The Second-Majority Complex

SINCE 2014, WHEN the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi first came to power at the Centre, the diminishing number of Muslims in Parliament has been turned into a whip of a narrative with which to excoriate the new dispensation. The purport of this narrative was to put a question mark on the legitimacy of the government which has been seeing re-election after re-election by levelling against it the accusation of not representing all Indians, for it didn’t have a liberal contingent (pun intended) of Muslim MPs in its ranks. Interestingly, if some other segment—a caste or a tribe or a region or another religious minority—remained similarly underrepresented, it would neither be noticed nor highlighted nor woven into a delegitimising narrative. But then, Indian secularism has been a euphemism for the Muslim excep­tionalism which conceptualises the polity in terms of power-sharing between the two religious communi­ties rather than equal participation of all citizens. Thus, the representation of Muslims is confused with the number of Muslims in legislatures. In our system of adult suffrage and joint electorate, an MP represents her constituency which comprises of people of all religions and castes, and irrespective of whether one voted for her or not, she represents all. Thus all Muslims—like all Hindus, Sikhs or Christians—are represented by the member elected from their respective constituencies. If that member happened to be a Muslim, she too would represent all her constituents, and not just the Muslims. Therefore, it is wrong, and against constitutional morality, to conflate the MP-ship of a Muslim with the representation of Muslims. It is a communal mode of thinking, and is a paraphrased articulation of the Separate Electorate system where only a Muslim could represent a Muslim.

If the diminishing number of Muslims in Parliament had been the handiwork of BJP, and not a reflection of some deep-seated structural malaise—as the number of BJP’s seats came down from 303 in 2019 to 240 in 2024, and as Congress’ strength went up from 52 to 99—the number of Muslims shouldn’t have plummeted from the already low of 26 in 2019 to just 24 this year. Their count didn’t go up with the increase in the numbers of seats won by the ‘secular’ parties because the I.N.D.I.A. bloc hadn’t fielded them in enough numbers.

In the just-concluded elections, only 78 Muslims contested on tickets of various parties as against 115 of 2019. Congress gave only 19 tickets to Muslims this time while the number was 34 in 2019. Of the two MY (Muslim-Yadav) parties, the Samajwadi Party (SP) gave only four of its 62 tickets to Muslims in Uttar Pradesh (UP), though they are 19 per cent of the state’s population; whereas, in Bihar, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) fielded only two Muslim candidates. The Trinamool Congress (TMC), an unapologetically pro-Muslim party, gave only six of its 42 Lok Sabha tickets to the Muslims in Bengal where they are 27 per cent of the population. Notably, these are the parties whose mainstay is the en bloc Muslim vote. With nearly all the Muslim votes in their kitty—ranging from about 15-25 per cent of the total electorate in the respective states—they need just about 10-15 per cent of the remaining votes to register victory in the first-past-the-post system.

Beyond the tickets distributed and seats won in these elections, it’s pertinent to note that from the first General Election in 1952, the number of Muslims in Lok Sabha has always been under 6 per cent, although for most of the period self-professedly secular parties held the majority.

So, before asking questions of BJP, it’s imperative to ask why the Muslim membership in legislatures remained so abysmally low during the high noon of secularism, and why the ‘secular’ parties fielded so few Muslims in the electoral fray. Has the present dip in the number of Muslims been long in the making, and is it an inexorable consequence of the politics played by these parties?

Notwithstanding the righteous protestations of the ‘secular’ parties, it is a fact that their vote-bank politics has largely been responsible for keeping Muslims outside the political process. They wanted Muslim votes, but not their political participation. The Muslim had a limited role in secular politics—to remain a vote bank. The participation of Muslims in the political process would have unwanted consequences for the politics of secularism. For one, by expos­ing them to the demands of everyday civic and economic issues, it would wean them away from the religious mode of thinking, and might lead to the secularisation of Muslim poli­tics, and it’s the last thing that the secular parties would want, for they thrive on the high-octane religious emotionalism and vote-bank of the Muslims. It’s a matter of survival for them that Muslims remain communal, separatist, and perpetually seized with religious fervour. The secularisation of Muslims would mean the end of official secular politics.

The Muslim’s role was limited to remaining a vote bank for the official secularism which promised to ‘save’ them from ‘Hindu communalism’. In practice, this promise translated into not allowing Hindu traces in the public sphere even as the Muslim entitlements remained intact.

But in return for this ‘protection’, Muslims had to resign their agency and be content with the tutelage of the secular establishment, remaining their foot soldiers and, sometimes, cannon fodders too. Beyond a token presence, they weren’t supposed to participate in politics; for, any serious partici­pation would encroach upon the demesne of their secular patrons whose politics could survive only till the time they, and not the Muslims themselves, represented the Muslim.

The assigned role of Muslims in politics being limited to voting for the party best positioned to defeat BJP, there is not much concern for their absence from the participatory pro­cess at the ground level. Even in the parties whose mainstay is the Muslim vote, the community’s representation, even at the level of primary membership, is neither in proportion to their population nor commensurate with the number of votes they bring to these parties. This being so, Muslims are only as sparse in the leadership of these parties as they are in legisla­tures. If there are not enough Muslims among the members and workers of a party, there is a limit to which they can be nominated either to the party leadership or to legislatures.

