IN the vast swathe which constitutes UP, Bihar and West Bengal, ever since Lalu Prasad’s defeat in 2005, Mayawati’s ascent in 2007, and then Mamata Banerjee’s sweep in 2011, the question now routinely being framed is: Have Muslims tired of the proverbial daadhi-topi chase, of being disproportionately obsessed with identity-related issues of personal law and beards, provision of security, and ‘moved’ on to other concerns – of rozi, roti, bank loans, jobs and promises of perhaps a skills development plan? Is the game now more than just about safety, security and identity?

The Muslim electorate is significant and seen as capable of influencing electoral results in Bihar (15.9%), UP (18.5%) and West Bengal (25.2%). The likelihood of the community rejecting parties it had stuck with over the past two decades and look for those offering ‘more’ – even if ostensibly just a cycle, a loan and a seat in a school – may be drawing the line under an era when Muslims, haunted by very basic concerns of life and sheer existence, either voted purely as a group, ‘tactically’, or just for certain limited parties. An influential set of Bihari Muslims will tell you how Lalu Prasad screamed at them when told about the dismal state of roads in the state, posing the question if it wasn’t enough that they were secure now. Bad roads were framed as an obstacle for just upper caste shehris, surely not a factor for Muslims. But those assumptions were soon to be proven woefully off the mark. So what has changed?

The deepening, diversifying or aspirational aspect of the Muslim vote now coming to the fore is indicative of how the democratic deepening experienced by the rest of India in the past two decades has impacted Muslims, fracturing the idea of a monolithic Muslim vote and drawing them into the game more as individual citizens. There is a change underway and a refinement in the Muslim’s choice, sometimes making parties like the Samajwadi Party or RJD (Rashtriya Janata Dal) privately rue that it was their very ‘success’ in ensuring security, by kindling the dangerous spark of ‘aspiration’, that has consumed them.

The near-complete faith in the Congress as a political refuge for Muslims is an old idea, going back to the period just after Partition. It was only when Muslims started thinking differently once the Nehruvian era came to a close that the Congress realized that it could no longer take Muslim support for granted. Thus, it is possible to virtually plot how swings in the fortunes of the Congress are contiguous with the Muslim view of the party and their decision to vote for it.

 

Just around the time that Congress hegemony in India was first shaken – when a spate of non-Congress governments came into being around 1967 – a series of communal riots in Jabalpur, Calcutta and Rourkela pushed Muslims to start worrying about life under the Congress, and there was a rush for ‘alternatives’. The Majlis e Mushawarat was initially set up under Syed Mahmud, a Bihari Muslim leader, educated in Cambridge, and a friend of Motilal Nehru (Pandit Nehru is said to have tied his holdall during train journeys). The Mushawarat’s UP unit was headed by a firebrand medical doctor. Dr Faridi proposed a new strategy for Muslims, asking them to vote for ‘good candidates’ and not look to parties for security, thereby sounding alarm bells for the Congress. The argument for giving primacy to candidates, in contrast to a politics of bloc voting for certain parties, sprung from a despair about the frequency of communal riots, despite a Congress dispensation at the helm.

Interestingly, even then, in the nine-point charter put out by Faridi in July 1965 for the crucial UP polls – the Majlis e Mushawarat released ‘The People’s Manifesto’ – there were glimmers of demands we now read as ‘aspiration’. With free education and medical aid, important elements on the wish list, the Muslims hoped to send a signal that their affiliations were up for grabs and were no longer just captive to the Congress party. Those were the days when even parties, who were self-professed ‘saviours’ of Muslims, found it easier to deliver identity than regular municipal care or schools or medicine. The Muslim vote, these ‘secular’ parties were convinced, was best mediated through a well-heeled upper class Muslim leadership. The notion of individual Muslim votes being aggregated was nowhere on the scene.

