Mapping the Muslim Mind

PHATAK (GATE) IS THE name of the most famous home in the town of Mohammadabad in Ghazipur district. It belongs to the Ansari family that had tremendous political influence in the eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) districts of Mau, Jaunpur, Azamgarh, Varanasi, Chandauli, and even Ballia—besides, of course, Ghazipur. “But their clout is on the wane,” says Riyaz Khan, a 62-year-old shopkeeper near the fort area of near­by Jaunpur, who adds meditatively that the death in March of Mukhtar Ansari, five-time legislator from Mau, in jail, has weak­ened not only the hold of the family but also that of the whole of the Muslim community in state politics. Ansari—whom the late writer Patrick French had described as a “godfather”, “a giant of a man”, and a man with a reputation “who got things done”—had been behind bars since 2005, and yet wielded power.

Khan, who reads multiple newspapers daily and is well abreast of national and local politics, says that Muslims in the region—as well as the state—will now have to rethink how they vote since the community, according to him, has a larger role to play than ever before. His reasoning: until recently, their exposure was largely to regional parties such as the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the former led by Akhilesh Yadav and the latter by Mayawati. “The canvas has now become bigger because Muslims of UP are a factor in polls at the national level. Not just because UP sends the most number of MPs to Lok Sabha but because Muslims need to find political representation and make their voices heard. Traditional ways of banking merely on regional parties don’t help,” he notes, but doesn’t elaborate.

The gates at ‘Phatak’ lie open, a usual occurrence in this dusty, sleepy village of about 38,000 residents. A bearded elderly man sitting on a charpoy on the verandah insists that I make a call to the incumbent lawmaker who lives there, 70-year-old Afzal Ansari, to confirm my appointment. I do so promptly and, at the other end, there is jovial laugh­ter when I say that I am a journalist from Delhi and that I am a close acquaintance of his cousin Yusuf Ansari, a Gurugram-based author and historian by training who has also left a mark in wildlife conservation. “I will join you downstairs soon,” the elder brother of Mukhtar Ansari says. Another brother, elder to Afzal, Sibgatullah Ansari, had represented Mohammadabad as MLA from 2007 to 2017.

I am asked to sit inside an air-conditioned room filled with photographs of older gen­erations of the Ansari family, besides those of SP leaders Akhilesh Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav. Holding the pride of place is the photograph of Afzal Ansari’s paternal grand­father Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, a surgeon and former president of the Indian National Congress who was also a friend of Motilal Nehru. Also on the wall are photographs of Subhan Ullah Ansari, Afzal’s father, who was a leader of the Communist Party, Brigadier Mohammad Usman, and other relatives, including former Vice President Hamid Ansari.

Waiting for Afzal Ansari on a sweltering May afternoon, it strikes me that many Muslim opinion leaders as well as those among the common folk offer a mixed response to how to align politically at a time the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in power. Across the state, especially in the western regions, there is a section of Muslims which states that it prefers Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s rule because he has “taught the upper echelons” among Muslims—meaning Gurjar and Jat Muslims—a lesson. The so-called Pasmanda Muslims, or backward-caste Muslims, see land-owning, upper-caste Muslims as their worst tormentors. However, that sentiment doesn’t find much echo among large sections of the community in eastern UP who want to vote to keep BJP out of power.

Not all of them lay the blame on BJP for the political culture of confinement of the Indian Muslim, including the community’s political leaders. Although several of them don’t expect BJP, which is avowedly pro-Hindu, to field Muslim candidates and empower them politically, they are disappointed to see the anti-BJP camp, the so-called secular parties, taking the com­munity for granted. “They feel that Muslims cannot vote for BJP, and so they have no choice but to vote for either Congress or SP or BSP. They feel that Muslims can be invisibilised in politics but will still vote for them,” argues Hakeem Shahid Badr Falahi, a Unani physician who runs a modest but busy clinic near Shibli National College, Azamgarh, about 90km from Ghazipur.