If this is the reality of the secular parties whose lifeline is the Muslim vote, there isn’t much justification for accus­ing BJP of overlooking Muslims in ticket distribution and ministerial allocation. BJP has not been in the business of the Muslim vote-bank politics, and has neither ever asked for nor ever received en bloc Muslim votes. In a way, it has thus spared the Muslim community of the degrading transactional relationship of give-and-take.

Muslims are inveterately hostile to BJP for its ideology, Hindutva. Such has been the nature of Islam in India that they are not going to look at anything Hindu, much less a political ideology, with the least degree of understanding ever. No wonder Muslim membership in BJP is negligibly small. With such near-zero membership, it’s well nigh impossible for the party to push forward a Muslim’s candidature.

Besides, in the Muslim community, the greatest contempt is reserved for the one who is seen to be with BJP. Such a Muslim is regarded as a traitor to the community, and it is considered morally justified to unleash the most vicious verbal violence against him. The ideological hostility to BJP is widely regarded as a religious duty for a Muslim. This mental­ity is a legacy of Islam’s history in India, and is shaped by the theology of conquest. It will remain unchanged till there is a big reformation which reformulates Islam in Indian terms.

So, with such hostility against BJP, particularly when a Muslim sympathiser of the party is viewed as a traitor to the community, what is the ideological rationale and moral justification for asking the party to give tickets to Muslims? The community would neither vote for such ‘traitors’ nor become well disposed towards the party.

However, there is a rationale, and that is the crux of the matter—the power theology. Seats in legislatures and ministries are demanded not for the ‘traitor’ Muslims who are in BJP but for the ‘true’ Muslims who are opposed to the party and its ideology. That the demand is made on BJP to give tickets to such Muslims as are opposed to the party demon­strates how historical entitlements play out in practice, and how instead of making space for oneself by participation in politics, a share in power is claimed on the basis of religion.

It’s like the demand for guaranteed seats as it was under the Separate Electorate, and the ministerial berths which the Muslim League would demand for itself—the “true represen­tative” of Muslims—rather than any Muslim.

As before Independence, it is being insisted upon to continue the entitlement of the remnants of the Muslim ruling class, “the conquering and the ruling race” whose “status and influence should be commensurate, not merely with their numerical strength, but also with their political importance….” For the liberal narrative-making class of India, the protection of the political position of the old Muslim aristocra­cy, the Ashraf, has been coterminous with the preservation of secularism.

Secular politics in India took such a form that in the absence of any real participation of Muslims in politics, their token presence in places of power had to be accorded the status of a political sacrament which could best be ritualised by invoking their group-right to a share in power. It was, for all intents and purposes, a return to the politics of Separate Electorate and a tacit approval of the Two-Nation theory. Henceforth, secular politics became synonymous with minoritarianism.

Majority and minority are two sides of the democratic coin. They keep flipping with every toss, and change from issue to issue and vote to vote. Not being permanent, they don’t crystallise into ethnic groups. However, every country has some permanent minorities—the ethnicities which don’t have as complete an overlap with the nation as the majority of the people who had constituted the nation and built the nation-state. In such countries, a minority has guaranteed constitutional rights of equality, but no group-claim of a share in political power. Individuals may rise and reach the top, like Barack Obama and Rishi Sunak did in the US and the UK, respectively. In countries like these, though some ethnicities, for example, the Blacks, are known as minority, the ‘majority’, however, is not called the majority. For instance, in the two countries mentioned, the Anglo-Saxon White Christians are not known as the majority community. They are too synonymous with the nation to be separately identified as a mere constituent community and brought into the same league as a minority. So, there, Whites and Blacks are not hyphenated as co-sharers in power as is exemplified by the Hindu-Muslim hyphenation in India.

Ours is a unique country where the population’s 80 per cent Hindu on the one hand and 14 per cent Muslim on the other are hyphenated as co-equals, and the smaller of the two is a pole unto itself, keeping the polity in perpetual polarisation.

In India, while a complete overlap between being a Muslim and being an Indian is resisted in the name of identity lest the pristine Muslimness be subsumed into Indianness, the identification of the Hindu with the Indian is also challenged on allegations of majoritarianism. Thus, while the Muslim takes recourse to arcane postmodern theories of multiple identities in order not to answer what came first, his religious or national identity, and whether both were interchangeable, he would also insist that the Hindu did the same, and kept his inseparable Hindu and Indian identities separate.

The compulsive exercise of counting the Muslim legislators and top civil servants, and the lament over the number not being propor­tionate to their population, is not because of any concern for the welfare of a minority. In reality, it emanates from the internalised understanding that instead of being a minority, Muslims are actually the Second Majority and, therefore, have the same claim on the power of the state as the other majority. They are not content with the equality guaranteed under the Constitution. The Muslim community, the Qaum, is less a religious and more a political construct, and as a rival political community, as the Other Pole, they want their share. Though their language is couched in the discourse of minority rights, the intent is of the Second Majority, which is merely a euphemism for the Two-Nation theory.

Muslims would do better to free themselves from the tribalism of limiting concepts like minority and majority, and should rather focus on the unlimited potential of individualism as citizens of India. For, as mere members of the Muslim community, they cannot but remain minor, but as individual citizens of India, the sky is the limit.

citizenselectoral politicsHindusIndian Muslimsminority communitypoliticsSecond-Majority