Pasmanda gamble by BJP to pose a challenge to Grand Alliance in Bihar

It is unlikely though that economic largesse alone will win it the community’s vote.

The BJP organised back-to-back Pasmanda meets in Lucknow, Bareilly, Rampur, and Kanpur in October and November. Here, at a meeting organised by the party’s minority wing in Lucknow on October 16.  | Photo Credit: SANDEEP SAXENA

In Bihar, the clock has turned back to 2015 for the Bharatiya Janata Party, when a Grand Alliance of the Janata Dal (United), the Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Congress relegated it to the margins in the Assembly election, highlighting Hindutva’s limitation in opposing a broad social coalition of the Other Backward Classes (OBC) and Muslims. In hindsight, the BJP would be better off concentrating on widening its voter base to include the Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) and Dalits, including backward Muslims or Pasmandas.

At the party’s Hyderabad national executive meet in July 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasised the importance of reaching out to deprived sections of all communities. The BJP’s interest in Pasmanda Muslims is demonstrated by a series of actions that followed. It fielded four candidates from the community in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections and organised back-to-back Pasmanda meets in Lucknow, Bareilly, Rampur, and Kanpur in October and November. Following this, RSS leader Ram Madhav and several Muslim leaders, including Ghulam Gous, Sabir Ali, and Akhtari Begum, held a discussion in Patna on November 26 on uplifting the Muslim poor. “About 75 per cent of Muslims are Pasmanda, but they are not getting adequate representation. This section needs to raise their voice,” Ram Madhav said in the meet.

Outreach to Muslims

The opposition contends that the BJP’s outreach to Muslims comes at a time when targeting and vilification of the community are at an all-time high. Jitan Ram Manjhi, former Bihar Chief Minister whose Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) is part of the Grand Alliance, called the BJP’s advances a “complete charade”. But questions that arise in this context are: Were the BJP’s victories in Rampur and Azamgarh Lok Sabha byelections in Uttar Pradesh and Gopalganj Assembly byelection in Bihar, constituencies with a salient Muslim population, an aberration? Or, are there fractions within the Muslim vote where the BJP sees an opening for itself?

To understand these questions, it is important to examine the trajectory of Muslim politics in India and the political context that triggered the migration of the Muslim vote from the Congress to socialist parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the RJD, and thereafter from the RJD to Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) in 2005. For the first four decades after Independence, the overlying concern of Muslim ideologues and politicians, who were invariably upper class Muslims or Ashrafs, was the protection of the community’s religious and cultural interests, broadly the continuation of Muslim personal law and the preservation of Urdu.

Disenchanted with the Congress

As the Hindu Right jousted with the Muslim intelligentsia over these bargains, the concept of the homogeneity of the Muslim vote emerged, deflecting attention from the more pressing issue of socio-economic upliftment of the minorities. When Mandal-kamandal politics swept India in the late 1980s, Muslims, riled by the opening of the Babri Masjid locks, defected from the Congress to Lalu Prasad in Bihar and Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh (both leaders were then in the Janata Dal).

However, the Muslim disenchantment with the Congress was more deep-rooted. In its pristine form, Article 41 of the Constitution, which envisages reservation for the Scheduled Castes, did not have a religious restriction. In 1950, a presidential order made the provision exclusive to Hindus; amendments in 1956 and 1990 included Sikhs and Buddhists, respectively, but Muslims and Christian Dalits remained out of its purview. A section of Muslims blames the Congress for this.

When the V.P. Singh government announced reservation for the OBCs in 1990, backward Muslims, who were among the beneficiaries, started formally organising themselves, with the themes of their politics shifting to development and equity. In Bihar, two important bodies were set up reflecting this new-found consciousness as opposed to the hitherto reactionary politics of the upper-class Ashraf Muslims: Ajaz Ali’s All India Backward Muslim Morcha in 1994, and Anwar Ali’s Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz in 1998.

The year 2005 marked a turning point in Bihar. As the State remained under President’s Rule, the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz and the Bihar Momin Welfare Society organised a convention in Patna to bat for reservation for Dalit Muslims. Both Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar attended it. Whereas Lalu Prasad remained non-committal, Nitish Kumar endorsed the move and raised it in Parliament. This compounded the sentiment among backward Muslims that the RJD’s attitude towards them was more or less similar to that of the Congress, wherein the Ashrafs and now also the Ansaris, an OBC caste, got patronage, but Muslim masses lived in poverty.

With slogans such as “Jo pasmanda ki baat karega, wahi Bihar pe raj karega” [whoever recognised the Pasmanda demand will rule Bihar], the JD(U)-BJP stormed to power in the November 2005 election. Compared with the elections held in February that year, the JD(U) tally increased from 55 to 88 seats in the 243-member Assembly; the RJD plummeted from 75 to 54.

