What S.Y. Quraishi Is Going Through Now, Hamid Ansari Had Gone Through as Well
Soumashree Sarkar
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Kolkata: On April 20, Bharatiya Janata Party MP Nishikant Dubey called a former chief election commissioner of India a “Muslim commissioner”.
In an extraordinary and vitriolic outpouring, Dubey claimed that the former commissioner (CEC) was also responsible for the "maximum number of Bangladeshi infiltrators " having been made voters in Jharkhand.
The former Indian Administrative Service officer who was on the receiving end of Dubey's diatribe was S.Y. Quraishi. Quraishi had been CEC for a year and 316 days between 2010 and 2012. He had criticised the government's controversial amendments to the Waqf legislation in a public post. Two days later, Dubey wrote his comments on X.
Quraishi was the first Muslim CEC of independent India – appointed 63 years after India gained freedom. Out of 26 CECs, Quraishi is one of two Muslims who have had this top post in one of India's most important independent agencies.
It is noteworthy that a four-time MP of the ruling party has chosen to lash out in exceptional terms at a senior former government representative. But Dubey's action is also reflective of how Muslims in key government posts have been treated in the last 11 years of Narendra Modi's rule.
When criticism has been levelled, their religion has always been brought up and language has been less than parliamentary.
Whom to harangue?
However, for Hindutva forces, it is not always easy to criticise Muslims in top government posts. That is because there are very few of them.
A study by Mohammed Abdul Mannan titled 'Muslims in India 1947-2024' finds that only one out of 33 cabinet secretaries and one out of 35 foreign secretaries have been Muslim. Muslims are almost never defence, home, or revenue secretaries. In the Union Public Service Commission, three out of 32 chairpersons, and 16 out of 119 members have been Muslim.
Sixteen out of 265 (or 6%) of judges in the Supreme Court have been or are Muslim, the study says. Out of 50 chief justices, four have been Muslim. Among high court judges, 207 out of 3,649 have been or are Muslim, the study adds.
Four out of 15 (26.7%) presidents of the country have been Muslims, and five out of 14 (35.7%) vice-presidents, it also says.
India has had no Muslim prime ministers or deputy prime ministers.
Among cabinet ministers, Muslim representation has varied, with higher numbers in ministries like health (seven), water resources (six), and minority affairs (six). However, key ministries like finance, defence, and commerce have seen little to no Muslim representation.
The study notes how few regulatory and policy-making bodies have had Muslim representation. Top posts almost never go to Muslims. No RBI governor has been Muslim, for instance.
In July 2012, the Times of India ran an article headlined: 'Muslim bureaucrats make a mark in power corridors'.
The piece noted how "the presence of six [Muslim bureaucrats] as secretary-level officers at one point of time is a record of sorts."
It highlighted Shumsher K Sheriff (secretary to the Vice-President Hamid Ansari), Syed Nasim Ahmad Zaidi (civil aviation secretary and later, chief election commissioner), Naved Masood (secretary of corporate affairs), Mohammad Haleem Khan (disinvestment secretary) and Rajen Habib Khwaja (tourism secretary).
Modi and the vice-president
Cut to 2024, and these gains are long forgotten. Last year in July, prime minister Narendra Modi paved the path for Dubey to single out a Muslim government position-holder because of their religion.
In his reply to the Motion of Thanks to the President in the Lok Sabha, as reported by The Hindu, Modi said, “No matter how many numbers they claim, when we came in 2014, our strength in the Rajya Sabha was very low, and the Chair’s inclination was somewhat on the other side. But we did not waver from our resolve to serve the country with pride.”
As vice-president, Hamid Ansari had been Rajya Sabha chairman from 2012 to 2017. He was appointed by the United Progressive Alliance government but retired during Modi's time in power. He is only the second person after Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to have held the post for two consecutive full terms.
