Electing or rejecting a party is part of political game. An individual or a group has a right to choose the representative of choice. The political parties too do not have monopoly over any particular caste, community, etc. But some election results are so surprising to be believed.
It is not the rout of Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar or fall in number of seats of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, which came as a bolt from the blue. What is amazing is that not a single Muslim MP from these two outfits could make it to Parliament though they liberally distributed tickets to the candidates from the community. For example, five out of 28 who contested on the RJD tickets from Bihar, were Muslims. Similarly, its alliance partner, the Lok Janshakti Party, which fought in 12 seats, gave tickets to two Muslims.
As if that was not enough. Lalu Prasad, who was once considered the darling of Muslims, lost from Patliputra parliamentary constituency, which has a sizeable Muslim population. What is more shocking for Lalu himself is that he trailed by about 500 votes from Phulwarisharif assembly segment, which forms the western suburb of Patna. Not only the headquarters of Emarat-e-Shariah, a reputed Muslim institution, is situated in Phulwarisharif but it has more than a dozen big colonies of Muslims with thousands of voters. Barring Jamaat-e-Islami, no Muslim organisation openly announced support to Lalu Prasad. A large number of Ulema of various schools of thoughts secretly and openly – for example Ghulam Rasool Baliyavi of Idara-e-Shariah – campaigned for the NDA candidates not only here but at many other places. The Urdu Press too remained completely hostile towards RJD-LJP. Curiously the RJD never trailed in Phulwari assembly segment in any election held in the last so many years.
Almost all these new colonies of Phulwarisharif started coming up in early 1990s, that is, at the height of BJP’s movement against Babri Masjid. Security was an important factor, which led to the concentration of Muslims in this new pocket of Patna. A large number of people sold their land and houses after the communal riots between 1989 and 1992 in various towns and cities of Bihar, including the old Patna City area, and settled down in Phulwarisharif. And when some communal elements opened fire in the night of December 7, 1992, a day after the demolition of Babri Masjid all the top officials of the state rushed to the spot. Lalu himself visited various colonies of Phulwarisharif – and other parts of Patna too – to restore confidence and ensure them that nothing would happen to them. Sixteen years and a half later a sizeable section of the same Muslims gleefully voted in favour of the Janata Dal (United) candidate, Ranjan Yadav.
True, there is a large number of Muslims, who strongly root for Lalu, but many of them simply did not vote as hardly any Muslim organisation or leader took to street or issued statement in favour of the RJD. They stayed at home and the voting percentage never crossed 40.
The case of Uttar Pradesh is slightly different. Though Samajwadi Party got 23.6 per cent votes – slightly less than RJD-LJP alliance in Bihar – it managed to win highest number of seats – 23. But what puzzled the political commentators is as to why not a single Muslim won on its ticket. In places like Aligarh there was prospect of Muslim SP candidate making it through yet the party failed. Aligarh too has a big Muslim vote-bank.
Azam Khan, the Muslim face of the Samajwadi Party, got his relationship strained with Amar Singh on a number of issues; for example, the nomination of Jaya Prada from Rampur. Azam used Jaya Prada and Kalyan Singh issues to target the party leadership though he was quite instrumental in ensuring ticket to the actress in the last election. To settle his personal score he dragged the community in the controversy.
A couple of years ago Shahid Siddiqui, another Samajwadi Party leader and Urdu journalist, quit the party to join Bahujan Samaj Party simply because she emerged victorious. Salim Sherwani recently crossed over to Congress and won from Badayun.
According to an estimate, 30 per cent Muslims of Uttar Pradesh voted for the Samajwadi Party. The figure for Bihar is somewhat better. This is simply because in Bihar Congress was much weaker than Sonia-Rahul-led Congress in UP. One of the two seats won by Congress in Bihar is that of Maulana Asrar-ul-Haque from Kishanganj. But he won on his own and not a single senior Congress leader campaigned for him.
What emerged from the election is that Muslims were prepared to forgive and forget the crimes of Congress – the Babri Masjid demolition, the Bhagalpur riots of 1989, the series of riots right from Moradabad to Aligarh, Meerut, Ahmedabad, Old Delhi, Hashimpura, etc. in 1980s and 1990s. Similarly they are prepared to forgive the BJP for all its anti-Muslim pogrom. Even in the town of Bhagalpur, which went up in flames after Lal Krishna Advani’s Rath Yatra in 1989, a section of Muslims cast their votes in favour of the BJP candidate, Syed Shahnawaz Husain. Muslims can forgive and forget Mayawati’s election campaign for Narendra Modi in Gujarat and the then railway minister Nitish Kumar’s role in Sabarmati Express burning incident in Godhra.
One can forgive a crime, but cannot forget it. But the community has done both in the above cases.
But it is not prepared to forgive and forget a single act of omission of Mulayam Singh or Lalu Prasad. Most of the time they will judge the duo on the basis of fantastic and baseless propaganda carried out by the media and the vested interest within the community. A large number of elderly Muslims with no political ambition whatsoever still recall the past when they were not only provided security, but also given relatively proper representation in the government jobs, assembly and Parliament election.
In UP the Jat-Muslim alliance of 1970s brought relative peace in the state. However, after the collapse of this alliance in 1980 parliamentary election and the decline of former Prime Minister Charan Singh, the state was once again rocked by a series of communal holocaust – starting from Eid day firing in Moradabad in August 1980.
Whatever be the compulsion of Muslims in switching over to Congress in 1980 is not the issue here. And this time too there was nothing wrong in voting for Congress in the seats where it was in a position to defeat the communal forces. What happened is that Muslims voted without any strategy. This was fuelled by the widespread anger for Mulayam and Lalu Prasad. In the process the community ignored that they have seriously weakened the regional aggressive secular leaders. The Muslims of Gujarat – and several other states – are paying for this absence of third force as the BJP is out and out a communal party and Congress, at times, playing soft-Hindutva.
What the community leaders and elders are not realising is that in the 15 years a generation have come up in Bihar and UP, which does not understand the importance of riot-free atmosphere. They are our new voters and we have not worked on them. A couple of days after the May 16 election results, Tauseef, a 15-year-old boy of Class-X innocently asked me: “What is wrong with the BJP?” When I explained to him about the ethnic cleansing in Gujarat, Babri Masjid demolition, Bhagalpur and Mumbai riots and a number of mayhems he was simply surprised. After all he had hardly heard about them in the Muslim society now. What he listens to, watches and reads in the media is anti-Lalu and, to some extent, anti-Mulayam stories. His friends rendered me speechless. He held Lalu Prasad responsible for the Bhagalpur riots of 1989.
We blame only the media for being biased. What we ignore is the role school teachers are playing while taking Social Science classes. No this is not only the case with the RSS-run schools, but even those managed by secular elements and Muslims. A young boy of Class-X said he was fed up with his Social Science teacher who spent a full fortnight after the election result of May 16 castigating Lalu Prasad and defending Nitish Kumar. The teacher took up the chapters on Caste and Political Parties in the Class-X of the Civics book of CBSE. The subtle propaganda only stopped after the school went for summer vacation on May 30. None in the community leadership is paying heed to the poison being so sweetly administered in the apparently secular and even Muslim institutions by apparently non-RSS teachers.