Long-standing demand

The current OBC focus of Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, and Nitish Kumar appears to have made Muslim Dalits uneasy, and their long-standing demand for inclusion in the SC list has become the mainstay of their political discourse. “It will be naive to think that the fear of the communal forces will be the only metric deciding our votes. In the 30 years of RJD- and JD(U)-led regimes, the downtrodden castes such as the Kunjra, Qureshi, and Raeeen got nothing,” said Wasi Akhtar, a social worker based in Patna.

Akhtar, who is a member of Edar-e-Shariya, a madrassa for the poor, said that several Dalit Muslim groups had proposed a summit to discuss the vexed question: “Why [vote for] only Lalu Yadav?” It was scheduled to take place at the Islamia auditorium in Patna in November but was postponed to February 2023. According to a CSDS-Lokniti survey, 8 per cent of the Muslim voters backed the BJP in the 2022 UP Assembly election and 14 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

A Pasmanda Sammelan in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur on November 12.  | Photo Credit: PTI

There is little doubt that Lalu Prasad is still popular among the poor. “Who can forget Lalu’s role in dousing the communal fire in Bihar during the rath yatra [by L.K. Advani in 1990]. Nitish Kumar also maintained communal harmony,” said Mohammad Iqbal, a 60-something cart-puller from Patna’s Dargah Karbala locality.

But the younger lot is exasperated. Heena Khatun, a domestic help belonging to the impoverished Sai community, said: “I enrolled my three children at the Government Middle School in Dargah, Sultanganj. They are entitled to meal/ration, but aren’t getting any.” She attributed the deprivation of people like her to the “complacence of secular parties”.

Who is a Pasmanda?

The debate over who is a Pasmanda adds to the disillusionment. The Urdu-Persian word pasmanda roughly translates into “left behind” or “oppressed”. Politicians use it as an umbrella term to refer to 75 to 85 per cent of the non-Ashraf Muslims. Dalit Muslims, who constitute 47 per cent of the community, are alarmed by this generalisation. The Sachar Committee report had classified Muslims into three categories: Ashrafs (forwards), Ajlafs (OBCs), and Arzals (Dalits). Both Ajlafs and Arzals are beneficiaries of OBC reservation, but Dalit Muslims are pressing for inclusion in the SC list.

Ghulam Sarwar Azad, a national executive member of the All India Tanzim-e-Insaf, told Frontline that the need for SC reservation arose because Dalit Muslims were unable to compete with dominant castes in the OBC quota. “The purpose will be defeated if Ajlafs and Arzals continue to be treated interchangeably,” he said. According to him, Pasmanda is “a misleading terminology” invented to deflect focus from Dalit Muslims. Halalkhor, Bakkho, Sai, Chik, Rajaka, Qureshi, Bhatiara, Pamaria, Bhanghi, and Dafali are some of the impoverished Dalit castes.

As the BJP’s Pasmanda march continues, former parliamentarian Anwar Ali points out that Pasmanda Muslims were the victims of some of the horrific crimes which took place under the watch of the Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh. “The BJP espouses a Manuvadi ideology that is structurally opposed to equality and brotherhood,” he said. He admits that the BJP’s social welfare sops, particularly ration for the poor, attracted a section of Muslims to its fold. “They are lobharthi [avaricious], not labharthi [beneficiary],” he said scornfully.

But it is unfair to turn elections into a stark ideological choice, feel the less well-heeled. Mohammad Asif, a teacher belonging to the Chik caste, expressed his displeasure: “Everyone expects us to defend secularism, but can secularists explain why Tejashwi Yadav is yet to disburse the promised 10 lakh government jobs?”

It is possible that the BJP sees in these dissensions an entry point. General discussions with the Muslim electorate also underlined the point that with the larger Sangh Parivar cadre intensifying its focus on cow vigilantism and with anti-minority hate crimes on the rise, an impact on the livelihood of some castes such as the Qureshis (butchers) may prompt them to assimilate with the BJP in order to avoid further targeting.

Yet, most people that Frontline spoke to said that it was unlikely that mere economic largesse can secure a sizable Pasmanda vote for the BJP. However, Rampur is testimony to the fact that the party needs only a nibble of the Muslim vote to best its opponents. Nobody is willing to bet that this will not happen.

The Crux

• The Urdu-Persian word pasmanda roughly translates into “left behind” or “oppressed”. Politicians use it as an umbrella term to refer to 75 to 85 per cent of the non-Ashraf Muslims.
• The Sachar Committee report had classified Muslims into three categories: Ashrafs (forwards), Ajlafs (OBCs), and Arzals (Dalits). Both Ajlafs and Arzals are beneficiaries of OBC reservation, but Dalit Muslims are pressing for inclusion in the SC list.
• The BJP has been trying to woo Pasmanda Muslims for some time now; it fielded four candidates from the community in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections and organised back-to-back Pasmanda meets in Lucknow, Bareilly, Rampur, and Kanpur in October and November.
• The opposition contends that the BJP’s outreach to Muslims comes at a time when targeting and vilification of the community are at an all-time high.