'Vote Jehad', 'Muslim League', What Next?

The only thing that might make the BJP stop trying to isolate Muslims completely will be if substantial numbers of the community vote for the party that flaunts its animosity towards it, notes Jyoti Punwani.

Damned if you win, damned if you don't.

That's the situation for Muslims now. When you win, it's 'vote jehad'. When you lose, the party you vote for gets the hated label of 'Muslim League'.

Either way, Muslims are the target.

After the BJP's loss in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra, where it won just 17 seats compared to the 30 won by the INDIA bloc, the party conjured up the concept of 'vote jehad' to convey to their voters that their defeat was the result of a Muslim conspiracy.

Muslims as a community had indeed voted en bloc for the INDIA Alliance, a coalition of Opposition parties. A Uniform Civil Code loomed on the horizon, with the Law Commission having invited suggestions on it and the PM himself speaking on its necessity. In February 2024, Uttarakhand introduced its own UCC.

The following month, the Centre notified the rules of the CAA, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act which had led to large scale protests by Muslims after it was introduced in 2019.

For Muslims, these two measures were seen as existentialist threats, affecting both their religious identity and their status as citizens.

However, the Muslim vote alone could not have been the reason for the INDIA bloc's victory in Maharashtra, where Muslims constitute just 11.54% of the population. The election results made it clear that Dalits, Marathas and a large section of Mumbai's 'Marathi Manus' had turned against the BJP.

The BJP knew this, and even tried to explain these losses. But for Muslims, they gave just one explanation: Fatwas or religious diktats; in other words, a 'jehad' fought using votes as weapons. This helped propagate the RSS' favourite stereotype of the 'fanatic' Muslim, guided even in secular matters by religion.

In the campaign for the assembly elections held later that year, the BJP singled out 'vote jehad' as the main reason for their defeat. It knew that this bogey would strike fear in the hearts of Hindus, and serve as a warning that if the majority community didn't gang up behind the BJP, like the minorities ostensibly had behind the Opposition, the future of Hindus would be in the hands of parties controlled by Muslims.

The ploy worked. 'Vote jehad' propaganda was one of the factors that contributed to the BJP's unexpectedly spectacular performance in the assembly polls.

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Now, the BJP is at it again.

The party swept Assam, except in Muslim-dominated seats where the Congress won a majority -- 18 out of 22 such seats. Of the remaining four, one was won by a Congress ally, two by Badruddin Ajmal's AIDUF, and one by Mamata Banerjee's TMC.

Of the Congress' 19 winners in Assam, only one is a Hindu.

In Bengal too, both the Congress winners are Muslim.

It is after the Assam and Bengal results, that the label 'Muslim League' for the Congress, coined by no other than the PM himself (he'd actually called it 'Muslim League Maowadi Congress'), was amplified by the BJP.

Ironically, Badruddin Ajmal, whose AIDUF is known as a Muslim party, also used the same label for the Congress after the results showed that many of his candidates had lost to the Congress.

What both the BJP and Ajmal cleverly omitted to state was that the delimitation exercise carried out in Assam in 2023, had been aimed at such a result. Muslim-dominated constituencies had been bunched together and reduced from 35 to 22, with a corresponding increase in other seats where the BJP could win easily.

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Like its 'vote jehad' campaign, the BJP aims to score many points by labelling the Congress as the new 'Muslim League'.

First, the Muslim League remains in most minds (except perhaps in Kerala, where the Indian Union Muslim League is a major player), the party associated with Jinnah, Partition and the creation of Pakistan. By hurling this label at the Congress, the BJP hopes to tarnish it with those associations.

Second, the label effectively masks Hindu support for the Congress. The Congress' lone Hindu MLA from Assam won 56% of the vote from Naobaicha, a mixed constituency which has 54% Hindu population and 38% Muslims. The seat was held by a Congress Hindu; the BJP has never won there.

Stung by the 'Muslim League' jibe, Congress Spokesperson Supriya Srinate was forced to point out that out of its 664 MLAs across the country, 520 or 78% were Hindu, 80 or 12% were Muslim, and 64 or 10% were from other religions.

This is in fact, a fairly accurate representation of India's population, something that the BJP can hardly boast of in its elected representatives.

Why Muslims choose mainstream parties

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But that is by design.

In the 11 years it has been in power, the BJP has never hidden its core belief that India is a Hindu Rashtra. Many of its CMs treat Muslims as second class citizens, targeting them with demolitions and evictions, restricting their religious practices as well as their livelihoods, felicitating rapists and lynch mobs.

After all this, in case Muslims still remained under any illusion, more than one BJP leader has boasted that the party does not need Muslim votes.

Won't any community similarly targeted, vote for the party best positioned to defeat the BJP?

That can only be a party that enjoys the widest support, which must necessarily come from the majority community. Muslims know that voting for a Muslim party would only isolate them further.

So they have voted for the Congress, as well as for the TMC, AAP, the CPI-M, the Samajwadi Party, the RJD, the DMK.

This is what irks the BJP -- that its rival parties, led by Hindus, are able to stay in the race thanks to the votes the BJP shuns.

The derogatory label of 'Muslim League', the BJP hopes, would make these parties shun Muslims, and drive the community to Asaduddin Owaisi's appealing rhetoric of victimhood. Then, there would be two distinct blocs, the Hindu bloc represented by the BJP; the Muslim bloc by Owaisi's AIMIM.

The two-nation theory, put into practice by the BJP since the last 11 years, would finally be validated.

However, that's unlikely to happen, even though already, the BJP's rivals (but for a few exceptions), have stopped wooing Muslims during elections, as they used to. They've been intimidated by the way the BJP has built up its Hindu vote bank, using a three-pronged attack on Muslims as a community, on the Opposition parties' so-called 'Muslim appeasement', and finally, on secularism.

Muslims understand this, but have no choice. Nor do those opposed to the BJP's majoritarian politics.

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'Vote Jehad', 'Muslim League', What Next?

The only thing that might make the BJP stop trying to isolate Muslims completely will be if substantial numbers of the community vote for the party that flaunts its animosity towards it.

A tall order!

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff