Vote Bank Politics the Art of Muslim Manipulation in India

8/6/2019 Vote Bank Politics the Art of Muslim Manipulation in India

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VOTE BANK POLITICS: THE ART

OF MUSLIM MANIPULATION IN

INDIA

Sujit Das

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

--- Charles de Gaulle (1890 - 1970)

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

--- Lester B. Pearson (1897 - 1972)

Muslim Vote bank

[Disclaimer: The contents of, and opinions expressed in this paper are the sole responsibility ofthe author and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the present website.]

A shrewd politician has many colors. Manipulation of voters for seizing power in democracy isan art. Politicians hunt for votes from various parties, often with conflicting interests. Thus, theyneed to appease various factions, sounding sweet enough to win the votes. A vote bank is a loyalbloc of voters from a single community, who consistently back a certain candidate or political


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party in democratic elections. Such behavior is the result of an expectation of real or imaginedbenefits from that candidate or the party, often at the cost of other communities. Vote bankpolicy is a divisive politics. It is detrimental to democracy because this brand of politicsencourages voters to vote on the basis of narrow communal considerations, often against theirbetter judgment.

In India, the practice of vote bank politics is rampant. The term vote bank was first used by notedIndian sociologist, M. N. Srinivas which has now become a part of vocabulary of Indian politics(Atal, 2009, p. 189). By seeing its success, other Asian countries have adopted it. Though theterm originally referred to voting along caste lines, it was soon expanded to describe vote banksbased on other community characteristics, such as religion and particularly the religioussentiment of the Indian Muslims.

Since the establishment of democratic and secular polity in India, the Muslim population wasbracketed in a vote bank group initially by the Congress party and subsequently by all thepolitical parties in the country. None of them however, offered any remedial solution to resolve

the educational and economic miseries of the Muslim masses and allowed their communalconflict with the Hindus and Christians to grow day by day. There are many very distinctivequalities in the political behavior of the Indian Muslims.

1. A Muslim is not born in a family. He is born in the religion of Islam. He does not belongto Indian civilization; rather he belongs to the Arab culture. He has no appreciation forthe ancient Vedic traditions. An Indian Muslim family is a poor imitation of an Arabfamily within the principled confines of Islam. Therefore it is very easy to isolate them asa religion-centric society and exploit in the name of Islam.

2. It is easy to boost up the Indian Muslims on Kashmir issue or Israeli-Palestinian issue.3. Most of the Indian Muslims have immense hate for their progressive Hindu and Christian

communities because of the illiteracy, poverty and backwardness of their owncommunity. This makes the Indian Muslims suffer from strong inferiority complex.

4. Muslims cannot de-link religion and politics. They vote in large numbers and participatemore in politics, much more than the rest of the electorate. They vote en bloc for onecandidate or party.

5. Muslim voters are more strategic in their voting and tend to hold back their decisionsuntil the last moment.

6. They are more dependent on others in their decision making and more likely to beinfluenced by clerics or community leaders and guided more by narrow communityissues rather than by broader interests. In many Muslim dominated areas they do not haveindividual opinion and cast their votes as per the fatwa dictated by their religious leaders.

7. Criminal-politician nexus: Crime rate amongst Muslims is very high in India. Politiciansneed muscle power support for political work, parties and elections and the criminals


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need the politicians protection against the processes of law. Most of the Indian mafialords are Muslims.

8. They are less supportive to Indian democracy than the rest of the population. They havemore loyalty for Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whom they see as their Guardian angels.

The above characteristics make the Muslims an extraordinary political community easy tomaneuver in elections. Political parties know these Achilles Heels of Muslims, and in order toexploit this psyche, they play very smartly. As a result; democracy steps into Indian Muslimhousehold before the battle of the ballot starts. Ironically, the Muslim clerics often help thepolitical parties to use Muslims as a vote bank by continuously keeping the Muslim masseslinked with their religious identity and allow the situation to continue because of their self-seeking interest. As a result many Indian Muslims across all sections of the Nation have refusedto sing Indian national Song Vande Mataram (Raghavan, 1996, p. 84).These clerics will nevermake the Muslims realize that they face absolutely no danger from the cultural ethos of Indiancivilization. Muslims are encouraged to be isolated, kept backward, encouraged to study all sorts

of theology in Madrasa etc. The Muslim clerics do it purposefully to promote fear of religiousabsorption of the Muslims by Hindu majority, so that they, as uneducated, not vote on merit butdue to fear psychosis vote in concert as block to whomever they are directed by corruptpoliticians, who can provide all kinds of corrupt cover in exchange of directed block vote.

