It would be a lazy analysis to put down the BJP’s emphatic win in Uttar Pradesh solely to communal polarisation. True, majoritarian sentiment is now acceptable and growing incrementally, not just in Uttar Pradesh, but in many parts of the country, in the Hindi heartland, in Western India, in Assam and now spreading to the Southern states such as Karnataka, Telangana, and parts of Kerala.
The fact that Adityanath Yogi was at the helm and had defined the election as 80 vs 20 per cent, is given as the principal reason for calling it a polarised mandate. True, majoritarian sentiment is acceptable, but its impact on voting choices was much less than in previous elections in UP. In fact, the communal plank had reached a saturation level and some of the most vigorous hate campaigners actually lost the poll in Uttar Pradesh. The famous trio of leaders who faced charges in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots were defeated. This includes Hindutva poster boys such as Sangeet Som, Suresh Rana and Umesh Malik losing their election in areas impacted by the farmers stir. Likewise, in another part of the state the now ex BJP MLA Raghavendra Singh had infamously stated that any Hindu who did not vote for him had Muslim blood in their veins. He was defeated by a Muslim woman, Saiyada Khatoon from SP, who obviously got some Hindu support.
At the time of writing, 36 Muslim candidates have won the 2022 election, up from 24 in 2017. This means that 9 per cent of legislators in UP now come from the minority community that makes up 20 percent of the state’s population. This is actually better than the all-India representation of minorities in the Lok Sabha that currently stands at 4.9 per cent of MPs while the all-India population of Muslims is 15 percent. The interesting aspect of this data is that this dismal figure has actually been the norm even in the decades of Congress rule and it was only in the Lok Sabha elected in 1980 and 1984 that the percentage of Muslim MPs touched 9 and 8 percent. In the 2009 Lok Sabha preceding the BJP’s 2014 win, five per cent of MPs came from the nation’s largest minority. Currently 4.9 per cent do.
Uttar Pradesh is therefore currently doing better than the national average on minority representation, because there are regional parties that are willing to give representation to Muslims per se, in what is clearly a give and take relationship.
I would in the course of my election travels paced out over two months meet five Muslim candidates, from Ghaziabad near Delhi to Ghazipur near the border with Bihar. Their stories are instructive because, as with other candidates, the reasons for the victory or defeat of Muslim candidates are multi-layered and more complex than examining whether polarization worked or failed. I have summed up their stories, phase by phase, in order to get a more nuanced understanding of the electoral experience of minority candidates.
Dholana, Ghaziabad, voted in Phase 1 on February 10
First, I met Aslam Ali, the former MLA from the Dholana assembly seat in Ghaziabad district. His office was located a kilometre away from the infamous Dasna temple at which Yati Narsinghanand presides as head priest (By the time I met Aslam Ali, the Dasna priest had made genocidal speeches about Muslims at the Haridwar hate assembly that was the early background noise to the assembly election).
Aslam had won in 2017 on a BSP ticket in the midst of the BJP wave but had shifted to the SP for 2022. When I asked him if polarization was his main concern as the Dasna temple was right there, he said, no that was not a top of the mind issue. But the fact that there were three Muslim candidates in the seat could be a cause for concern. He also said that the best way to avoid polarization is to ignore all those threats that people like those at the Dasna temple kept making.
Aslam Ali would lose the seat to the BJP by a margin of 12,500 votes. The two other Muslim candidates on the seat did indeed cut votes, with the BSP getting 32,000 votes and AIMIM, 3500. It was not polarization but another kind of division that did him in.
Moradabad city, voted in Phase 2, February 14.
Next, I would meet Haji Yusuf Ansari, the SP candidate for Moradabad who had in 2017 lost to the BJP’s Ritesh Gupta by 3,000 votes in a seat with a 47 per cent Muslim population. He too was facing three other Muslim candidates who got a smattering of the votes. But days before polling in Moradabad I found many voters with their names missing from voting lists. When I confronted Yusuf Ansari, with the question about missing voters, he said he had asked people to help out but a query with a former election commissioner revealed that if a complaint is made with the EC then it takes at least 7 to 10 days to verify. Therefore, by the time many voters headed out to get their slips, it was too late for them to vote anyway. What was required was a sustained awareness campaign months before voting and Yusuf Ansari had just not done his ground work on the technical aspect of the election.
He would lose to the same BJP candidate by 900 votes. His campaign depended on mood, momentum and not the detailed work that the BJP/RSS would have done with exact details of voter lists. Ansari was just an affable figure who wished to avoid butting heads with the system. And so he lost.
