Can Muslims Reimagine the BJP?

As the BJP expands its political dominance, Indian Muslims need to rethink old electoral assumptions in engaging with the BJP.

It is fascinating to read Arvind Singh’s ‘India’s Rogue Historians: How They Fought Hindus at Ayodhya & Lost’ (Redux Publications) in the context of the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s recent Bhojshala judgment. Singh, in his 830-page tome, explains how India’s Muslims, persuaded by the cohort of Marxist historians, squandered every opportunity to reconcile with the Hindu side’s religious, historical, and legal claim over Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. In November 2019, when the Supreme Court (SC) awarded the entire site to the Hindus to build the temple to Lord Ram, it only built on a series of legal interventions including the 1994 SC judgment which ruled that “a mosque is not an essential part of the practice of the religion of Islam”. Singh writes that right from 1858 when the then caretaker of the mosque filed the first complaint seeking an order restraining Hindus from praying inside the ‘mosque’ which the Muslim complainant himself mentioned as ‘janmasthan’, Ayodhya presented innumerable opportunities to the Muslims to accept the religious, historical, archaeological, and legal superiority of the Hindu claim over the site. Throughout the legal trajectory of the Ayodhya case post-independence, India’s ‘eminent historians’ took it upon themselves to represent the Muslim side and effectively stopped them from reaching any legal or out-of-court settlement, reconciliation, or just a pragmatic acknowledgement of the merit in the Hindu side’s claim which the SC upheld in 2019.

Rogue Historians

Singh’s account is an instructive read about the Hindu side’s nearly 500-year old struggle to reclaim Ayodhya, particularly the post-independence era, against all odds including the narrative war that “India’s rogue historians” fought on behalf of the Muslims but lost eventually, in the context of two recent developments- one, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) victory in West Bengal and Assam elections that has triggered a curiously cynical response that Muslims do not matter any longer to the BJP. Two—and a more direct outcome of the 2019 Ayodhya verdict itself—the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s judgment declaring the Bhojshala complex in MP’s Dhar district a “temple to goddess Saraswati”. The MP HC based its judgment on the 10-points emanating from the Ayodhya verdict. It also ruled that the 1991 Places of Worship Act, widely cited by the entire spectrum of Muslim petitioners to politicians to “secular” parties to the “eminent historians”, did not apply to the Bhojshala temple as it was a “protected monument” under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958, a set of monuments the Places of Worship Act does not apply to.

The argument that the Muslims do not matter to the BJP has not been made for the first time nor are we likely to see this reductionist tendency to interpret India die down anytime soon. The BJP has won Bengal and retained Assam with even higher numbers despite the unfavourable demographics in many constituencies in these states. It indeed is a paradigm electoral shift in the sense that the BJP has finally denied the Muslim vote bank, if not the Muslims, the exercise of its veto power. In several state and national elections, the Muslim vote bank, and the fantastically self-styled secular parties who court this vote bank, have exercised this veto power to either deny the BJP a majority or even a shot at power. Assam and West Bengal have changed this and hence the cynical argument that the Muslims (not just Muslim voters) do not matter to the BJP any longer.

Cynical Template

Why always use this reductionist template which gives just one task to the Muslims - defeat the BJP in elections? Why not ask Muslims to take a chance on the BJP and vote for it? Given the viscerally polarised political atmosphere it probably is a big ask of the Muslims. But in that shines a political opportunity that has the potential to change this very cynical ‘BJP versus Muslims’ template of Indian politics. A suggestion has been made that all non-BJP parties build a coalition of Hindu voters and Muslims to take on the BJP. But in order to build that Hindu-Muslim coalition, won’t these non-BJP parties have to give up at least some, if not all, of their nauseatingly Muslim-appeasing politics? There is absolutely no sign that the non-BJP parties are even thinking on these lines. But the Muslims already have an electoral choice in the BJP. Like any other successful political party in a democracy, the BJP caters to its constituency, which effectively is the Hindu constituency. With West Bengal and Assam, the BJP’s Hindu consolidation is at its peak. So, there is no electoral incentive for the BJP at least in near future to change this Hindu maximisation matrix. But there is an incentive for the Muslims to consider the BJP as an option- it has the potential to make them stakeholders in BJP’s reign and perhaps incentivise the BJP to speak to the Muslims without appeasement.

Can the Indian Muslims be politically bold and creative to take a bet on the BJP? A large part of the answer lies in the Bhojshala judgment. A court has just pronounced the structure as a temple to Saraswati based on the solid archaeological, historical, and religious evidence. The Muslim clergy and politicians have reacted exactly in the same manner they did to the Ayodhya ruling. Seven years after the epic Ayodhya judgment, a splendid Ram Mandir stands on the site taking nothing away from the Indian Muslims. Can the Indian Muslims distinguish themselves from their clergy and political leadership this time around and revisit some of their positions in an India that looks vastly different from what it did in 1992 or even 2019?

(The author is a senior journalist and Executive Director of Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini. Views personal.)