Keeping up with UP | Lessons from Delhi victory for Uttar Pradesh and the country
The BJP devised a campaign plan without any divisive slogans like ‘batoge to katoge’ for Delhi where all castes and communities reside.
It was the first meeting of its kind. The then national president of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) Rajnath Singh was meeting about 300 Muslims from across the country at a convention in Delhi. Singh made a fervent appeal: Will the community give one chance to the party in the upcoming elections?
The party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, tried to win the community’s support as well, talking about his desire to see Muslims with the Quran in one hand and a laptop in the other. Subsequently, in his first term, Modi abolished the triple talaq, a move commended by the women from the community and condemned by their religious leaders.
Though the BJP never deviated from its Hindutva agenda, the perception of negativity towards the community deepened over the years; the party’s
The 2024 poll campaign narrative did not help in mitigating the belief. As a result, neither Modi nor Singh won Muslim support in their respective Lok Sabha constituencies of Varanasi and Lucknow in the Lok Sabha polls. Modi could get barely a few thousand votes in his constituency, which comprises one lakh Shia and 2 lakh Ansari votes. Singh barely managed to secure about 5000 Muslim votes, that too after holding parleys with about 250 Shia leaders. Lucknow has about 2.5 lakh Shias.
The BJP had launched an aggressive outreach programme to woo Pasmandas (backward caste) that form 85% of the Muslim population comprising Malik (Teli), Ansari, Qureshi, Idrisi, Mansoori, Saifi, Salmani and others. The outreach started after Modi outlined it to BJP leaders at the party's national executive meet in Hyderabad in July 2022 to reach out to the Pasmanda Muslims. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), several conventions of Pasmandas were held, targets fixed and promises delivered. An elaborate plan was also made to reach out to the beneficiaries of the government’s welfare schemes. However, the Pasmanda group was dismantled after BJP failed to win over their support in both the 2022 state assembly and 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Kunwar Basit Ali, president of BJP’s Muslim Morcha, shared data to establish the growth of minorities during Modi’s rule. He said, “Muslims got about 30% share in most of the government welfare schemes including housing, drinking water and infrastructure development. The impact of the Prime Minister’s decision to grant scholarships for 2.5 crore Muslim students in his first term helped the community improve its ratio in employment and civil services examinations. The Income Tax Returns filed by the community also grew considerably.” The Muslim Morcha with 38,000 workers and 7,20,000 enrolled members have launched schemes like 'Ek Desh, Ek DNA' and 'Modi Bhaijan, Shukriya’.
Many believe that the BJP’s Pasmanda outreach programme failed. Hero Vajpayee, the UP BJP spokesperson claimed otherwise. “It takes time to win the confidence and support of a community, which has been suspicious about your politics. Delhi assembly election results go to prove that the Muslims have started looking at the BJP as a political option.”
According to him, Muslims have not only taken note of the reluctance of the other political parties in publicly wooing them to keep the Hindu community in good humour but they have also realised that the BJP was not discriminating against them in disbursing largesse under welfare programmes.
Delhi elections
The BJP high command had carefully devised a campaign plan without any divisive slogans like ‘batoge to katoge’ for Delhi where all castes and communities reside.
Of the seven Muslim-dominated constituencies in Delhi, AAP won six with a reduced majority. It’s the BJP’s win from the Mustafabad seat that's encouraging for
the party leadership. One strategy of the BJP high command was to deploy Muslim workers and leaders in every constituency to divide their votes if they failed to win them. It helped in Mustafabad.
Senior party leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the Prime Minister's 'no discrimination with any caste or community policy’ in the implementation of welfare schemes has helped the party win the confidence of the Muslims.
He said, ‘In the education sector, the dropout rate of Muslim girls has dropped by 30%. The Muslim of today would not ignore this fact.”
Despite negative perceptions, the BJP did get about 8% Muslim votes in the 2024 general elections. “It is found that around 8% of Muslims voted for the BJP this time at the all-India level. Statistically speaking, the BJP has emerged as the third national-level choice for Muslim voters,” said a CSDS report by Christopher Jafferelot and Hilal Ahmed, titled “Indian Muslims (Self-) Perceptions and Voting Trend in 2024”.
The report further noted: “The state-level Muslim voting patterns make things much clearer. One finds two noticeable patterns in this regard. BJP’s Muslim vote share increased in the states where the party had a direct contest with one single dominant party. For example, in Gujarat, the Congress, which was the main opposition party, received 70% of Muslim votes. The BJP, on the other hand, performed also quite well in the state as 29% of Muslims voted for the party’s candidates in different constituencies”.
While at the national level, BJP is determined to dent the Muslim vote bank of the opposition, the same way they breached Dalit and OBC votes, in UP they foresee a direct clash between two personalities — Yogi Adityanath and Samajwadi party’s Akhilesh Yadav in 2027.