Thakurdwara, near Uttarakhand border, voted in second phase, February 14
The third Muslim candidate and sitting MLA would be in the seat of Thakurdwara, on the Uttar Pradesh-Uttarakhand border, that I would reach at night after a backbreaking drive on terrible rural roads from Rampur. Nawab Jaan would turn out to be a tiny but energetic man who lived in an impressive house that could be the set for a Hindi movie, that was now run over by party workers wearing the SP red caps. By the time we met, the hijab controversy was raging so I recorded an interview asking him how he could be silent when Muslim women were being humiliated in Karnataka. His reply was as follows: in this election the BJP is trying very hard to stir up communal issues but it has not worked. The hijab issue is part of that and it will be forgotten after March 10.
Thakurdwara, as its name suggests has a large Thakur population and chief minister Adityanath Yogi had come to campaign. The seat also had a 40 per cent Muslim population and there were multiple Muslim candidates who divided small slivers of voters and Nawab Jaan needed non-Muslim votes to win again. He was known locally for excellent work during the Delta wave of COVID, delivery of oxygen cylinders to his constituents and he had even set up an oxygen plant. Besides, the candidate was organized about the voter lists and booth management. He won the seat comfortably with 20,000 votes more than the local BJP candidate and this win came because he got a chunk of Hindu support as well.
Ramnagar, Barabanki, voted in 5th phase on February 27
Fareed Mahfooz Kidwai had been a minister in a previous SP regime but in 2022 was contesting from a new seat in Barabanki, in the Awadh region of the state. Erudite and gentlemanly, he was actually facing a communal campaign as the candidate of the BJP was going door to door asking people if they wanted a Muslim representative. From the kind of family that promotes the ideas of Gunga-Jumni Tehzeeb, Kidwai was clearly troubled by what was happening. In his seat there were actually multiple Pandit candidates that would have cut the base of the Brahmin BJP nominee. Eventually, after a nerve-racking count that went up and down, Kidwai won by 200 votes. He certainly got both Muslim and Hindu support.
Mohammadabad, Ghazipur, voted in 7th phase on March 7
The Ansari family home in Mohammadabad has many histories and tales to tell including a long association with freedom fighters and current association with jailed Don Mukhtar Ansari, against whom the vocabulary of bulldozer raj has been created by Adityanath Yogi. I would in Mohammadabad meet Sibgatullah Ansari, former MLA and brother of Mukhtar, who was expected to get the SP ticket from the seat that eventually went to his very polite son Sohaib or Manu Ansari. The seat itself has just a 10 per cent Muslim population, but would be won comfortably by Suhaib by 18,000 votes.
More emphatic would be the win of his cousin Abbas Ansari (son of Mukhtar Ansari) by a margin of 38,000 votes in neighbouring Mau (he contested on a SBSP ticket from party of Om Prakash Rajbhar). This is a family that has long been in politics, understands all the technical aspects of electoral battles, and the loyalists and retainers around them are overwhelmingly non-Muslim. In such large victories they are supported by a cross section of the electorate. Polarisation is always attempted against them, it works with a section of the voters, but they also manage to prevail.
In conclusion, across India and not just in Uttar Pradesh, Muslims increasingly confront prejudice and profiling and are targeted by hate campaigns. But to see majoritarianism as the only factor in the BJP’s victory would be to miss the other elements of the Uttar Pradesh election story and to also set up a somewhat insulting formulation that people only vote for the BJP because they hate Muslims. The analysis of voter choices deserves a more nuanced understanding as does the examination of what polarisation is and how it works.
In 2022, the BJP won Uttar Pradesh because of direct transfers of cash and rations, plus the additional migration of BSP votes that added another element to the national party’s already impressive social engineering base. Compared to 2014, 2017 and 2019, this was not a pitched anti-Muslim election on the ground.
Muslim candidates often won and lost because of local arithmetic, their own shortcomings or the ability to overcome the challenges and still manage. But they were there on the ground, fighting. A certain base level polarisation is now always present; the challenge is to understand what else is happening.
Thank you for this unbiased political analysis Saba Naqvi. There is hope for Indian democracy as long journalist such as yourself are present.
Tells us why losing hope doesn’t help. The electorate works with what it gets and teaches and messages to shape the political agents overtime. The arrival of two party fight between SP and BJP is new. It will shape SP to rework its politics and agenda besides pressurising the BJP too. The convoy of democracy moves slowly but surely!