The debate on Muslim political representation has found a new overtone in this Lok Sabha election. The BJP relies heavily on Hindutva-led development as an electoral narrative to redefine its core ideology of cultural nationalism. The party evokes the ‘Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas’ slogan to argue that its development-oriented outlook is inclusive; hence there is no need to have any specific Muslim-centric policy. On the other hand, the non-BJP parties are hesitant to talk about Muslim political aspirations as well. They fear that it would affect their Hindu outreach. This reluctance of the political class to address Muslims as legitimate political stakeholders makes the idea of Muslim representation much more complicated. Precisely for this reason, there is a need to historicise this debate to make sense of the shades and trajectories of the politics of representation in the Indian context.
Muslim representation was one of the most contentious political issues in colonial India. The colonial Census, which practically divided Indian religious communities into permanent majority and minorities, played a significant role in this debate. Hindus as the majority and Muslims as a minority emerged as two antagonistic entities for the first time. The idea of representation was introduced to deal with this imaginary-yet-permanent Hindu-Muslim conflict. This led to a number of legal, administrative and institutional changes. Various comprehensive sets of laws—such as the Government of India Acts of 1909, 1917 and 1935—were passed by the colonial state to deal with the question of adequate and effective Muslim representation in legislative bodies.
These legal interventions, nevertheless, failed to solve the political deadlock. There were two reasons behind it. First, voting rights were restricted. Only the elites among both Muslims and Hindus had the right to vote, while the vast majority of Indians were outside the fold of political processes. Second, the colonial state was interested in the divide-and-rule policy to maintain its status as a neutral entity. It was always beneficial for the British to encourage communal polarisation. Finally, British India was divided into two nation-states in 1947 on religious lines to provide a lasting solution to what was then officially called ‘the Muslim problem’.
The Partition, interestingly, gave a new political dimension to this debate. The Republic of India adopted a secular Constitution to get rid of the communal politics of representation. The final draft of the Constitution did not have any provision for political reservation for minorities. Even the term minority was introduced as an undefined category simply to make it impermanent and open-ended. It became politically possible to think of different kinds of minorities—cultural, linguistic and above all religious. In a way, the Constitution proposes a crucial distinction between two kinds of rights: the individual rights that are enjoyed by all citizens on a secular basis, and the group rights that are given to specific groups to maintain the cultural-religious diversity of the country.
This well-worked constitutional framework of politics, however, had to operate in a post-Partition scenario where Muslim representation was still surviving as a powerful emotive issue. There was an interesting debate that took place around the time of the first general elections. A section of political leaders wanted to have some kind of informal reservation for Muslims in legislative assemblies. There was even a proposal for proportional representation that was strongly supported by the Socialists. Jawaharlal Nehru, however, was reluctant to subscribe to any of these proposals. He wanted to establish a very different kind of political culture. He opposed proportional representation of any kind and stridently argued for a completely secular process of electioneering. Secularism was established as a guiding principle for all political processes and transactions. At the same time, a conscious effort was made to accommodate minority cultures, especially the contribution of Muslims, in the constitutional framework of ‘unity in diversity’.
In this schema, Muslim representation is defined in two ways. One, representation in politics was given a new meaning. Instead of encouraging Muslim elites, the participation of common Muslims in elections was envisaged as a form of real and substantive representation. Second, representation was also defined as Muslim presence in public life. The state played an active role to promote the Taj Mahal, Qutub Minar and Jama Masjid as symbolic representatives of Indian heritage; while participation of prominent Muslim figures in public life—such as Dilip Kumar in cinema and M A K Pataudi in cricket—was recognised as a secular achievement.
The crisis of Indian politics after the death of Nehru gave a new twist to this acceptable form of Muslim representation. There were two significant developments in the late 1960s. First, the political parties, especially the Indira Gandhi-led Congress, tried to channelise the overwhelming participation of Muslims in elections to create a favourable winning configuration. This led to a new debate on what is now called the Muslim vote bank. Second, the political class began to recognise Muslim religious elites as informal Muslim political representatives. Indira Gandhi played a key role in providing legitimacy to the imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid in the 1970s, and, for that matter, his election fatwas.
The rise of the BJP in the mid-1980s contributed significantly to this process. The BJP tried to create a new winning configuration based on Hindu unity. For that, a conscious attempt was made to destabilise the Congress support base. As a result, ‘Muslim appeasement’ emerged as a strong political reference point. The metaphor was used to ignore the relative socio-economic marginalisation of Muslim communities—a fact that was recognised by the Sachar Committee report in 2006.
This brief overview of the debates and trajectories of Muslim political representation has two implications for the contemporary moment of Indian democracy. First, the demonisation of Muslims in public life has certainly destabilised the acceptable idea of positive Muslim presence in the framework of unity in diversity. Second, this negative trajectory is also linked to Muslim political representation. There is a growing sense among Muslim communities that even the non-BJP parties and leaders have stopped raising their concerns. The puzzling question for all of us is: do they want to be represented only by Muslim leaders?
(Views are personal)
Hilal Ahmed | Associate Professor, CSDS, New Delhi; his new book, A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India, will be out in July 2024