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By Jagdish Dwivedi
As the state and parliamentary elections are round the corner Samajwadis have decided to up the ante and Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav has put his old garb of "Maulana Mulayam". Mulayam with his Man Friday Mr. Amar Singh would hold a rally of Muslim community in Bijnore, and the duo would visit Azamgarh and organise a public meeting in Jamia Nagar, New Delhi. In battlefield UP, the scramble for Muslim votes has also intensified. While the support for nuke deal is seen to have weakened its position among Muslims, especially with BSP painting the deal as anti-Muslim, the party's association with Congress in post-Jamia Nagar encounter could damage its prospects.
Politics is often defined as a trade that thrives on sentiments and superstitions rather than rationalism. This would certainly ring true of Uttar Pradesh politics today, vis-à-vis the Muslims. Long before the poll process began, political parties in the state had started wooing the Muslims. If initially the blame was on the ruling Samajwadi Party for being unabashed in their overtures, other parties were quick to follow suit. The Congress was far from being the last to join the bandwagon.
The Congress Member of Parliament, Mr. Rahul Gandhi, famously broached the subject in western UP when he said that the Babri Masjid would not have been demolished had the Gandhi-Nehru family been active in politics at that time. Soon after this comment, the UPA government at the Centre announced a rehabilitation package for the victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots on the lines of the one drawn up for the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre.
On February 18 last year, the UP minister, Haji Yaqoob Qureshi, announced Rs 51 crore reward and the executioner's weight in gold for anyone who beheaded the controversial Danish cartoonist who made caricatures of Prophet Mohammed. Haji's extremist ideas were rewarded in the municipal polls in Meerut.
Early in April last year, a breakaway group of the Sunni Muslim sect announced a reward of Rs 5 lakh for anyone who could fetch the head of Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi author currently residing in India.
A consolidation of Muslim votes is seen to be the key in winning at least 16 parliamentary seats out of 80 in UP. But no party can say for sure that it has the support of the majority of Muslim voters in the state. Will the Muslims vote for parties they have been loyal to? Will they experiment heavily? Will the Muslim voters replay the Assam experiment and send a representative resembling the Assam United Democratic Front leader, Maulana Badruddin Ajmal? And most importantly, will the voters respond to the new strategy of the political parties to work out a new social formation of backward classes and upper castes which political analysts have called "reverse social osmosis"? This is a process by which upper-caste groups left out in the churning of politics since the mid-Eighties are expected to integrate with the backward caste-based parties.
Looking at the many Muslim fronts and alliances which have emerged in the state in recent times, it appears that the community is all set to blaze a new trail in voting pattern. First came the People's Democratic Front in May last year, led by Kalbe Jawaad, a Shia cleric known for his clean and honest image. But he did not get the support of the Sunni clerics. This dashed his hope of bringing together the many factions within the community, and Jawaad resigned as the president of the outfit in October.
The Jama Masjid imam, Ahmad Bukhari, launched the United Democratic Front in July 2006. Bukhari was joined by hardcore Muslim leaders like Maulana Haji Yaqoob Qureshi of Meerut. But this outfit too failed to forge ties with the majority of the ulemas. Bukhari is seen as a political turncoat for his association with the Bharatiya Janata Party during the National Democratic Alliance regime. Some other fronts, like the Jamait Ulema-i-Hind, led by Arshad Madni, which also claimed to be a force in western UP has split vertically. Madni is believed to be close to the Congress, but the Jamait general secretary, Mahmood Madni, has become a Rajya Sabha member with the help of the Rastriya Lok Dal. There are at least six other fronts vying for the votes of the Muslims.
Jawaad has no doubts that the Muslim votes would be split this time too. "The greatest tragedy is that they (the Muslims in UP) can't see eye to eye on even the basic issues like education, drinking water and health," he said. This also hints at why mainstream political parties go on a mad scramble for Muslim votes before every election in UP.
The Samajwadi Party chief, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who likes to be called 'Maulana Mulayam', had tried to woo the Muslims with sops including Urdu University in Rampur. He has offered 40 per cent of his party tickets to Muslim candidates. Mayavati's Bahujan Samaj Party had given 61 seats to the Muslims during last year's state assembly elections. In western UP, Ajit Singh has been working towards a Jat-Muslim understanding. The Congress had managed to get some Muslim votes in 2004 and would like to build on that now.
It is possible that the Muslim voters of UP might revisit their old loyalties by backing the Congress and the Samjwadi Party or the BSP. The community appears to be wary of a patchwork political ideology. The Samajwadi Party still projects itself as the sole defender of Muslim interests, yet the party's second-in-command, Amar Singh, has been recruiting upper-caste Hindu (Thakur) youths at the forefront of the party. The BSP has been openly wooing Brahmins. A study reveals that these two parties are bound to estrange their traditional supporters - Muslims for the Samajwadi Party and the OBCs for the BSP - because of their new caste-alignments. There is also a perception among Muslims that both Mulayam Singh and Mayavati had helped, or are being helped by, the BJP.
In the 2002 assembly elections, 46 Muslim legislators got elected from 403 seats - 20 of them from the Samajwadi Party, and 14 for the BSP. There are 16 parliamentary constituencies in the state where Muslim votes could prove to be crucial.
In 2002, the Samajwadi Party, with 143 MLAs, fell short by about 60 in making a bid to form the government. Observers felt that this was because of a drifting away of Muslim votes from his party. The party's Muslim votes may go down further in 2009. Mayavati may gain marginally from this, unlike the Congress, which had found the anti-NDA factor useful the last time round. The newer outfits and large number of independent candidates may get negative Muslim votes in some constituencies - that is, a vote against a party they hate, not necessarily for a party they love. The 40 assembly seats in which Muslim candidates were runners-up in 2002 may form the political theatre for a pitched battle this time, particularly among the Muslim outfits. It is ironic but true that the desire to defeat candidates of the mainstream parties failed mostly because of the split in Muslim votes, especially in the constituencies where the Muslims were in a position to play a decisive role in 2002. INAV
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