Time Again To Turn The Cycle

India’s most populous state is hea­ded for a fractious election in February and the run-up has been marred by casteist, communal and misogynistic slugfests. This year, incredibly, the state’s minority Muslim community, which often bemoaned its dwindling heft since the 2014 national hustings, is the subject of daily outbursts, appeals and even veiled threats.

Even more incredibly, incumbent Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has tomtomed a ‘development’ plank, but his Muslim voters, many believe, are largely being propelled to exercise their vote under the influence of a very different emotion: fear. “You have no idea how terrified the Muslims of UP are,” says Mohammad Adeeb, a former MP from the state. “When they speak in private, in their homes, there’s a real sense of doom and gloom.”

The doom is partly due to the outcome of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls—more specifically, the heavy losses suffered by Akhilesh’s Samajwadi Party that has adopted over the last 20-odd years a proprietorial and protective attitude towards the state’s Muslims. In that election, the BJP and its leader Narendra Modi swept into power. Almost all pundits agree, the Muslims were less than enthusiastic about the communal undertone of the campaigning.

This wariness was especially pronounced in UP, where a Hindu-Muslim riot displaced more than 50,000 rural Muslims months before the election. Not just that. Thousands of the displaced still live in relief camps or away from their native place. The relief offered by the Akhilesh government in 2013 to the displaced was sketchy. For example, it provided many victims cash to rebuild their homes—but on a bizarre condition: they renounce their village forever .

In 2014, only seven leaders of the Samajwadi Party were able to retain their parliamentary seats—all members of Akhilesh’s immediate family. The party hopes that the state assembly polls will reverse that bloodletting, in which the Muslims had stood steadfast by the party. Akhilesh’s new image as Mr Clean is both the fulcrum of that strategy as well as the outcome of a bitter internal fight in the SP, in which he has wrested power away from his father Mulayam Singh Yadav.

The Muslims will still vote keeping in mind who they think will defeat the BJP, says UP Planning Commission member Sudhir Panwar, a professor at Lucknow University. “They also see the Yadavs of the SP as capable of giving them protection,” he adds, citing reasons for the Muslim affinity for Yadavs, which extends beyond just supporting the SP’s bid for power into periods of time when they are out of power too.

The protection Muslims appear to seek while the SP is in power is usually a reference to the support they can get from the Yadav-dominated government machinery in addressing their everyday concerns. It is also a reference to the psychological advantage of aligning with a powerful social group in cases of communal conflict. For­gotten in these calculations is the high frequency of communal clashes in UP since 2013, which make it the worst state as far as this indicator goes. “I feel it is the BJP that the Muslims are helping come to power with their support to this new version of the Akhilesh rule,” says Dr Tasleem Rahm­ani of the Muslim Political Council of India (MPCI). “It is a dangerous trend for a com­m­unity to not be able to see this reality.”

It may appear inexplicable that, once again, the Muslims of UP, who bear the brunt of communal outbreaks, are expected to stand by the SP, which has simply taken on a new avatar under Akhilesh. Doubly so because, the buzz until December was that they were actively receptive to being wooed by his political rival, Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati.

Asmer Beg of Aligarh Muslim University says political decisions are not always taken rationally. “Quite often, you are quite surprised that despite all the evidence, people make the opposite move,” notes the professor who heads the varsity’s political science department. This contradiction is clearest in the question of security, which many UP Muslims are said to be seeking. “Security,” Beg says, “is a concrete aspect of everyday life but it becomes an emotive issue in the electoral arena”. In other words, the last few years of communal clashes at an unprecedented scale notwithstanding, if the SP plays accurately on “perceptions” among the Muslims, then it can still whisk away their votes in big numbers.

This approach has a much longer history than 2014 and extends at least to the 1980s, starting with the run-up to the end-1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the subsequent riots across the country and the Mumbai bomb-blasts. The Congress party could not claw its way back to acceptability among Muslims in the early 1990s, nor could it wrest away the upper castes from the BJP subsequently.

