New DelhiNearly a decade after the deadly communal riots in western Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hoping to heal the Hindu-Muslim divide in the region by hosting an “Ek”.affection conference(Collection of Love) Title Ek Desh, Ek DNA (One Country, One DNA). To be held next month, it will be the first of 12 such programs that the party plans to organize in Muslim-majority areas ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
“We are hosting the first such meeting in a Muslim-dominated area so that our message is loud and clear,” Kunwar Basit Ali, president of the UP BJP Minority Morcha, told ThePrint.
He said, ‘Muzaffarnagar was also chosen because it is its land. Chaudhary Charan Singh, who experimented with the idea of Jat-Muslim unity, but which was later hijacked by the Congress and the Samajwadi Party. The party wants to restore unity among Muslims who see the BJP as the enemy and seek to remove divisions created by opposition parties.
State BJP leaders said that apart from these lofty goals, electoral arithmetic is also a factor.
“BJP faced stiff resistance from SP-RLD (Socialist Party-Rashtriya Lok Dal) in the last Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. He drew support from the Jat base of the RLD and the Muslim base of the SP. The BJP now has to break the SP-RLD unity and woo Muslim voters towards the party,” said a BJP leader from western UP.
While the BJP won all 14 Lok Sabha seats in western UP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the SP-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance won six in 2019. BSP won Nagina, Amroha, Bijnor and Saharanpur seats and SP won Moradabad and Sambhal.
Similarly, while the BJP won 100 of the 126 seats in 24 districts of western UP in the 2017 assembly elections. tally dropped to 85 in the 2022 state elections. RLD – now led by Chaudhary Charan Singh’s grandson Jayant Chaudhary – alone won eight seats.
in addition to affection conferenceBJP’s Muslim outreach efforts add to Modi’s identity Friend (Friends of Modi) to organize Sufi music performances among minority communities and constituencies as well as for G20 delegates.
A Muslim BJP leader from UP said, “Generally very few Muslims vote for the BJP, but the Rampur election shows that a section of the community has come out to support the party.” “With sustained outreach, we can weaken Muslim consolidation towards at least one other party and also increase our share of votes.”
Last December, the BJP candidate won an assembly by-election in Rampur – a Muslim-majority constituency and stronghold of SP leader Azam Khan – more than 34 thousand votes, The by-election was necessitated by Khan’s disqualification due to a hate speech conviction.
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Jat-Muslim ‘brotherhood’ in western UP
Chose Muzaffarnagar as the first location affection conference Seems like a well thought out move. district known as UP’s sugarcane belt And there is a significant population of Muslim and Jat farmers.
So far BJP’s election rhetoric has been frequent in this area. moved back Further polarization led to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. But with the rise of SP and RLD, this time BJP seems to be trying a new strategy to make inroads.
Muslims and Hindus, including the Jat, Rajput, Gurjar and Tyagi communities, have lived together in western Uttar Pradesh for centuries. So, why is there still division on the basis of caste and community? Our DNA is the same, and we should accept leaders like Yogi Adityanath, Rajnath Singh and Sanjeev Balyan regardless of their caste or community,” Ali said.
According to him, there are 80,000 Muslim Rajputs and 1 lakh Muslim Jats in Muzaffarnagar. He claimed that there are 1.8 lakh Muslim Rajputs and 1 lakh Muslim Gujjars in the adjoining Saharanpur and Shamli districts respectively.
“The government treats all religions as equal, and when the Prime Minister of our country says that Muslims are our brothers and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) insists that our DNA is one, the division between communities must end, he added.
Muzaffarnagar invited leaders affection conference Union Defense Minister Rajnath Singh, BJP State President Chaudhary Bhupender Singh and Muzaffarnagar MP and Minister of State Sanjeev Balyan. A BJP leader involved in the preparations for the event said prominent Muslim leaders are expected to attend the proceedings.
Sufi shock, selfie of ‘Modi friends’
Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the BJP’s national executive meeting in January to plead Party leaders to hold ‘Sufi nights’ as a way of reaching out to Muslims. This idea is now being implemented.
BJP Minority Front is not only planning Sufi conference (conferences) but is also preparing to host musical nights for G20 delegates at various venues.
On March 15, the party’s minority leaders will meet in Delhi to prepare an organizational structure to reach out to the Sufi people.
Jamal Siddiqui, national president of the BJP Minority Morcha, told ThePrint, “In this meeting, we will discuss the Sufi event. conferenceSufi Nights, and Street corner (Street corner) meetings. We will also recruit in-charges for these events across the country and involve Sufi leaders.”
Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam that seeks a direct personal connection with God through spiritual practices including devotional songs.
According to Siddiqui, the BJP Minority Front has already identified the in-charges for “Modi”. Mitra programme” in 65 constituencies.
“In the Modi Mitra programme, we will select those from minority communities who have received benefits from government welfare programs as well as those who support PM Modi. We are identifying these beneficiaries from different Lok Sabha constituencies (with a sizeable minority population) and we will start a program for them to post their selfies (on social media),” Siddiqui explained.
So far, the BJP has identified 65 Lok Sabha constituencies in 10 states and union territories where the population of religious minorities is more than 30 per cent.
Among the identified seats, 13 from UP and West Bengal, six each from Kerala and Assam, five from Jammu, four from Bihar, three from Madhya Pradesh, two each from Telangana and Haryana and one each from Maharashtra and Lakshadweep Are.
The constituencies of UP include Bijnor, Amroha, Kairana, Nagina, Sambhal, Muzaffarnagar and Rampur.
Sources in the BJP Minority Morcha said that 5,000 minority beneficiaries or Modi supporters from each of these constituencies would be selected to post their selfies and encourage them to participate in a rally to be held in Delhi in May, which would be addressed by the PM. Will address
‘Just giving speeches won’t do’
These outreach measures follow right after Modi told BJP leaders at the party’s national executive meeting that they should connect with Bohras, Pasmanda Muslims (depressed classes) and others from the community without expecting votes in return.
Then, last month at a Dawoodi Bohra event in Mumbai, Modi announced that he was there as a “family member” rather than a prime minister and had built up an “unprecedented atmosphere of trust” over the years.
Echoing Modi, Sabir Ali, national general secretary of the BJP Minority Morcha, told ThePrint that mere speeches would not be enough to galvanize Muslims towards the party.
“Lack of education is contributing to a sense of alienation in the community. Speeches alone will not be enough to end animosity towards the BJP. We must reach out to these communities with open arms at their doorsteps and engage them in dialogue, “They said.
“By presenting data on the achievements of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee ministry (between 1998 and 2004) along with the progress made by Modi’s government over the past nine years, we can demonstrate the difference between the National Democratic Alliance government and those are led by regional parties or the Congress, which only pay lip service to these communities. Such data can help bridge the gap and instil a sense of trust among minorities.”
(Edited by Asawari Singh)
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