Religious Leadership Has Lost Its Credibility among the Muslims
Muslims
Have Grown As a Community
Main
Points:
1. Only 46% Muslims say they
will prefer a Muslim candidate in an election.
2. 41% Muslims says that they
will vote for a more eligible non-Muslim candidate.
3. Muslim community now takes
its decision on voting on regional considerations.
----
By New Age Islam Staff Writer
2 November 2021
Mr Hilal Ahmad discusses the pros and cons
of Muslim leadership in India after Independence. The myth that Muslims always
vote for a Muslim candidate if given a choice and that Muslims always follow
the dictate of their religious leaders in elections has been proven wrong by the recently held survey of CSDS-Lokniti
APU to look into the Muslim mind on their voting pattern. The survey done in 24
states on 48000 respondents. The survey brought out two realities. One, Muslims
do not vote en masse on communal line but prefer a better candidate. The survey
shows that 46 % Muslims will vote a Muslim candidate but 41 per cent Muslims
will prefer an eligible non-Muslim candidate.
Secondly, the survey proves the myth wrong
that Muslims follow the election time fatwa of religious leaders in favour of a
particular party or candidate. In the 1980a, Maulana Abdullah Bukhari would
assure a political party success by issuing fatwas in its favour and the
Muslims would vote en masse for it. But that period is over. Not only because
the latter day religious leaders do not wield so much clout over Muslims but
also because the communal politics of the Bhartiya Janata Party, Hilal Ahmad
says, has changed the entire political scenario as even secular parties do not
want to give tickets to Muslim candidates. Therefore, Muslims seems to be
without a political leadership in the present day India. But on the other hand,
being without a religious leader has made Muslims more responsible as they
consider the regional needs and compulsions while going to vote and this has
helped them. For example, in the recently held West Bengal Assembly elections,
Muslims voted en masse in favour of a secular party though, Abbas Siddiquee and
Asaduddin Owaisi, two faces of Muslim-centric politics also fielded their
candidates.
This was possible because, Muslims of India
now rely more on the views and opinions of independent intellectuals,
journalists and political activists. They have matured a lot and have learnt to
live without a religious leadership. They have grown as a community. Hilal
Ahmad’s article, ‘Imagined Realities’ delves into this issue.
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Imagined Realities: Some Facets Of Muslim
Leadership In India
By Hilal Ahmad
30.10.21
Muslim political leadership is one of the
most misunderstood questions of our public life. A strong assumption — that
there is a homogeneous Muslim community that does not have leaders, or the
right kind of leaders, who can make the community modern, rational, secular and
nationalist — continues to survive as the ultimate truth. Ironically, this
strange belief is very powerful. Serious public intellectuals, journalists, and
a section of scholars evoke the rigid Jinnah versus Azad binary as a criterion
to evaluate the politics of contemporary Muslim leaders (such as Asaduddin
Owaisi) as if nothing has changed in the last 75 years.
Representational image.
File photo
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The declining numbers of Muslim MPs and
MLAs in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies are often cited to justify this kind
of oversimplified explanation. The rise of Hindutva politics led by the
Bharatiya Janata Party has given a new shift to this assertion. It is now
claimed that the non-BJP parties are also not interested in giving tickets to
Muslim candidates. As a result, there are only 27 Muslim MPs in the present Lok
Sabha. This figure is slightly better than that of the previous Lok Sabha,
which had only 23 Muslim MPs. This political decline, we are told, is
inextricably linked to Muslim marginalization.
No one can deny the significance of Muslim
presence in legislative bodies. However, it does not mean that there is an
organic relationship between Muslim MPs/MLAs and common Muslims. The hypothesis
that if an opportunity is given to Muslim voters, they will eventually vote for
a Muslim candidate is factually incorrect. Muslim communities vote in a highly
diversified manner and their Islamic faith is one of the factors that influence
their political preferences.
Similarly, the popular imagination that
Muslim MPs/MLAs function as Muslim delegates inside legislative assemblies is
not entirely appropriate. Muslim elected leaders do raise Muslim-specific
concerns and, in a way, contribute significantly to the inclusive character of
legislative discussions. However, they also abide by the established norms of
politics and behave like a typical Neta. The official position of the party
turns out to be the source of their political arguments, statements, and
interventions.
To explain these complexities, I propose an
alternative analytical framework. In my view, two very basic features of Indian
Muslim identity need to be acknowledged: i. the substantial sociological,
cultural, and regional diversity that make Muslims a highly heterogeneous
religious group and ii. the imagined and symbolic Muslim homogeneity that
transforms them into a visible opponent of Hindutva.