Seen in this light, if the SP is still assured of sizeable Muslim support, it is because the community seeks to preserve a more strategic self-interest. Even if the party loses in the elections, the Muslims may want to hang on to it, for a variety of local reasons. While all other groups may flee to join the “winning” candidate, the Muslims would rally around the SP—primarily if they believe it would hold back the BJP.

Often though, the results of this strategy turn out to be just the opposite of what the voters had set out to achieve, as pointed out by MPCI’s Rahmani. Prof Mohammad Sajjad, who teaches history at AMU, says that right before 2014 polls, a large group of educated Muslim intellectuals from Ali­garh decided to jointly cast their vote for the BSP. “On paper, the BSP was well-pla­ced to ensure the defeat of the BJP candid­ate. It was a rational, calculated decision we took,” he says. But on polling day, many from the previous day’s meeting switched away from the BSP to SP, which had fielded a wealthy Muslim candidate. “Overnight, there was a polarisation and the Jat candidate of the Congress got no votes. The Jats had all switched to the BJP. The SP candidate also lost. The BJP won,” Sajjad says.

Similar scenes unfolded in Bijnor, Muzaffarnagar and elsewhere, explaining why the BSP has fielded twice its previous tally of Muslim candidates. This, though the problem of voters being more favourably inclined towards their own community’s candidates, is true among almost all party’s supporters. The Muslim voters, this time around, are adding another flavour to the UP polls. This is on account of their growing class and ‘caste’ awareness. “Elite Muslims, the Muslim bureaucracy, sections of the clergy, all are beneficiaries of the SP,” says Sajjad. “They have got plum postings, assurances against transfers, etc. They, being dominant, also manage to persuade other Muslims to back the SP. However, the elites are loud. As for the poor or rural Muslim, we just don’t know what (s)he’s thinking.”

How far all of this holds after Mayawati’s strident wooing is another question altogether. The psyche of UP voters is embedded with the notion that Mayawati’s votes can be transferred to any political party or formation, including the BJP, the Congress or the SP. This phenomenon can go to her advantage at any time in an election. Elite Muslims dominate the SP echelons and can turn the Dalit-Muslim alliance into a Dalit-Muslim divide, but increasingly active are the pasmanda Muslim groups, who have a stronger affinity with the Dalits. “People are trying to tell non-elite Muslims very clearly and persistently now, that they should shake off the SP, go for BSP,” says Sajjad. “On law and order, she (Mayawati) is determined not to let even the BJP dictate terms. The point is, how successful will these efforts be? There’s still that fear of the BJP coming in.” The concern, in part, is dictated by a history of post-poll BSP-BJP alignments, though Mayawati has ruled it out this time.

Here, intellectuals and activists are strongly advising Mayawati that she take notice of the BJP playing an ati-pichda or most backward card. In response, they say, the elite Muslims would also try and strengthen the SP. “Security has become an old hat now, but the Muslim elite still tries to hold on to it,” Sajjad says.

Just until August 2016, the Muslims were a beleaguered lot in UP, crushed by cow vigilante groups that were wreaking havoc on its business interests, love jehad and other such campaigns. “At that time, the Una incident happened (in Gujarat) and atrocities on Muslims reduced soon after. It became clear that the Dalits could offer protection to Muslims,” says Dalit intellectual-activist Satish Prakash, who teaches at Chaudhary Charan Singh University in Meerut. But Prakash doesn’t think security and protection are sought on as wide a scale by the Muslim community. “People are not paying attention. Hindus were polarised on grounds of religion, but the Muslim is being polarised as jaatis or castes,” he notes. “Today, UP Muslims appear divided and scattered as Qureshi, Saifi, Pathan, etc. Their reason for not being with the BSP so far is that everybody wants to align with somebody ‘above’, not below them.” This is an old trope at work—the Muslims, especially elites, do not prefer to vote for the BSP, as it conveys to them a sense of a loss of identity and falling status.