(Left) Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is pretending to offer Namaz(Islamic prayer) to impress the Muslims. (Right) When Mamata is amongstHindus, she is with folded hands to appease the Hindus.

The efforts of many honest Hindu nationalists to bring the Muslims into the socio-politicalmainstream of the country lost its credence in its vote bank competition with the "secular"parties. Though most of the Indian Muslims strongly hate their Hindu and Christian counterparts,there are few honorable one who have full faith in democracy but their voice is so feeble andweak that they are unable to bring out their community from their religion-centric identity.

The political mobilization of Muslims as a vote bank made disturbing progress in the last threedecades. A section of Muslim clerics will never allow the common Muslims to develop their


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national identity. This unfair game of Muslim manipulation, which is not only a curse toMuslims but to the India as a whole, was initiated by Congress under the leadership of Nehru andGandhi, and then followed by all the "secular" parties. Ever since independence, not a singlepolitical party did even consider it necessary to guide them properly regarding their commitmentto the fundamentals of the political blueprint of the Indian polity as free and responsible citizens.

Historically, the Muslim clerics, as a group, who were responsible for partition of the countrywhile playing into the hands of the colonial power turned their community members hostile tothe national aspiration of the Hindus and the Congress created the minority and majoritysyndrome and thereby widened the gap of mistrust between the two communities.

Election gimmick: Mamata Banerjee sitting at the front

row in white clad pretending to be a Muslim sympathizer.She might have considered herself intelligent and Indiansas fools, but she has made herself and her party alaughing stock with all these gimmicks.

The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), a party of mainly Hindu nationalists, with a view to combinethe Hindu voters in its favor, criticized the Congress for pursuing Muslim appeasement policies.This attitude of BJP however helped the Congress to tighten its hold over the Muslims, whofound the party as the only savior of their religious identity. Following the footsteps of theCongress, all the political parties made a mad rush to woo the Muslim community by raising hueand cry for protection of their religious identity. Following the notorious divide and rule policy

of the British, the contemporary Muslim leaders also played the same divisive game in postindependence to share political power without showing any real interest for the economic andeducational developments of their own people. They treated the community as a marketablecommodity and continued bargaining with different political parties in election time for theirindividual benefits. Therefore, the plight of the Muslim community remained the same, as theseparties hardly did anything to rescue them from their educational and economic backwardness.The "secular" parties and the Muslims clergies have a common strategy to scare the Muslims ofthe danger to their religious identity due to consolidation of Hindu nationalists under the banner


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of the BJP. The BJP on the other hand made consistent attempt to consolidate the Hindus also asa vote bank to counter the political consolidation of the Muslims against them. Though, the partyfailed to achieve any major success on this issue, it made the Muslims as its permanent politicalenemy. This helped Congress to exploit the Muslims more artistically.

The Muslim sycophancy was started by Nehru. The practice of subsidizing Muslim Hajjpilgrimage to Mecca as appeasement for Muslim votes began as early as 1959 as a policy ofappeasing Muslims, in contravention of the secular principle of the Government. This practice isstill continued and the subsidy is increasing ever since. In 2007, the Hajj subsidy paid by theIndian Government was INR 5.95 billion and INR 7 billion for 2008 (INR 43 = US$ 1). ExceptIndia, no other country in the world, even the Muslim countries, offer subsidy to Hajj pilgrims.Offering such a financial assistance to a religious group goes directly against the secular spirit ofthe Indian Constitution. It is also to be noted that the Government does not provide any suchsubsidy to the Hindu pilgrims, who go to visit Kailash-mansarovar in China, or to Amarnath inKashmir or Gangasagar in West Bengal. On the contrary, the Government imposes direct andindirect pilgrimage taxes on them (Brahmachari, 2010). This is the biggest hypocrisy that anyone

had ever seen in Indian politics.