These crucial features of Muslimness
provoke us to ask a few simple questions. What do Muslim communities think of
Muslims leaders? What are their expectations? Do Muslims behave as a political
community? Do they follow the advice given to them by Muslim religious
elites/ulema or pressure groups such as the All India Muslim
Majlis-e-Mushawarat? Is it alright to reduce the idea of Muslim leadership
merely to elected MPs and MLAs? Is there any possibility to think of various
kinds of Muslim leaders?
Let me begin with the first set of
questions. The CSDS Lokniti-APU’s three round, survey-based study, Politics and
Society between Elections (2017-2019), explores several important questions to
map out people’s perceptions of political elites. This comprehensive study
covers 24 states with a nationally representative sample of more than 48000
respondents. From our point of view, one particular question was very relevant:
“Suppose there are two leaders from same political party and equally competent
to get your work done. If one is from your religion while the other from a
different religion. Whom would you be willing to contact first?"
One finds a mixed response on this issue.
Religious communities, it seems, do not overwhelmingly express trust in their
leaders. This national pattern also corresponds to the Muslim views. A sizeable
number of Muslim respondents (46 per cent) said that they would prefer to
contact a Muslim leader. Interestingly, an equally powerful segment of Muslims
(41 per cent) did not find this issue very pressing. For them, the religion of
a leader did not bother them at all.
Two crucial inferences can be drawn from
these findings. It appears that Muslim communities recognize the significance
of Muslim elected leaders simply to tackle everyday encounters with the
administrative power structure. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this
expectation is not overstated by a significant Muslim section. Muslim leaders
are envisaged primarily as professional politicians who follow the usual rule
of the game.
This brings us to the second important
issue: the role of the ulema in politics. Various studies conducted by the
CSDS-Lokniti confirm that Muslims do not want the religious elite to support
any political party. The “Religious Attitude and Behaviour Survey 2015” is very
relevant here. This study tells us that a significant majority of Muslims do
not want the ulema to indulge in electoral mobilization.
Two examples are useful to elaborate this
finding. The AIMMM decided to intervene in the electoral politics as a Muslim
representative body in the mid-1960s. It published a nine-point People’s
Manifesto to evolve an electoral strategy for Muslim voters for the 1967
general election. The Majlis resolution called upon the Muslim voters to vote
for candidates irrespective of their religion, community, or party. It extended
its formal support to 135 candidates in different states for the parliamentary
elections. This formal electoral appeal to Muslims paved the way for what is
now called strategic voting.
A systematic analysis of the 1967 election
demonstrates that out of 135 Majlis-supported candidates, only 42 managed to
win elections. One also finds a similar trend in the state assemblies. The
Majlis-supported candidates did not do well in most of the cases. Their
performances were not up to the mark even in the Muslim-dominated
constituencies.
The political role played by the imam of
Jama Masjid, Abdullah Bukhari, in the 1980s, especially his ‘election fatwa’,
encourages us to also validate this point. Indira Gandhi discovered Bukhari as
a Muslim leader in the early 1970s and nurtured his political aspirations.
Bukhari, on his part, made full use of this political patronage. He transformed
the historic Jama Masjid into a symbolic centre of Muslim politics to bargain
with political parties.
Bukhari consciously issued election
statements (which were incidentally described as fatwas by the media) in
support of the most powerful party/coalition: the Janata Party in 1977, the
Congress in 1980 and in 1984, the Janata Dal in 1989 and the Congress, once
again, in 1991. This strategy legitimized his status as the political
Imam-e-Hind and consolidated the media-friendly argument that Muslims always
follow the advice of the Ulema and vote as a bloc.
A closer analysis of these trends would
suggest that Muslim leadership is a highly-diversified phenomenon. There are
three distinct types of Muslim leaders, who perform very specific functions in
different contexts.
The Muslim elite is the first important
category. An individual or a set of individuals, who acquire authority and
influence over other members of their immediate Muslim community (communities)
in a particular context primarily based on their social-educational status and
class-caste position, may be described as Muslim elites. These privileged
Muslims make use of their powerful Muslim presence to sustain the internal
power structure among Muslim communities.
The Muslim politician is a different
category of leaders. These are the individuals who mobilize, or claim to mobilize,
other members of the Muslim community (communities) in a particular context for
a specific political purpose. Aspirant Muslim politicians and elected MPs/MLAs
belong to this segment.
Finally, there are Muslim
influencers/activists. They engage with known or unknown Muslim-related issues
and assert their presence in the media-driven public discourse.
There is a need to explore the circulation
of these three types of Muslim leaders at the grassroots level to understand
the actual operational aspects of everyday Indian Muslim politics, especially
in the present Hindutva-dominated context. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to
get rid of the Jinnah-Azad syndrome.
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Hilal
Ahmed is Associate Professor, CSDS, New Delhi
Source:
The Telegraph Online
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-politics/religious-leadership-muslims/d/125694
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