Win Pasmanda hearts before seeking votes
In the recently held national executive of the BJP at Hyderabad, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly urged the party functionaries to reach out to deprived and downtrodden sections in non-Hindu communities. It is a subtle message to focus on segments such as Pasmanda Muslims in the Hindi heartland.They underscored their electoral importance in the recently-held by-elections to some assembly and parliamentary constituencies in Uttar Pradesh. In the Muslim-majority seats of Rampur and Azamgarh, Pasmanda Muslims played a crucial role in ensuring the BJP’s victory by voting for it in substantial numbers. The BJP wants to bring the Pasmanda community into its fold to scuttle the Opposition’s chances of consolidating minority votes in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
Pasmanda is a Persian term that means the ‘ones left behind’ used to describe depressed castes among the Muslims. They constitute the lion’s share of India’s Muslim population.
Before vivisecting the BJP’s new social engineering move, one must briefly analyse the anatomy of the caste system prevailing among Indian Muslims. The significant elements of a caste are endogamy, occupational specialisation, hierarchical order, and restrictions on social intercourse and commensality. All of these apply to Muslim castes as well. In his Muslims in India: Caste Affinity and Social Boundaries of Backwardness, Nadeem Hasnain wrote that while Islam may not have caste or caste-like groupings, the Indian Muslims do have caste. Using evidence from decennial censuses, Ghuas Ansari opined in 1959 that Muslims in India were divided into three broad social groups—the Ashraf (nobles), Ajlaf (lowly), and Arzal (excluded). Ajlafs and Arzals are collectively called Pasmandas.
The socio-political interests of Pasmandas have always been distinct from and conflicting with the elite Ashrafi Muslims. Pasmanda Muslims were at loggerheads with the Ashrafis represented by the All-India Muslim League in colonial India. The All-India Momin Conference, which represented socially backward Pasmanda Muslims, especially weavers, was a voice of the oppressed and the downtrodden amongst the Muslim masses in pre-independent India. It resisted the oppression which was meted out to them by Ashrafi Muslims. The Conference was a part of the Azad Muslims’ Conference led by Allah Baksh Soomro, which opposed the Muslim League’s Two-Nation Theory and the proposal for the partition of India.
The Momin Conference advocated Hindu-Muslim unity for a joint struggle for freedom. Zaheeruddin, president of the Conference, stated: “The Pakistan scheme is a mirage which is taking us towards destruction…we should not forget that a Muslim farmer in Punjab has more in common with a Hindu farmer than with a Muslim from outside”. The Conference feared that the creation of Pakistan with the Muslim League as the ruling party, which represented only the interests of Ashrafs, would further aggravate the sorry state of Pasmandas. Unfortunately, the voice of Pasmandas went unheard as the franchise to legislatures was limited to the wealthy class, and Pasmandas were under-represented in legislatures.
The Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, founded by Ali Anwar Ansari in 1998 in Bihar, spearheads Pasmanda politics in the Hindi Belt. The Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz is a loose coalition of social reform organisations bringing awareness to the plight of the Pasmanda Muslims and their complete neglect and persecution by the upper-class Ashraf Muslims in India. The Mahaz advocates for the Pasmanda Muslim cause concerning personal law, reservation and electoral politics.
The BJP has successfully brought many social classes who recently maintained some distance from the party into its fold. Dalits of Uttar Pradesh, sad with the fall and decline of the Bahujan Samaj Party, have almost en masse embraced the BJP. “Dalits, tribals and Muslims are the groups on which the RSS works hard. The big change we have witnessed in recent years is the RSS’s outreach to Dalits through its samajik samrasta (social harmony) campaign. A “more accommodative stance towards Dr B R Ambedkar”, says Badri Narayan in his Republic of Hindutva: How the Sangh Is Reshaping Indian Democracy (2021). Badri Narayan observes that the RSS is morphing daily, and the image the opposition parties are attacking is much older and has become obsolete. The queen of the Sangh hive, the RSS, is becoming more inclusive and accommodative.
The BJP has won significant acceptance among the Muslim electorate over the last decade. In his New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party (2022), author Nalin Mehta points out: “There are nineteen Lok Sabha seats in the Hindi heartland where over 30 per cent of voters happen to be Muslim. For our purpose here, let’s call them Muslim-significant seats. Of these, the BJP won only five seats (19.6 per cent of votes) in 2009, fourteen (41.6 per cent) in 2014 and seven (39.6 per cent) in 2019. It would imply that its support base in these Muslim-significant seats declined in 2019. However, when we look at vote shares, it is clear that the party grew much deeper roots in these seats during the past decade.”
Mehta says that the BJP is no longer an upper-caste party and the new BJP is a differently oriented caste organism altogether. It also created a new model of political mobilisation around labharthees (beneficiaries) in a way that had not been done in north India before. He observes: “Together, resetting the caste matrix, welfare politics and Hindutva created a new BJP model of politics. It turned the party into a party of the poor and transformed it into the dominant pole of politics in rural India, the default party of the village”.
Several social welfare initiatives of the BJP government at the Centre have catered to the basic needs of the downtrodden sections of the population, including Pasmanda Muslims. The new BJP can comfortably accommodate Pasmanda Muslims in its fold as they are labharthees of the new model of politics. Pasmandas depend on low-income generating professions like butchery, weaving, tailoring etc. If the BJP provides them facilities of skill-upgradation, socio-economic stability, protection from communal violence etc., the induction of Pasmandas into the BJP fold would create a symbiotic ecosystem for Pasmandas and the BJP. However, the BJP has to win their hearts before they catch their votes.
Independent researcher interested in constitutional law and political philosophy