Jump-cut to the late eighties, a period of great churn and turmoil, which is perhaps only just turning full circle, and you find multiple active identity-led mobilizations around faith and then caste – Muslims too did what seemed like the rational thing to do then, align themselves rather firmly to parties and leaders that promised safety of life, business or livelihood. Where was the luxury then to think of scholarships, demand reservations, talk of deprivation and so on? In Rajiv Gandhi’s temple-building calls, the Congress was found vacillating and equivocal (despite reversing the Shahbano verdict which he thought was a peace offering to Muslims). Confused by the call for a ‘Ram Rajya’ from Faizabad by Rajiv Gandhi, ostensibly at the urging of Arun Nehru, the Muslims concluded that it was best to align themselves politically to parties like Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party, the RJD of Lalu Prasad and stay with the Left. This tendency persisted till well into the new millennium.

 

The story of how all that has now changed is something that will need more than the instincts of this writer to tease out, but some broad straws can be discerned. The central fulcrum of this change is what one might call the peace-dividend offered by the formation of the UPA. A social democratic political project of the Congress supported by the Left may be pooh-poohed by some analysts and observers, but within the community, just two years after the Gujarat pogrom, the appeal of stability and the space provided by the UPA, even as an idea, will perhaps only be fully appreciated in the years to come.

Other than the fact that the BJP failed to retain power at the Centre after Gujarat in 2002, the findings of the Prime Minister’s High-level Committee on Social, Economic and Educational Status of Muslims (Sachar Committee) and the wide publicity it received, too had a far-reaching impact. The data severely undermined the propaganda of Muslim ‘appeasement’, and the committee’s assessment of the community on cold socio-economic and educational parameters dramatically changed the terms of discourse. Once peace and the right to life had been guaranteed by political parties like the SP, RJD and the Left, it served to condition the politics of even their adversaries in each of the states in which they were powerful.

 

It may just be an appreciation of the power of the Muslim vote and the consequent compulsion to frame their own USP intelligently. But it is worth noting how the principal opposition parties to the SP, RJD and the Left (the BSP, JDU and TMC, all ironically once staunch allies of the BJP), in their anxiety to carve out space for themselves more imaginatively, decided to project themselves as the ‘real’ benefactors of Muslims. This was done by offering the prospect of more than security – equity in the distribution of material benefits, not just the comfort of knowing that the district administration would not allow a riot to rage. In short, the entire politics of this crucial belt shifted to adjust to the fact of the Muslims being an invaluable vote, not just for some parties, but at least two parties competing for power in each of these states.

On the face of it then, the shift in the politics meant that Muslims in these states could actually think of what can be termed ‘life plus’ politics, and of what the state must do to invest in the quality of their lives. With this, Muslims, in the crucial cow-belt and in Bengal, finally felt they had a choice, a far cry from the days when Mullah Mulayam just needed to wear a skull cap and do some walkabouts in costume to demonstrate his empathy with the community.

 

Another aspect that has played a silent role is the impact of globalization. Liberalization, now nearly twenty years old, continues to influence lives and therefore, political choices. It has generated both pull and push pressures for a large number of members of the community impacted by the winds of change, especially those involved in traditional occupations, crafts and skills. The first impact of the destruction of what seemed to be never-changing age-old skills and trades has meant that children are no longer just being groomed for specific professions, as their forefathers were for generations. This has, of course, meant a loss of skill sets and a break in the old time-tested method of passing on trade secrets. But, the younger generation of Muslims, children of weavers or potters, is now being pushed to look for other opportunities and livelihoods. The melting down of old lifestyles has resulted in new influences, in particular the emergence of new ideas via mass-media and urbanization (incidentally, increasing at a much faster rate for Muslims than non-Muslims).

Its important to note the enhanced interest of Muslims in formal education. Even madrasas are reinventing themselves, offering courses in english, maths and computer skills so as to prepare their wards for ‘potential’ jobs in the organized sectors of the economy. More importantly, this trend is noticeable not just for boys but also for girls. It is instructive that parties like the MIM in Hyderabad, with a strong base in the old city, have heavily invested in educational institutions.

Fortunately, though with a time lag, a similar tendency can be discerned amongst the Muslims of the Hindi heartland. Delhi today has a large number of Muslim youth flocking to the various educational institutions in the city, all keen to improve both their technical/professional and social skills. Both they, and their families, are aware that such facilities are non-existent in their region. And though they are often forced to live in ghetto-like conditions in the national capital, they know that their life-chances for upward mobility depend on their ability to reinvent themselves.

 

The spur for getting out of a centuries-old routine – increased pressure on livelihoods and being forced to look for new ways of making ends meet – has also provoked an interest in what political party manifestos/governments have to offer by way of incentives, entitlements and in a sense, go beyond slogans to high policy – whether it be skill institutes, a mid-day meal, the prospect of school, a job in the mobile kiosk or call-centre or even just MNREGA. Whether by kindling the spark via new opportunities or satellite TV-induced dreams and possibilities, or by pushing people to the brink of despair and forcing them to look for options, the traditional systems that several Muslim families took for granted have broken down, forcing them to travel outside old frontiers. Often, this has meant a change in how youngsters or families spend their evenings – social dialogue is no longer as confined as it earlier was – encouraging Muslims to respond as voter-citizens and not just flocks or groups. The Muslim family is no longer just part of a larger ‘community’ with increasing numbers of Muslims assessing politics as individual voters.

 

Another fallout of what has been described above is the emergence of expressions of differences within the Muslim monolith. The various colours within the idea of a large one Muslim umbrella, have got more pronounced over the past few years. That someone like E. Ahamed (President of the Indian Union Muslim League, a Keralite) would go to Batla House or some place in UP and be bewildered by the problems he encountered there and vice-versa is new. The Sachar report has a delightful statistic that says more than words can convey – a Keralite Muslim urban woman’s literacy rate is much higher than that of a Bihar Muslim rural male’s.

With some distance between them and the atmosphere during the polarized nineties or even shortly after the 2002 Gujarat shocker, the Muslims are now able to look at their own backyard with some degree of openness and honesty. The concerns of Muslim ‘Backward’ castes are being discussed, and somewhat sympathetically, by an otherwise cagey upper class Muslim leadership and even sectarian differences are being debated within the community. The general opening up of the media in the country too had some bearing on this. Muslims employed at call-centres, or websites like indianmusliminfo.in or twocircles.net and some chatty googlegroups may appear to be niche phenomena only impacting a thin middle class, but they provide a forum for loud and open debate within the Muslim middle class, which is unprecedented. Moreover, the debate is usually laid bare for the rest of the country to see, a sign of creeping self-confidence in the community.

Issues and concerns beyond just victimhood are being thrashed out, often as chatter, articles in cyberspace, followed by articles in Urdu, other languages and Hindi and English newspapers, till they eventually acquire the shape of a clever slogan, articulated as a demand when taken up by social or political groups. A recent case in point is the demand for ‘reservations’, emerging shortly after the Sachar Committee report was made public. This first started as a whisper campaign; letters and emails within the community. Initially it invoked just hushed comment but slowly grew louder and picked up momentum, till the demand was nuanced as one of quotas for the deprived Muslims, not for the community as a whole. All getting to the point that it is influencing policy.

Finally, the realization within the BJP, even if only for tactical reasons, to not hit out at Congress for its ‘secular’ credentials (when last did you hear Advani call the Congress ‘pseudo-secular’?) has had a deep impact on the way the Muslim wishes to exercise her vote.

In conclusion, a significant and perhaps unintended consequence of the formation of the UPA has been the making of space for India’s largest minority (13.4%) and this has resulted in its flowering, and diversification, enabling it to think about things other than what the leaders articulated on its behalf for decades. This does not mean that there will be a set back if the UPA were to relinquish office. Contending parties will have to do a lot more than just convince the community that it will be allowed to live in peace. Self-respect, jobs, opportunities, empathy and an understanding of their complexities – it seems like life has just got harder for those courting the Muslim. The genie may have just freed itself from the bottle.