A younger colleague got worked up after reading yet another article on how Congress has for the last 67 years exploited the Muslim vote bank. The writer of the article is a Muslim (Shahid Siddiqui) and an ex-editor of Nai Duniya. Normally, I would provide the link, but I find the article so bad that I will not do it.
Here is how I responded to my colleague:
Dear ...,
This guy is from MP and probably bought over by RSS.
It is not true that for 67 years, the game is going on. It is only in the last 30 years that a Muslim vote back has taken shape. Immediately after independence, the rightists were not non-entities, but many of them were in the Congress. Others who were distributed in formations like the Swatantra parties were non-entities and the fight was between Congress and socialists of all hue (communists, Lohiaites).
Incidentally, the idea of a Muslim vote bank can make sense in UP, Bihar or Kerala - it is absurd to think of it in the National context - after all, they are no more than 18% of total population. Does it require much thinking?
The reality is the other way around. BJP survives on the Hindu vote bank. Too bad for them that the majority has had other interests.
Congress also willy-nilly played into Hindu vote bank - there are many instances of this - indecision on Babri mosque/temple beginning 1949, the Punjab politics in the eighties, etc. Nehru was less concerned with going to temples, but Indira made it a rule that she visited certain Hindu temples regularly. This was done not just because she was a believer. She married a Parsi (an atheist actually) against family wishes. She visited temples to cater to the Hindu psyche.
It is true that now Muslims are wooed by parties, but earlier Congress was not the only party they voted for and wherever they did it, it was for a variety of reasons. The Bihari and other Hindi speaking Muslims in Kolkata voted for Congress in the sixties and even seventies because they identified with leaders in the states they came from. This changed as the left culture took roots. Muslims started voting for left from late seventies onwards until the TMC took them away in the last ten years.
So, Shahid Siddiqui's analysis is biased and incorrect. There are many such self-proclaimed experts, who are prejudiced one way or other and they keep mis-informing people.
Here is how I responded to my colleague:
Dear ...,
This guy is from MP and probably bought over by RSS.
It is not true that for 67 years, the game is going on. It is only in the last 30 years that a Muslim vote back has taken shape. Immediately after independence, the rightists were not non-entities, but many of them were in the Congress. Others who were distributed in formations like the Swatantra parties were non-entities and the fight was between Congress and socialists of all hue (communists, Lohiaites).
Incidentally, the idea of a Muslim vote bank can make sense in UP, Bihar or Kerala - it is absurd to think of it in the National context - after all, they are no more than 18% of total population. Does it require much thinking?
The reality is the other way around. BJP survives on the Hindu vote bank. Too bad for them that the majority has had other interests.
Congress also willy-nilly played into Hindu vote bank - there are many instances of this - indecision on Babri mosque/temple beginning 1949, the Punjab politics in the eighties, etc. Nehru was less concerned with going to temples, but Indira made it a rule that she visited certain Hindu temples regularly. This was done not just because she was a believer. She married a Parsi (an atheist actually) against family wishes. She visited temples to cater to the Hindu psyche.
It is true that now Muslims are wooed by parties, but earlier Congress was not the only party they voted for and wherever they did it, it was for a variety of reasons. The Bihari and other Hindi speaking Muslims in Kolkata voted for Congress in the sixties and even seventies because they identified with leaders in the states they came from. This changed as the left culture took roots. Muslims started voting for left from late seventies onwards until the TMC took them away in the last ten years.
So, Shahid Siddiqui's analysis is biased and incorrect. There are many such self-proclaimed experts, who are prejudiced one way or other and they keep mis-informing people.
The real
nature of democracy and electoral politics became apparent to parties
only in the last thirties. There is not just a Muslim vote bank, there
is the caste bank, the gender bank. Parties work on these equations very
carefully because of electoral compulsions and that is all that one
should see in it.
