NATIONAL POLITICS
Given a ten per cent or more Muslim population in 207 parliamentary constituencies, the Millat (community) appears to be almost in a position to make or break the fortunes of a political party. In the face of the impression that the Congress has virtually given up on the support of the Muslim community after the Babari Masjid demolition, whether the search for lost minority votes will bear some fruit largely remains an open question. Monolithic?
Are religious communities monolithic in terms of their political preferences? Perhaps nothing is farther from truth. Every attempt to create a major national political party of the Muslims after independence has failed. With the impending general elections in 1996, old myths have begun masquerading in the guise of truth. The greatest of these is the phenomena of minority vote banks. Periodically revived by politicians, particularly at election time, this myth is also legitimized by biased pollsters and bad media analysts...
Their voting patterns despite the communal consequences of the partition have been greatly intriguing. It is this conundrum that the vote bank theory tried to address but ended up in communalizing the discourse of election analysis.
Muslim voting behavior pattern disproves the 'minorities as a monolith' hypothesis. If in the initial elections the percentages of Muslim voting for the Congress were somewhat higher than those of the majority community, this could have been the result of the partition, and the charismatic, secular appeal of Pandit Nehru. Between 1962 and 1971, Muslims voted more or less along the lines of the majority community.
The Congress-Muslim hiatus came with the excesses of Emergency in 1975, the formal separation following in the 1977 general elections... Right after 1977, the Muslim community moved back to the Congress from 1977 to 1984 the Congress polled a lower percentage of votes in constituencies that had higher Muslim population content than others.
The explanation lies in the growing division between the Ashraf and the Ajlaf, the forward and the backward classes among the Muslims. While the Congress could win back some of the Ashraf after 1977, the more backward sections among the Muslims proved more difficult to be wooed. This differential pattern of voting among the Muslims was clearly evident in the recent state assembly elections in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. The Muslim-Yadav coalition of the Bihar chief minister, Mr. Laloo Yadav, has largely been a backward class coalition from both. It was precisely the division of Muslim vote between Janata Dal, Samata Party and the Congress in the 1995 Bihar assembly elections which helped the BJP to make its first inroads in several constituencies of north Bihar.
While the long-term pattens of minority voting behavior explode the myth of the Muslims monolith, short-term trends and constituency-based research disprove the mini-vote bank thesis. The strategies employed by the minorities are neither uniform nor simple. Electoral research has conclusively shown that not only minorities of various regions and provinces vote very differently, even within the same region there are differential voting patterns even among neighboring constituencies. This seems to hold true both for assembly and parliamentary polls.
While constituencies with higher Muslim populations voted more for Muslim candidates, those below the critical 20 to 25 per cent population voted. strategically for the candidate most likely candidate to win, below 10 per cent population, Muslims within a constituency voted like their Hindu brethren.
With uncertainties galore in the run-up to the impending polls, a process of dealignment between voters of all communities and political parties has set in. Old equations are out and new ones are yet to form. Therefore, it cannot be claimed that the preferences of the Muslim voter will be shaped entirely by their response to the Babari Masjid demolition. It also cannot be said that the Muslim vote would simply be a response to the issue of reservations or various (gifts) by the government right before the elections. The choice will be much more complex, determined largely by local constraints. While Muslims in larger numbers are certain to vote for the third front in the Hindi heartland, the Congress will be a serious contender for the minority votes in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. The CPI-M will corner a large percentage of Muslim support in West Bengal, but in Kerala the confessional parties could gain from it. Any division of minority votes among various contenders will have only one clear outcome, which was evident in the Bihar assembly elections: it will benefit the BJP in various parts of the country.
(Source: The Times of India, 15 December, 1995)
ROLL OF BACKWARDNESS
Indian Delegation for World Women Conference, Beijing, September, 1995
Total: 34 Muslim: 2 1) Dr. (Smt.) Najma Heptulla
2) Smt. Fatima Bibi
(Source: LSUQ No. 228 dated 28 November, 1995 by R. Ray, P.C. Verma, S.K. Mandal & S.K. Patel)
