New Delhi: Only two weeks ago in Rajasthan’s Banswara, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while attacking the Congress, referred to Muslim Indians as “those who have more children”.
In a matter of few days, he has lost that euphemism in his speeches, where he warned people that a possible Congress regime will ensure that all Hindu wealth, and more importantly reservations guaranteed to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, will be taken away from them and distributed among Muslims.
Yet, it didn’t feel like a leap for Modi, who gained both fame and notoriety – depending on which side of the political spectrum you are in – after his alleged complicity as the Gujarat chief minister in one of the biggest anti-Muslim riots in India.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The deliberate ploy to stoke fear and anxiety among non-Muslims on one or the other issue in most elections has been the BJP’s consistent tactic. However, the saffron party has sprung into an all-out communal offensive this time around, ditching indirect pejoratives for Muslims for more direct ones in the guise of attacking the Congress, its principal political adversary.
Dog whistle to hide its lack of a central political theme?
The root of Modi’s latest apparent dog whistle is the lack of a central theme in the BJP’s campaign.
It began with Modi’s projection as a global leader who has catapulted India to the global centre stage, then holding out the promise of delivering a ‘viksit bharat’ by 2047 before pivoting towards crediting Modi for the Ram Temple in Ayodhya.
However, none of it could excite the electorate as the low voter turnouts reflect in the first three phases of the general elections.
If a few years ago, Modi pit Hindus against Muslims by blaming opposition parties for favouring “kabristan” (graveyards) over “shamshan” (cremation grounds) to amplify the BJP’s accusation that the opposition parties have always “appeased” Muslims to secure their votes, the run-up to the 2024 general elections is marked by the prime minister’s assertion that the Congress will distribute wealth and constitutional guarantees to Muslims alone – an attempt to drive a wedge between not only Hindus and Muslims but also different segments of the poor along the lines of faith.
Like before, none of these charges hurled at the Congress is backed by evidence – the Congress has not mentioned any such plan for wealth distribution or providing for Muslim reservation in its election manifesto – but is still magnified through the BJP’s sophisticated campaign machinery.
Opposing Lalu, silent on Naidu
Most recently, the BJP lashed out at the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Lalu Prasad Yadav for his statement that Muslims should get reservation.
First, his statement was prompted by a section of the pliant media, which has devoted itself to boost the BJP’s campaign.
For a leader like Yadav, whose secular credentials are well-known and who has built a strong socialist foundation for his party on the basis of stitching a social coalition between OBCs and Muslims, his response was well-known. The RJD has historically advocated for a quota for the backward among Muslims.
Secondly, the same media and the BJP are largely silent about N. Chandrababu Naidu’s recent demand for Muslim reservation.
Naidu is a part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and has been seeking Muslim votes by promising them a quota. In fact, in almost all his speeches, he has promised a 4% quota for Muslims if elected to power in Andhra Pradesh.
Contradictions aside, the BJP appears to be caught in its own loop of rehashing its old communal narratives in different contexts, and spinning established affirmative action in India as the opposition’s ploy to advance what it calls “appeasement politics” – again, a euphemism to advance its anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Almost everyone knows that these charges against the opposition are not even distantly connected with facts. But helped by an uncritical media, political discourse has veered towards discussions around wealth redistribution and Muslim reservation, in the process shielding the BJP from pushback for its alleged failures at the governance front and widespread concerns like rising unemployment, the back-breaking price rise of essential commodities and deteriorating standards of public education and healthcare under Modi.
The question of Muslim backwardness
However, Modi has opened up a window to discuss Muslim backwardness in India, which has now been abandoned by all political parties amid an unprecedented rise of communal and divisive politics in India over the last decade.
The 2006 Sachar Committee report has well-established the multi-layered backwardness among Muslim Indians. They lag behind Hindus socially, economically and politically, and have been afflicted by social marginalisation, poor access to schools and health care as well as unequal access to land ownership historically.
A good 80% of Indian Muslims belong to the OBC sections and have been demanding the government’s special focus for almost 40 years in what community leaders like to term as the Pasmanda movement.
Despite repeated assurances, none of the secular parties has fulfilled their promises to them. Whenever the question of a pan-India quota for the Pasmandas arise, the secular parties have faced incessant attacks by the BJP and other Hindutva parties.
In southern states like Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, some Muslim groups have been given a small share of reservation among OBCs after successive committees and social justice commissions recommended affirmative action for them back in the 1990s.
Again, the H.D. Deve Gowda-state government in Karnataka first introduced reservations for Muslims in Karnataka in 1994.
The BJP, incidentally, has allied with Deve Gowda’s party, the Janata Dal (Secular), in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
For all its diatribes against the Congress, it is the BJP that opened the reservation debate. The saffron party breached the 50% ceiling on reservation imposed by the Supreme Court to allow a 10% quota for economically weaker sections (EWS) – essentially a reservation system in jobs for the “upper castes” as other SCs, STs and OBCs were ineligible for it.
The decision would have been open to attack along the lines of the BJP’s “appeasement politics” charge had any other party taken it. But that was not to be.
However, it allowed all socialist parties, which grew after the Mandal Commission reforms, to talk about a pan-India caste census to distribute India’s welfare schemes in a more equitable way than what exists now.
It also pushed the Congress to shed its previous apathy towards Mandal politics and argue that it was time to break the 50% ceiling in India’s affirmative action policies.
The opposition’s push towards an equitable system in reservations, at a time when BJP leaders have spoken about changing the constitution and Sangh parivar leaders advocating for reservations to end, has caught the BJP in a bind.
Modi, like a true demagogue, has resorted to deflecting the attention of the electorate’s marginalised sections from these issues raised by the opposition. Opposition leaders, especially the quartet of Rahul Gandhi, Tejashwi Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav and Siddaramaiah, have united to encourage these aspirations among Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs, which may have stoked anxiety among Modi and his peers.
It is now for the prime minister to respond to his allies’ – Naidu and Deve Gowda’s – demands to get Muslim reservation implemented. He may have no answers.
But that may have never been his goal. The prime minister’s repeated assertions against the Congress are clearly aimed at creating a stronger foundation for the further isolation of Muslims, and a political ground where any talk of alleviating Muslim backwardness through affirmative action will be looked down on with contempt by the majority Hindus.
Between Rahul Gandhi’s advocacy to break the 50% ceiling on reservations and Modi’s attempt to communalise it through half-truths and falsehoods, one aspect of such a vitriolic debate is still clear.
It is one thing to suggest having, or even extending, long-pending reservations for backward Muslims as part of the government’s affirmative action, even when no political party is actually saying or promising it.
And, it is another thing to actually snatch existing, even if minor, reservation away from Muslims and give it to dominant, landed communities like Vokkaligas and Lingayats, like the way the Basavaraj Bommai-led BJP government did in Karnataka as a poll stunt in 2023 just before it was thrown out of power.
It should have been the opposition firing at the BJP for taking away existing reservation from the backward classes to distribute it among privileged, politically powerful communities. Did anyone say “vote bank politics”?
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