In 1982, the National Council of Educational Research and Training of India issued a directivefor the rewriting of school texts. Among other things it stipulated that; characterization of themedieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden (cited Knap,2009, p. 200). Thus denial of history, or negationism, has become India's official 'educational'policy. To appease the Muslims, the Government of India will not tell Indian children about thereal magnitude of the Hindu genocide by Muslim invaders. What type of distorted morality isthis?

The Muslim sycophancy of the Congress reached its highest peak in mid 1980s, when theCongress leadership surrendered to the dictate of Muslim clergies in the famous Shahbano case(it was a controversial divorce lawsuit in India, in which Shahbano, a sixty-two year old Muslimwoman and mother of five, was divorced by her husband in 1978 and was subsequently deniedalimony) by opposing the Supreme Court verdict by a parliamentary amendment. The Shahbanocase, which made a complete mockery of democratic republic India's secular image, is a glaringexample of this raping of democracy and development of this sick art of vote bank politics whichthoroughly exposed the self-acclaimed secular character of the party.

After Shahbano case, the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, sensing the reaction and likelyconsolidation of Hindu votes against the party (because of his political immaturity, he neverunderstood that there was no Hindu vote bank as such), laid the foundation of Ram temple atAjodhya, which has been a disputed issue between the Hindus and the Muslims. But this actionangered the Muslims and they distanced themselves from the party. By seeing an opportunity,other parties took advantage of the situation and aggressively spread the story of the danger ofHindu communalism. The Muslims found in them as the savior of their religious identity andaccordingly went for collective but tactical voting with a sole objective to defeat the BJP.


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Congress Muslim MLA Sabir Kabliwala is in touchwith CM and Hindu poster boy Narendra Modi.

The consistent disappointing situation of the Indian Muslims prompted the BJP leaders to thinkin term of gaining their confidence. There is hardly any possibility that BJP would be able toconsolidate the Hindu votes because of the diverse character of the Indian Hindu society.Therefore they considered it necessary to win over the confidence of the Muslims andaccordingly the tactical shift of the party from Hindutva (Hinduness) to development was a movealso to woo the Muslim voters. This is a major shift in the history of over half a century of party'selectoral politics.

Vajpayee, while addressing a BJP-led convention for development of minorities made an appealto the Muslims to shed their hate BJP mindset and to judge the party on the basis of its

performance during its governance. He also told the Muslims to come out of their fear psychosisand think independently. Advani appealed to them to beware of vote bank peddlers andconcentrate on education Many problems arise today because Muslims have so far only beenthought of in terms of votes (Upadhyay, 2004). The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), theparent organization of the BJP, is no more found having any obsession to the hand of friendshipextended by the BJP to the Muslims.

Encouraged with the new gesture of BJP some sections of Muslims were found respondingpositively. Some of the Muslim leaders were either found joining the BJP or hobnobbing withthe party to come closer to it. They had perhaps realized that the "secular" parties had onlyexploited the community for vote but were hardly serious for their educational and economic

developments. The way the Muslims shifting attitude towards BJP seems to be an encouragingdevelopment for the party.

This is the naked truth about the vote bank politics of India. Unless the Muslims understand thatthey have been used as a marketable commodity by the politicians who do nothing for themexcept for shedding crocodile tears, every time during election they will come out straight fromtheir empty kitchen to the polling booth to cast their vote. Many Indian intellectuals wouldstrongly agree if one was to mention vote bank politics as one of the major causes for our


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country's troubles. Vote bank politics is obviously harmful to the country. It needs to stop andour political scene needs to be cleaned up. If not, very soon the people all over the world willthink many times before choosing a political system existent in India, which is worst than themost despised of any system of governance. Why there is hardly any vote bank politics in othercountries like, say USA, UK or Germany? The general opinion is, their politicians are more

honest and more patriotic than the Indian politicians. Better people get into politics abroad thanin India.

