The appointment of Danish Azad Ansari as the Yogi Adityanath government's lone Muslim Minister has aroused mixed feelings within the Pasmanda or backward sections of the community in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, as an event that needs to be addressed in the community's own larger struggle for political representation. The BJP had not fielded a single Muslim candidate in the Assembly polls, but its ally, the Apna Dal (Sonelal), fielded Haider Ali Khan from Swar, who lost.
Mr. Ansari, 34, will have to be elected to the Legislative Council within six months to keep his Ministry. A resident of Ballia and associated with the RSS youth wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, since 2011, he has described his appointment as a signal that the Muslim community was also warming up to the BJP.
However, former Rajya Sabha member and head of the All India Pasmanda Mahaz Ali Anwar, one of the first to raise issues related to non-Ashraf Muslim community, has said the community should be careful of not playing a part in the "communal politics of any party, be it the Congress, Samajwadi Party, All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and the BJP."
Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Anwar quoted the late poet Rahat Indori: “Ameer-e-Shahar ki hamdardiyon se bach ke rehna, yeh sar se bhoj nahin sar hi utaar dete hain (beware of the sympathies of the lord of the city, rather than relieve your head of burdens they relieve you of your head instead)“ to describe the situation as he viewed it.
Momin Conference
“The BJP has been working to a plan, that is clear, of appointing non-Ashrafs to the madrasa boards and Urdu academy posts, organising ‘hunar haats’ etc. But the Muslim League was a bigger disruption in the past, and Pasmandas at that time organised the Momin Conference in reaction to it, and opposed the two-nation theory,” he pointed out to highlight that the Pasmanda community had its own views on identity politics.
"In voting for non-BJP parties, Pasmanda Muslims have been choosing the lesser evil, so to speak. Since the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the National Register of Citizens and in lynching incidents, it is Pasmandas who are victimised. Therefore, our identity as Muslims, but also as the deprived among Muslims, creates an intersection that has to be navigated. We need to steer clear of every party's communal agenda," he stressed.
Nitish Kumar’s move
The Mahaz had held meetings during the recent Assembly elections among civil society groups in areas such as Meerut, Gorakhpur, Varanasi and Budaun. "It important that our distinct politics is recognised," he said. In the early 2000s, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar made the first attempt at courting the Pasmanda communities as distinct from a monolithic Muslim block. "The community gave him support till very recently, and now that they have withdrawn support, look at the number of seats the Janata Dal (U) got in 2020," remarked Mr. Anwar, who had been elected to the Rajya Sabha twice from the JD(U) before parting ways with it in 2017 after it broke the alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal.
Interestingly, 35 Muslim candidates were elected to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly in 2022, 10 more than in 2017. Within the BJP, there is an attempt to parse the Muslim vote, possibly the "final frontier" of the party that seems to get support from most sections among the Hindu society. A lone Muslim Minister, unelected yet, is being considered a start, in a political space where all bets seem off.