Invisibilisation of Muslims is a complaint that several leaders of Congress had raised over the past decade. Salman Khurshid, former president of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee, had openly stated his frustration with exclusion in political campaigns. Rahul Gandhi cold-shouldered the late Ahmed Patel during his poll campaigns in Gujarat. More sophisticated and urbane commentators among Muslims, especially scholars and the well-heeled, express their displeasure about most parties in the I.N.D.I.A. bloc pushing Muslims to the fringes. One of them asks not to be named when she says, “Even the great Mulayam and Akhilesh and Lalu and Mayawati don’t want a strong Mus­lim leader who acts with a sense of autonomy. They merely want to of­fer token representations and people they know are always at their beck and call.” She goes on to cite the examples of Azam Khan and a few others to say that “they are all expendables”.

Extremely tall and imposing, Afzal Ansari now joins me, welcom­ing me to Ghazipur, a constituency that he says has a history of voting out powerful people even at the height of Congress’ power at the Centre, quite like some others in the region. He goes on to talk about the historical importance of Ghazipur from Brit­ish times and finally arrives at the polls to be held in the last and seventh phase in the constituency. In 2019, he had trounced BJP’s Manoj Sinha, winning more than 50 per cent of the votes polled. He says Muslims make up less than 9 per cent of voters in the Lok Sabha seat, and that he has won thanks to Hindus who voted for him.

THE ANSARI FAMILY has long been associated with na­tional politics, and from different parties. Afzal has won four times from the Mohammadabad Assembly seat on a CPI ticket and once as an SP leader. He was elected twice to Lok Sabha, representing SP in 2004 and BSP in 2019. This time round he is with SP. The Ansari brothers had formed their own party in 2010 after they were sacked from BSP, named Qaumi Ekta Dal (QED). “They wanted to show regional parties in UP that they have the power to win votes in several seats, both to the Assembly and Lok Sabha, on their own. But times have changed now,” says Khan from Jaunpur.

Ishtiaq Ali, who is fresh out of college and lives in Bhadohi, 60km from Varanasi, says that young Muslims do not see great hope in any one political grandee among their community cham­pioning their aspirations. Ali, a first-generation entrepreneur who runs a tailoring shop near a railway crossing in the small town, disapproves of leaders with criminal backgrounds repre­senting them. “Yes, there is an awakening within a large section of Muslims, especially the young lot. I, for one, don’t watch TV chan­nels. I keep myself abreast of news nonetheless. I watch the likes of Ravish Kumar and YouTubers of my choice, like Dhruv Rathee. There is widespread awareness therefore among Muslim youth about national politics,” he says. The only Muslim shop owner among the row of businesses near the traffic junction, he empha­sises that “blind trust in so-called secular parties is not there any­more”. The young man adds, “I watch Narendra Modi’s speeches closely. We do not reject him outright. We listen to him because he has a way with words and many of his appeals make sense to us.”

Hailing from a picturesque, quiet rural dwelling not far from the Bhado­hi railway crossing, where a handful of Muslim families coexist peacefully among dozens of Hindu farmers, Ali also says that Muslims shouldn’t al­low any political party to take them for granted. “What a section of the media projects about Hindus and Muslims is not true at all. They often try to provoke people into thinking along religious lines. Muslims have realised that hostilities do not fetch them any gain,” he says.

Zahra, a medical student in Vara­nasi, agrees with those views. She also dislikes inflammatory statements be­ing made to drum up religious polarisation, from whichever side. “Nobody is far behind when it comes to poll-time divisive tactics,” she avers, bringing up the names of several politicians, including the SP candidate from Sambhal, Zia ur Rahman Barq, for employing such tactics. Barq had allegedly sought votes over the ‘martyrdom’ of Mohd Shahabuddin, Mukhtar Ansari and Atiq Ahmed, all of whom died in police custody. “What hap­pens when you discuss such subjects is that the core issues of jobs, development, and so on get sidelined. Politics should be about highlighting issues to do with governance and finally choosing who is best for your interests as a human being, not as a Muslim,” she says.

Like Ishtiaq Ali, Zahra also says that there is nothing wrong with “strategic voting” to get people of your choice elected al­though that is easier said than done. “There are people who vote along religious lines. There are people who vote among caste lines. Such people don’t change who they vote for even if the candidate is not up to the mark. So, political parties are always looking for the votes of the perpetual fence-sitters who can make the difference between who wins and who loses,” she says.

