims since there are no Dalits in the community.
When Muslims are denied representation in parliament and state legislatures their voices are automatically snuffed out of the country’s political process. These are clever tactics adopted against Muslims in the name of democracy. It certainly does not need somebody to be an Einstein to realise that the Hindu majoritarian mindset is at play here.
According to the latest Census, the population of Muslims in Gopalganj (Bihar) is more than 17 per cent, while Dalits here are only around 12 per cent. But this seat is reserved for the latter.
Similar is the case of Karimganj (Telengana) where Muslims are about 56 percent and Dalits 12 per cent. Here too the seat is reserved for Dalits.
The Nagina seat in Bijnor (Uttar Pradesh) has 43.04 percent Muslim population as against 12 per cent Dalits. This seat is also reserved for Dalits.
In the same state’s Bulandshahr, the population of Muslims is two percent more than Dalits, but this is a Dalit-reserved seat.
The same is the case with Kutch and Ahmedabad West constituencies which are Muslim-majority seats in Gujarat but reserved for Dalits.
Bihar’s Gopalganj, Telangana’s Karimganj, Uttar Pradesh’s Nagina and Bulandshahr, Gujarat’s Kutch and Ahmedabad West are examples of reserved seats for Dalits that have a Muslim majority.
The idea of reserving Muslim-dominated seats in the Dalit category is a clever game being played by those in power. As a result, a large number of Muslims cannot reach Parliament or the state legislatures.
On the contrary, in constituencies where the population of Dalits is more, they are put in the unreserved category. These constituencies are Aurangabad in Maharashtra and Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh. Aurangabad has the largest number of Dalits and Rae Bareli has 30 percent Dalit population. Incidentally, Rae Bareli is a pocket borough of the Gandhi family and at present Sonia Gandhi represents the constituency in Lok Sabha.
The Justice Rajindra Sachar Committee, constituted by the Central Government in 2005 and later the Ranganath Mishra Committee have recommended that electoral seats for Muslims should be reserved to increase their presence in legislatures. It was also recommended that the constituencies where Dalits, Tribals and Muslims are in the majority should be reserved for them. The Sachar Committee had also instructed to reserve Muslim-majority seats in the SC category through the delimitation exercise. However, even after many years of the Sachar Committee report’s recommendations, the situation remains unchanged on the ground.
There are 9 Lok Sabha seats in Bengal, Assam, and Bihar where the Muslim population is more than 50 percent but these seats are not reserved for the community.
In the delimitation draft issued in Assam, the commission is being accused of neglecting the Muslim-majority seats. The Muslim community says that if the delamination is implemented, then the political representation of Muslims in the state will come down significantly. Muslims in Assam are more than 33 per cent but their representation in the legislature is very insignificant.
Recently the delimitation commission recommended reserving 2 seats for the Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir. There is no reservation for Muslims on similar grounds. The delimitation exercise in Jammu Kashmir is done to give supremacy to the Hindu-dominated region of Jammu over the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir.
The most startling factor is that the delimitation commission’s decisions cannot be challenged in a court of law. It is clearly written in Section 10(2) of the Delimitation Act that the decision of the commission will be final and binding.
In this context, it would be apt to say that Muslims have become rudderless in India. Since independence, Muslim leaders who could voice the aspirations of the Muslim community have not been allowed to do so. They have been tasked only with doing managerial activities like fetching Muslim votes for political parties. It is left to the Hindu leadership to speak on behalf of the Muslims. In this context, Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh and Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar occupied center stage of politics as they spoke on behalf of Muslims.
As such Muslim leadership was not nurtured among the secular elite of the country. It was rather handed over to Muslim clerics whose job was to garner Muslim votes in lieu of getting protection from the ruling class.
This vocabulary got changed by the BJP which invented the 80 vs 20 formula, where Muslim votes do not matter at all in the electoral politics of the country. In the BJP’s worldview, Muslims or their leadership have no political space in the country. The BJP can run the states and the country on the basis of an 80 vs 20 formula sans Muslims. The BJP can only tolerate Muslims as intermediaries who can fetch votes at the local level without asking for any plum positions.
The BJP has been successful in the marginalisation of the old Muslim elite, cultivated by the Congress since independence. By sidelining the Muslim elite, the BJP has seen to it that there was no one left among the Muslims to negotiate or even to engage with them on behalf of the community.
Meanwhile, the BJP propped up the BC, OBC, Mahadalit, and Dalit converts from Hindu to Muslim communities and called them Pasmanda Muslims. The saffron party is shedding crocodile tears for their underdevelopment blaming the Muslim upper castes for pocketing all the benefits given by the state to the Muslims.
While they are playing this voting game with the Muslims, the BJP has not done the same with the Hindu community. They have not tinkered with the Hindu upper caste elites for the sake of the development of the lower caste group of the Hindu community. This is a hypocritical game played in the country and there is no opposition to such mechanisation of power politics.
In other words, the BJP sees to it that no conversation between the Hindu religious faith and Islamic faith ever takes place. For all these reasons, a grand bargain or even thawing of relations between Muslims and the BJP appears to be implausible. In such cases, it is harder for Muslims to get adjusted to the new 80 vs 20 political paradigms.
The symptoms are obvious that democracy will be only for the majority community in India where Muslims will not be treated as equal citizens. In such an eventuality, what will be the status of Muslims? Muslims need to realise that what is gone on their back is a sinister design to get them permanently marginalised in their own country.
As all these things stand, Muslims should be prepared to respond to such happenings. But it appears that the Muslim community is in a deep slumber basking in the glory of its chequered past and harping on composite culture. It’s high time Muslims take stock of the situation and make preparation to handle their future or be prepared for the worst.
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Syed Ali Mujtaba is a journalist based in Chennai. He can be contacted at syedalimujtaba2007@gmail.com. The views expressed here are author’s personal.
