NATIONAL POLITICS
Surendra Mohan on Muslim Voters
The Congress party has decided to concentrate its efforts on winning back the favor of the large Muslim community which it has been losing progressively since the late 1980s. Even the cold reception which the Prime Minister received in Bareilly a few months ago, and the protests mounted by some organizations of Muslims in Kanpur recently on the occasion of the visit of the union Home minister have not depressed them.
The welfare minister, Mr. Sitaram Kesri, took the first step by announcing his support to extend reservations in public employment to all Muslims.
The gimmickry involved in the whole exercise is therefore quite obvious.
The Prime Minister has been trying to get the Imams of the mosques to favor the Congress party by promising them salaries from the government exchequer.
Wooing of editors of periodicals published in Urdu and Urdu writers is yet another ploy to influence the Muslim electorate.
The major theme employed by Congress leaders in such conferences is that the saffron brigade can be defeated only by the Congress. But, the response of the Muslim electorate has been to vote for the parties of the third alternative to roll back the communal challenge.
It is instructive in this context to look at the local bodies election results in UP. Though the Muslim community was known to favor the Samajwadi Party and it was felt that the BSP had lost its clout because of its short-lived alliance with the BJP, the Muslim vote went to the latter in Meerut, Ghaziabad, Aligarh and Agra. In Rampur, a stronghold of the Samajwadi Party, they favored the Janata Dal candidate. But, in most areas in central and eastern UP, they showed their preference for the Samajwadi Party.
The same was the case in respect of the elections to the Bihar state assembly, where Syed Shahabuddin, Abdul Ghafoor and Yunus Saleem left the Janata Dal barely nine months before the elections.
In several states, particularly MP, Gujarat, Maharashtra and even Karnataka the number of Muslim legislators has gone down. In Gujarat and MP, not a single Muslim candidate won in the last general election. This concern is heightened by the experience that the Mandal formula for reservation has not helped the Muslim youth from backward communities in the absence of further categorization of the OBCs on a rational social basis. The inclusion of Buddhists in Maharashtra among the SCs and the demand for the same in respect of Christian Dalits have activated similarly situated groups among Muslims.
It has not been realized that the community has been the mainstay of our small industrial sector and the closure of half a million units in this section has accelerated unemployment and even destitution in large sections. Educational backwardness is an equally serious problem. So is the slow pace of social reform, which has to be accelerated by the community itself.
The Muslim community's collective feelings of hurt and humiliation on the destruction of the Babari mosque and the riots in Mumbai, Surat and ten other cities following it have still to be assuaged. Instead of trying to buy the support of the Imams or influencing Urdu writers and scribes or making hypocritical offers of reservation, leaders of the Congress party would do well to ponder over some of the real problems that the Muslim community is faced with.
(Source: The Times of India, 19 January, 1996).
Rajiv Shukla on Muslims and Congress(I)
If Rao was under the impression that the Muslim religious leaders being wooed had faith in his leadership, he has been proved wrong - grievously wrong. For, as the events have proved, nothing could be farther from the ground reality. It is not at all surprising that even a large section of Congressmen strongly disputes these claims, and believes instead that far from winning over Muslims the party's strategy has been achieving quite the contrary.
The party's critics see the Kanpur incident as just another instance of the Muslims' profound abhorrence of the Congress led by Rao and, even more so, of Chavan whom they hold personally responsible for the Babari Masjid demolition.
What an irony, then, that just at the time when the wounds the demolition inflicted on the Muslim psyche were beginning to heal, the gentlemen should have arrived to the sound of anti-Rao slogans to protest against Chavan's 'presence'! Suddenly a subject that, for the moment at least, had been forgotten was revived, till everybody was talking about how deeply Rao had alienated about how deeply Rao had alienated the Muslims. For the message of Kanpur's Muslims was one more powerful reminder to the community, countrywide, that the Congress under Rao was not to be forgiven.
As Anwar says, the Muslims of India hold Chavan directly responsible for failing to protect the Babari Masjid As the country's home minister, they feel, the least Chavan could have done was to have accepted moral responsibility for the incident - and here we nearly had him acting as Rao's goodwill envoy!
