Azad’s Dalit-Muslim gamble

Dear reader,

Heads turned when Aazad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) leader Chandrashekhar Azad won the Lok Sabha seat from Nagina in June this year, defeating the candidates of the BJP, the INDIA coalition, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). As the numbers showed, both Dalits and Muslims voted in large numbers for Azad, with his roadshows and door-to-door campaigns in the Muslim settlements of Nagina considered a key reason for his victory.

In early September, Azad addressed a large Muslim gathering at Khilafat House at Byculla in Mumbai expressing his opposition to the Waqf Amendment Bill. He was trolled by the right wing for undermining Hindus.

Azad’s statements supporting the offering of namaz on the streets and protesting the jailing of Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan also drew attention. At rallies in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, where attacks on mosques had taken place, Azad announced that he stood for minority rights. In a television interview, he accused Central governments in the past (both BJP and Congress) of doing nothing for Muslims.

In Uttar Pradesh, where Muslims constitute 19.3 per cent of the total population and Dalits 21.1 per cent, Azad is now joining hands with Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) for the upcoming Assembly byelections in 10 seats. His close associates say that Azad is up to the ambitious political project of bringing Dalits and Muslims together, which, if it materialises, can become a strong bloc not only in Uttar Pradesh but elsewhere as well.

Azad has had this in mind for a long time. Many still remember how, just a week after the National Democratic Alliance government passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in 2020, Azad with a copy of the Constitution and a portrait of B.R. Ambedkar visited the iconic Jama Masjid in Delhi to show solidarity with the protesters. Addressing a “Bahujan Samaj Banao” rally in Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh in November 2018, he had strongly pitched for Dalit-Muslim unity, saying it could play a major role in the future politics of the State.

Muslim-Dalit consolidation is something that the late Kanshi Ram and his protégée Mayawati tried hard for but unsuccessfully, as did Ram Vilas Paswan in Bihar. It has proven to be a herculean task so far and whether the new kid on the block can make any inroads remains to be seen.

In Bihar, one remembers how Ram Vilas Paswan played spoilsport in government formation by insisting on a Muslim Chief Minister after the fractured mandate in the February 2005 Bihar Assembly election. Abdul Ghafoor has been Bihar’s only Muslim Chief Minister, between July 1973 and April 1975. When Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party stuck to its demand, it led to an impasse in Bihar and then another election in October 2005. Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, whose support base was Muslim-Yadav, did not accept the demand, nor did any other party. Paswan, then part of the United Progressive Alliance, was aiming for a Dalit-Muslim combination but his party’s performance, which had won 29 seats in February, nosedived in the second election. Bihar then had 16 per cent Dalit and 17 per cent Muslim population.

In Maharashtra, Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) leader Prakash Ambedkar (B.R. Ambedkar’s grandson) and Owaisi have backed each other in the past. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Owaisi announced his support for Ambedkar in Akola. But the latter lost, despite the constituency having 2.75 lakh Dalits and 2.50 lakh Muslims. The two had come together for the 2019 Lok Sabha election as well but not with great success: the VBA-AIMIM alliance won 7.6 per cent of votes while Dalit-Muslim votes were 26 per cent—and broke up before the Assembly election that year.

In fact, their 2019 alliance was called the “Veeru and Jai” team by the local media, referring to the Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra blockbuster Sholay (1975). But real politics is different from reel bromance. When the alliance fell through, both parties blamed each other. Clearly, there is much work to be done before the Dalit-Muslim idea can arrive.

Mayawati’s BSP fielded 20 Muslims in the 2024 Lok Sabha election but not one could win. The party could not even get the majority of Muslim votes for its candidates in these seats. In the 2017 and 2022 Assembly elections as well, the BSP fielded the maximum number of 99 and 88 Muslim candidates, respectively, but with little success. BJP’s young Dalit leader Guru Prakash Paswan has been dismissive of the idea of Dalit-Muslim unity and the media discourse around it. But this is not surprising, given that the idea hardly suits the BJP.

The Dalits in general have no history of violence with Muslims, barring a few Scheduled Castes that have moved towards the BJP in the past 10 years. Also, much water has flown down the Ganga in the ensuing years and Azad can start something fresh even as the bigger “secular” parties tread on eggshells with Muslim voters because of the fear of Hindutva consolidation in the BJP’s favour.

Prussian statesman and diplomat Otto von Bismarck, who oversaw the unification of Germany, famously said that “politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best”. Azad comes from the same dominant Dalit Jatav caste as Mayawati does. Will he succeed where behenji failed? Watch this space.

Until the next newsletter reaches you, write to us with your thoughts on this combine.

Anand Mishra | Political Editor, Frontline

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