As far as BJP is concerned, the national party banks on all sec­tions of Hindus to vote for it, especially the extremely backward classes who had once voted for regional parties, resulting in a peak of supremacy for these entities in the post-Mandal era. BJP has won over non-Yadav OBCs and even made inroads into Yadav bas­tions, besides attracting Dalits who feel slighted by Mayawati’s so­cial engineering politics that has kept them out of power. Which is why both SP and BSP, which had done badly in the last General Election despite tying up to form a grand alliance, are looking to woo Muslims besides their traditional caste-oriented vote base.

In this context, the likes of Yusuf Ansari see an opportunity for Muslims to find their political feet and snatch gains. Like his cousin Afzal, he, too, feels that groups within the Hindu bloc— such as Rajputs—are veering towards the Muslim-Yadav axis of politics in the state. “There is discontentment among the Rajputs who have voiced their opposition to BJP and there is a confluence of interests with Muslims,” he asserts.

While Muslim leaders hope that the community’s votes don’t get split, a section of lower castes among them is veering towards BJP

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Afzal Ansari hopes that people across caste and religious lines who have voted him to office last time will stand by him this time as well. However, there are those like Falahi who state that those among Muslims who feel “unsupported” by the re­gional parties will shift their allegiance out of necessity to BJP. “That cannot be stopped, especially in the rural areas,” he opines. This is a view shared by another Azamgarh resident named Sharib Ahmed. “We are using powers of persuasion to get Muslims to vote strategically, but it doesn’t often succeed. Yet, we are trying,” says the businessman, who is in his mid-fifties and runs a medical shop in Azamgarh market.

The problem is more complex than meets the eye.

A report by the Carnegie Endowment for Interna­tional Peace published in February this year and titled ‘Mapping Muslim Voting Behavior in India’, authored by Feyaad Allie, quotes a survey on caste among Muslims in UP. Ac­cording to the survey, some Dalits (among Muslims) reported regu­larly encountering instances of untouchability, such as not being permitted to bury their dead in the same graveyard as upper-caste neighbours or their children being seated separately during meals at school. According to the survey, 21 per cent of non-Dalit Muslims reported that they do not visit the homes of Dalit Muslims.

It concludes that since the 2019 General Election, Muslims have become more likely to vote in a unified way, but the politi­cal salience of caste in the Muslim community appears to have increased at the same time. The report forecasts, “Thus, in the coming 2024 elections, while it still seems unlikely that Muslims will vote entirely on their caste or sect identity, it is clear that sub-identities will shape both campaigning and voting to some de­gree. With the BJP’s mobilisation of Pasmanda Muslims gathering steam and with opposition parties plotting countermeasures, it would be unwise for political analysts to limit investigations of caste to the Hindu community alone.”

Again, voting patterns do not confirm Muslims avoiding a split in their vote. For instance, in the bypoll held in the Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat in 2022, Muslims did not vote en bloc to ensure the defeat of BJP. While SP’s Dharmendra Yadav cornered more than three lakh votes, BSP candidate Guddu Jamali secured more than 2.6 lakh. As a result, BJP’s Dinesh Lal Yadav won with a margin of just above 8,000 votes. But the likes of Firdaus Alam, a fifth-generation textile businessman from Varanasi, and many others in the Muslim com­munity in eastern UP that Open spoke to, feel that change is in the offing and that any split of the Muslim vote may be a thing of the past. In a state where Muslims are 20 per cent of the electorate—ac­counting for more than 30 per cent in 21 seats—there are newer players, other than the regional ones, looking to tap the minority vote. The Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Mus­limeen (AIMIM) and Apna Dal (Kamerawadi) have formed an alli­ance in the state, India’s most populous, to fight for the uplift of the poor and the disadvantaged and promising to empower Muslims. Alam—who says he voted for BJP in 2014—is however insistent that “Muslims will vote differently this time and will not allow anti-BJP votes to go to waste.”

For his part, Yusuf Ansari sums up, “There are prospects of a huge churning, whatever be the outcome of this election.”

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