The hard fact is that in India most of the politicians have criminal background. Serious chargesof murder, rape, kidnapping, extortion, bribery and the likes are pending against many of them.Some had served lengthy prison term for various crimes. Some come from such families whichlack cultural, educational and patriotic values, and some come from poor families which havenever seen good life, sometimes not even enough to eat. So they become corrupt to grow richquickly. When such a corrupt politician with criminal background gives public speeches aboutmorality and values, it is ridiculous. Indian democracy is raped every day by these corruptpoliticians.

Mumbai blasts, the Gujarat carnage, Varanasi blasts, attack on the Parliament how comesecurity forces of a vast country like India are incapable of fighting foreign inspired Mafias,criminals and Islamic terrorists, who are robbing, blackmailing and killing innocent persons? Theworst part is that the journalists are controlled by these corrupt politicians. The vote bank politicsis also responsible for the illegal infiltration from Bangladesh. Demographic changes are rapid,but political parties are not keen on solving the issue. Assam and Bengal will be swamped if itgoes on like this by another twenty years. If the Hindus fail to handle this situation withstrictness, wisdom and long-term vision; polarization of the Nation on religious grounds willbecome a widespread and ugly reality, for which the Hindus will pay a heavy price. There is apossibility, which the present author cannot ignore, that by the end of the present century theHindus will find themselves in refugee camps in their own country.

The Indian Muslims must understand that nationhood is just an idea which needs to be turned toreality. To achieve this, we need to work sufficiently on inculcating the sense of citizenhood inpeople at all levels. Here religion hardly has any role to play. Religious absorption of theMuslims by Hindu majority is a myth which was created for purely political purpose to useMuslims as political football. To convince the Muslims, the politicians have even spread thefake Hindu terrorism agenda. Hindus do not place the religion above their country. TheGovernment of India is spending in billions (mostly from the Kafir Hindu tax-payers money),as subsidy to Hajj pilgrims and other facilities, e.g. paying monthly salary to Imams of mosques,expanding Madrasa education, renovating mosques, providing quota for Government jobs,providing easy bank loans, scholarships for Muslim students etc. In spite of this, the Nation isfailing to earn their loyalty. Rather more and more Muslims are vocal with their stanch supportfor Islamic terrorism and anti-Indian motives. The refusal to sing Vande Matram reveals truecolors of Muslims. Muslims must realize that they are citizens of a Nation first, and their religioncomes much later. Vande Mataram is not a Hindu song. It was a source of inspiration to thepeople of India in their struggle for freedom. It is a prayer to Mother India, homage to ourmotherland. It cannot be viewed through a narrow prism. Our Indian culture has a well-respectedplace in the world. We must preserve it. Once Muslims understand the meaning of nationhood,


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only then they can be agile and respond to any challenging situation. Otherwise every time, weare challenged as a Nation; people will give more priority to their narrow views instead of theNation as a whole.

References

1. Atal, Yogesh (2009); Sociology and social anthropology in India. Dorling Kindersley(India) Pvt. Ltd

2. Brahmachari, Radhasyam (2010):Hajj Subsidy: An Instrument of Muslim Appeasementin Indian Politics. Published on Islam-watch on January 22 / 2010. URL:http://islam-watch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=324:hajj-subsidy-an-instrument-of-muslim-

appeasement-in-indian-politics&catid=73:brahmachari&Itemid=58(Last assessed 23 May 2011)3. Knap, Stephen (2009); Crimes Against India: And the Need to Protect Its AncientVedic

Tradition. iUniverse. Bloomington.

4. Raghavan G. N. S. (1996);A new era in the Indian polity: a study of Atal BihariVajpayee and the BJP. Gyan Publishing Hose. New Delhi. India.

5. Upadhyay, R (2004); The Grammar ofVote Bank Politics - The Muslim Community hassuffered. Published on 15.04.2004. South Asia Analysis Group. URL:

http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers10%5Cpaper950.html (Last assessed 23 May 2011)

Author can be contacted at [email protected]

Vote Bank Politics the Art of Muslim Manipulation in India

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