The BJP and the Rise of Muslim Leadership

In just three weeks, with Samrat Choudhary replacing Nitish Kumar as CM of Bihar and the recent West Bengal elections, the BJP has extended its direct governance of India's Muslims by a quarter of their population. The BJP has, much against its own interests, created the conditions for Muslim political leadership to emerge in India for the first time since Partition. The long-term effects of this are unclear because they are dependent on the actions of many actors, but this is a watershed moment for India’s political future, and the fact that it has gone unmentioned in most election coverage shows how deeply unserious much of our political commentary has become.

Many of the numbers we have to rely on are 15 years old, because the Modi government has proven entirely unwilling or incompetent in conducting a census. According to the 2011 census, Indian Muslims accounted for just under 15% of the population at 172 million people. Over half, or around 91.5 million, lived in the contiguous north Indian states of Uttar Pradesh (38.5), Bihar (17.56), West Bengal (24.65) and Assam (10.68). Our overall population has increased by 21% since then, so that number would now be over 100 million.

These numbers go a long way in explaining the lack of Indian Muslim political leadership since independence. These states are amongst the poorest, least literate states in India, but even then Muslims here were even worse off than their neighbours because a significant section of the educated Muslim gentry in these states migrated during Partition.

More important than this issue, though, is that politics is about material considerations, and for Muslims in these states the material considerations were bijli, sadak, zameen, taleem and naukri. It is not as if being Muslim was unimportant, but it was not something that impacted the conditions of life or livelihood as these did. The “Indian” part of Indian Muslim has always been the more important one when it comes to how Muslims in these states organise and vote.

Furthermore, all these issues – electricity, roads, land, education and jobs – are most impacted by the state government in power, and thus the political consideration of a UP Muslim was starkly different from that of a Bihari Muslim, or a Bengali Muslim or an Axomiya Muslim.

In sum, the largest population of Indian Muslims were not just minorities in the states they inhabited, limiting their impact on electoral outcomes, they were also poorer and less educated than their counterparts, and their political interests were linked to political parties that pursued radically different paths. It is, therefore, entirely unsurprising that no significant Muslim political leadership with a large electoral base has emerged.

All of this has now changed. These four states, which host over 100 million Muslims bounded by New Delhi at one end, and bordering Nepal and Bangladesh, are now ruled by the same party for the first time since 1967.

Furthermore, the BJP has politicised almost all of these material considerations. Whether it is land, jobs or education, there is some BJP politician or BJP-affiliated extremist terming Muslims' possession of these a “jihad”.

This is aside from the nearly daily horror stories of humiliations, calls for genocide, assaults and murders of Muslims that go unpunished and, at times, are even celebrated. For the first time in the history of post-Partition India a political party is making the majority of Indian Muslims face the unenviable fact that, under the BJP, the Muslim part may be the materially more important part of their identity as Indian Muslims.

Where we go from this is unclear. It would, of course, be ideal if the BJP actually followed through on its promise of “sabka saath, sabka vikas” and promoted unbiased development for the whole country. This is unlikely. The West Bengal election campaign was viciously bigoted, and reports of attacks on Muslim institutions and businesses are already filtering in. Given the redeployment of police personnel by the Election Commission, and the massive deployment of paramilitary forces in the state under Amit Shah’s leadership, it seems obvious that this violence is being allowed.

On top of that we have lakhs who have been disenfranchised during the special intensive revision exercise, whose future remains unclear. If the BJP continues in its approach of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in Assam, it will try and find ways, like through the controversial Constitution Amendment Act, to exclude Muslims.

The numbers we are now talking of are huge. While individual atrocities such as attacks on places of worship, lynchings, or pogroms are every bit as horrible, they tend to be geographically discrete. They generate a more discrete response – legal cases and localised protests. Wider attacks generate a different response.

We saw a foretaste of this in the Shaheen Bagh protests, which were Muslim-owned and Muslim-led, throwing forward a set of new leaders that were significantly different than the Muslim leaders usually trotted out – the Muslim politician from a political party, the TV maulana, the film star, athlete, or upper-class intellectual. Instead, those protests were grounded in a local political base and threw up a very different set of actors – the local nani-dadi, student leaders, and neighbourhood organisers who were often ignored.

As instructive as Shaheen Bagh was as an example of how large-scale actions against Muslims (for being Muslim) generate a response and a leadership, the numbers involved in the protests were tiny in comparison to the Muslim populations of UP, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. It is hard to predict what type of leadership may emerge, but it is unlikely to be cleric-led as the issues are not religious so much as civic; furthermore clerics tend to have a local network that rarely expands beyond that domain.

The Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen is also an unlikely claimant for this position. Even if a common understanding emerges among the Muslims of these four states – something that has never happened before – it is extremely unlikely that that understanding would be represented by a politician whose electoral base is largely confined to one city in southern India.

More importantly, we do not know how an emergent Muslim leadership in this region would relate to the Indian identity it has clung so hard to, only to have it sidelined by its Muslim identity. The Shaheen Bagh protests centred the Constitution, and Muslim legal-aid groups in Assam for those affected by the NRC have also centred Constitutional values, but there is no guarantee that a sustained attack on Muslim identity, lives and livelihoods will generate the same response.

All we can predict is that a response will happen, a leadership will emerge. How the state responds, how the judiciary acts, how the media paints it and how opposition parties manage this new leadership are all open questions. Either way, what is clear is that the BJP is setting the stage for a confrontation whose outcomes it is unlikely to be prepared for.

Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist in India, the US and the UK.

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