The Muslim voter is expected to play a
key role in determining who wins the West Bengal Assembly elections. The state
accounts for the second highest population of Muslims in India (2.47 crore) and
third highest, in terms of proportion of the population (27 per cent).
The Muslim vote could determine winners
in 102 constituencies (35 per cent of Assembly strength). The Left-Congress
alliance has made the elections, which would have otherwise been a walk over
for chief minister Mamata Banerjee an interestingly close affair.
The Muslim population is more than 25
per cent in the districts of Malda, Murshidabad, North Dinajpur, South 24
Parganas, North 24 Parganas, Nadia and Birbhum. In three districts of West
Bengal - Malda, Murshidabad and North Dinajpur - the population of Muslims is
higher than that of the Hindus.
The Muslim vote is all the more
important this time around because of the saffron surge, the state witnessed in
the Lok Sabha polls in 2014 in which the BJP recorded twice the vote share of
the Congress (17 per cent versus nine per cent) and got as many seats as the
Left Front (two).
The landscape of Bengal also provides an
opportunity to the BJP to experiment and shed the inhibition that it is a party
representing Hindus. After all, it had nothing to lose. The BJP is always
criticized of issuing very few tickets to Muslim candidates. It was announced
in December 2015 that the party would field Muslim candidates in areas where
they are dominant, totaling some 44 seats. However, the list has Muslim
candidates numbering in single digits. Frustrated, the state minority cell
chief has left the party.
In the five years she has been in power, she
has sought to consolidate the Muslim vote: there have been the controversial
stipends to imams, the setting up of Haj houses, a new campus for Aliah
University, sanction for 400 madrasa hostels, and scholarships for Muslim
students.
The Mamata government has taken a lot of
measures for the welfare of Muslims with allowance/stipends for imams, free
cycles to girls studying in madrasas, scholarships to Muslims students (class
one to ten), reservation for Muslim OBCs (Left had initiated it), ban on the
telecast of a drama series by controversial author Taslima Nasrin and making Urdu the second official language in districts where
Muslim population is more than ten per cent. Mamata made a strong anti-Modi
pitch in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and secured maximum votes from the
Muslims.
Ms. Banerjee, however, has got many
factions of the Muslims, including the most powerful one led by Siddiqullah
Chowdhury, the State chief of JamiatUlema-I-Hind, to back her. Similarly, the
TMC has closely coordinated with another powerful community leader PirzadaToha
Siddiqui in south Bengal to ensure that the Muslim votes of at least south
Bengal, where 75 per cent of the seats are located, remain undivided.
Muslims, who had traditionally largely
voted for the LF, had abandoned it in 2011 because they felt betrayed. One, the
Sachar Report made clear that the community had lagged behind in socio-economic
terms; two, the events in Nandigram, that has a 50 per cent Muslim population
made the community feel they were being deliberately targeted to separate them
from their land.
Today, rural Muslims in many parts of
Bengal, largely secular, are rethinking their 2011 decision.
Mayank Verma
PG MEDIA (2015-2017)
