Daily Times

The path to Delhi goes through India’s Uttar Pradesh (UP), the most populous state, where voting the caste (or any candidate that ostensibly supports the creed) has always been the norm.

Until now that was quite true.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) recent clean sweep of the UP Legislative Assembly indicates that the state’s power corridors have received a saffron paintjob. Despite a Supreme Court order prohibiting using religion, caste or language to garner votes from communal politics, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi could not resist the temptation to declare, ‘If cemeteries are being built, crematoriums should be set up too.’

However, analyses of such campaign rhetoric and post-election statistics regarding the split Muslim vote between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) still leaves a lot to be desired.

Even with wounds of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots still fresh, how can there be an overwhelming Muslim support for the very entity that instigated the violence? BSP chief Mayawati’s tampering allegation does not offer the soundest explanation for this recent Muslim inclination towards the BJP.

Hopefully, this answer may be a lesson to parties that consider themselves the bastions of pluralism. A Muslim vote was not a vote for the BJP, but one against the opportunistic tokenism its opponents have practiced.

Let’s start with the so-called flag bearer of the Dalit people, Mayawati herself. In 2017, little did many scheduled caste and other backward community farmers realise that their vote ballots in her name were unofficial permission slips for the state machinery to allot their land to big corporations and property dealers.

To woo the Muslim community away from the SP camp, she let 98 Muslim candidates contest on the BSP ticket. As for Akhilesh Yadav, who had positioned himself as the poster boy for egalitarian development, his party did not exactly project a united front prior to the elections. While Muzzafarnagar was burning, Akhilesh seemed to care less.

With Yogi Adityanath’s ascession to power in UP, one can only wonder for what it means for secularism in India.

Down south with the emergence of the Majilis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), Muslims are finding an alternative to parties who can’t seem to move beyond hosting grandiose Iftars and providing Hajj subsidies, and a thriving saffron wave. But its electoral abilities and secular credentials are yet to fully materialise.

Yes, the Congress fared well in three of the other states this election season. But the path to Delhi does not go through Punjab, Goa, or Manipur.

The writer is a freelance blogger on South Asian politics and culture. He is currently completing his masters in South Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK. He tweets at @MajidDan