As Ansari was leaving in 2017, Modi insinuated in the Rajya Sabha that the former vice-president's last position had put him in a sort of disarray because his thoughts had been shaped by his diplomatic stints in West Asia – which has predominantly Islamic countries – along with his post-diplomatic posts as vice-chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University and chairman of the Minorities Commission – both associated with Islam.
An op-ed on Newslaundry gives the Hindi original and translation thus:
“Ho sakta hai bheetar aapke andar bhi kuchh chhatpataahat rahi hogi, lekin shaayad aaj ke baad aap ko woh sankat nahin rahega, ek mukti ka anand bhi rahega aur jo aapki moolbhoot soch rahi hogi, uske anusaar aap ko kaarya karne ka, sochne ka, baat bataane ka avsar bhi milega (It is possible that there must have been a sense of uneasiness in you, but perhaps after today you would not face the dilemma, and you would experience the bliss of emancipation and you could not act and express yourself according to your original manner of thinking (which was moulded by your stint in West Asia).”
The op-ed notes how the use of "chhatpataahat" is key and appears to indicate a form of "writhing."
Modi was ostensibly hitting back at Ansari over his interview to Karan Thapar in which Ansari noted the sense of insecurity that Muslims felt under the BJP government.
No prime minister has ever attacked a former Speaker (Lok Sabha) or Chairman of the Rajya Sabha in the manner that Modi has, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh had said last year.
Ramesh also noted that Modi conveniently did not mention how Ansari had represented India in Australia and the United Nations too.
This was not all. In 2022, the BJP cited media reports and accused Ansari of inviting to India a Pakistani journalist Nusrat Mirza who claimed to have spied for the Pakistani spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence. As The Wire had reported then, BJP spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia called a press conference and claimed that Mirza has alleged that Ansari shared many “sensitive and highly classified” information with him.
Ansari released a statement saying that he had never met Mirza in the first place.
“I had inaugurated the Conference on Terrorism, on December 11, 2010, the ‘International Conference of Jurists on International Terrorism and Human Rights’. As is the normal practice, the list of invitees would have been drawn by the organisers. I never invited him or met him,” Ansari said, but not before legions of BJP supporters had unleashed their choicest abuse at him on social media.
An Indian Express report notes how in his autobiography By Many a Happy Accident, released after his retirement, Ansari wrote how a demand was raised “by the government floor managers that a Bill may be allowed to be passed (despite) din in the Rajya Sabha”. Modi also allegedly had a problem with Rajya Sabha TV and voiced it to Ansari, who said he had no editorial control over it.
RSTV was launched in 2011, under the chairmanship of Ansari. In 2019, two years after Ansari's retirement, The Wire reported on how the merging of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha channels – now united under an umbrella Sansad TV – was taking place under the watchful eye of the Prime Minister's Office.
Others
While Quraishi and Ansari occupied higher posts, the memories of what happened to Kafeel Khan, a Muslim paediatrician at the government-run Baba Raghav Das Medical College at Gorakhpur, when he tried to secure oxygen cylinders for dying children is another reminder that as religious minorities, Muslims cannot catch a break, even if they do the right thing.
In December 2023, Article 14 reported how the Uttar Pradesh police registered their sixth first information report (FIR) against Khan based on an alleged conversation between unknown people in Lucknow. Khan is now accused by police of being a “secret” distributor of a book Muslims wanted to use in spreading public discord, the report said.
Elected officials, of course, have proven to be better game for the BJP, even in parliament.
Bahujan Samaj Party MP Danish Ali was abused by Ramesh Bidhuri, a BJP MP from South Delhi, in language that was communal as it was crass. When Ali approached Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla for action, little happened. Bidhuri rose through positions in the BJP, eventually contesting and losing the Delhi assembly elections.
In Bidhuri’s case, as in Modi’s, attacks led by top MPs, and then tolerated by chairs or speakers of the House lend credence to the view that harassing a Muslim representative is acceptable behaviour and has official sanction, thus paving the way for someone like Dubey to do what he did.
This article went live on April twenty-first, two thousand twenty five, at fifteen minutes past seven in the evening.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.