Majority Politics, Muslim Marginalization

India is a country of incredible religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity. Muslims are an important part of the mosaic that would be incomplete without them. Muslim communities themselves are ‘diverse, with differences in language, ethnicity and access to political and economic power’. But, more recently, they have faced discrimination regardless of their internal differences in employment, education and housing. Many people do not have access to health care and basic services. Above all, they often struggle to secure justice despite constitutional protections and guarantees of equal citizenship.

ruling party, its politics

In general, the representation of Muslims in public institutions and representative bodies in India is low. While representation of most groups has improved, for example, the percentage of backward caste MPs in the Hindi belt nearly doubled from 11% in 1984 to over 20% in the 1990s, Muslims remained at a low level. – Represented in relation to the general population. Upper castes have the highest representation in the Lok Sabha with around 29% and Other Backward Classes 22% in 2019. Most importantly, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will not have any Muslim MPs when the three conditions are met. Its Muslim MPs in the Rajya Sabha expire in July. It did not nominate any Muslim member to the Rajya Sabha to compensate for his absence from the party party in the Lok Sabha in the recently concluded Upper House elections. This is an unprecedented moment for the first time in the history of our democracy. The ruling party will not have any Member of Parliament from the largest minority In the Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha, indicating their distance from political power and reducing their chances of being heard where it matters.

The BJP does not even have any Muslim member of the Legislative Assembly in the states. This is a direct result of the political strategy implemented for the first time in Gujarat to get majority without minority support. This strategy has been extended to other states as well, most notably in the 2017 and 2022 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, where it won an overwhelming majority with negligible minority support. Thus Muslims were thrown out of the system by first making them electorally irrelevant and then making them invisible in the public sphere because of their electoral inconsistency.

erosion of secularism

This raises the question of how inclusive India is given its large Muslim minority population. What is at stake, however, is not a question of representation of Muslims, but a series of questions about new notions of representation in political life and the future of pluralism – the bedrock of India’s democracy. Pluralism was a way of demonstrating that India’s democracy represented all and it gradually became a cornerstone of Indian political practice. However, the transformational changes in Indian politics in the last decade have eroded the secular and pluralistic base of the nation. The failure to keep the cult out of politics, a major fault of Indian democracy today, is changing the structure and basis of representation. In this context, it is worth remembering that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had framed the 2022 assembly election as 80 per cent versus 20 per cent election, where 20% of the group (a dog whistle for Muslims) were mafias and criminals. represented the supporters of Thus effectively illegalizing and recognizing an entire community.

key template

This form of majoritarian politics changes the meaning of liberal democracy, reshaping it to provide expression through state power to the majority while disregarding and boycotting minorities. In these circumstances, parties that rely on the support of minorities also make them invisible so as to compete to fit into the dominant template on somewhat equal grounds. This view negates ‘the legitimacy of a political majority forged with minority support or votes’. For this reason Rahul Gandhi was mocked and mocked for contesting from Wayanad in Kerala and claimed that he has done so because it is a Muslim majority constituency.

As mentioned above, since independence the representation of Muslims in the legislative arena has been low. The number of Muslim members of parliament has increased marginally from 23 to 27 (about 4%), which is still very low compared to other groups. This marginal increase was despite the decrease in the share of Muslim candidates. Among the main parties, the total number of Muslim candidates declined from 10.3% to 8%, the biggest decrease recorded among state-based parties. The explanation for this cannot be found in the structural limitations of the first-past-the-post electoral system and the lack of victory for Muslim candidates. It is the political factors, i.e. the development of majoritarian politics, that are exacerbating the problem of under-representation. Over the years, majoritarian politics has markedly changed the political landscape with respect to Muslims. Subsequently, the decline in representation is evident in states where majority politics is a dominant force. In this event, most parties disregard their claims to the ticket because they fear that their rivals will accuse them of sacrificing the interests of the majority community. Therefore, parties are busy diluting the tickets given to Muslims out of fear of being anti-Hindu if they give them due representation or promoting and protecting their interests.

This trend is directly related to the privilege of the majority community and the ethnicization of the state. It marks a change from a representative democracy based on inclusive politics in which everyone has equal rights regardless of caste or creed, to an ethno-majority politics that treats diversity housing in the form of concessions to minorities at the expense of the majority community. treats.

a means of protection

The representation of Muslim concerns by Muslims is certainly not necessary or desirable; In fact it is infinitely better for them to be represented by non-sectarian secular parties. But when the parties are unwilling to stand up for them, when they are explicitly subject to hate speech or their continued goal is not countered by the state or when institutions refuse to speak for them when their homes and Their presence in institutions matters when shops are illegally demolished and their livelihoods destroyed. Rather than being understood as a concession, political representation should be treated as a means of protecting minority rights. The diminishing representation of Muslims in legislatures and public institutions also matters because actual representation (of a group’s interests) is linked to descriptive representation (their numerical presence). Indian experience shows that ‘access to institutions is a key element in attracting the attention of the state’. When a group has real representation in public institutions, interests are better represented.

a litmus test

To conclude, diversity in public institutions is essential to promote stability and integration of the state as an institution of governance as an underlying basis of democracy is power sharing along multiple axes – religious, linguistic, regional, caste. , tribal, etc. The ethnic or racial minorities that exist in the legislatures can be seen as a litmus test for the effectiveness of a country’s democratic system and the prevention of racial inequalities or discrimination. At the same time it outlines the complexities of democratic politics with respect to the relationship between formal and real equality, and the question of whether this is sufficient to give people formal equality, or whether structural barriers need to be overcome. A paper on ‘The Political Representation of Ethnic and Racial Minorities’ by the New South Wales Parliamentary Library states that groups are not making full use of their equal rights. One thing is clear from the recent Indian experience. Rights have been largely ineffective without participation in public institutions.

Zoya Hassan is Professor Emerita, Center for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and presently Distinguished Professor, Council for Social Development, New Delhi.