Modi’s BJP becomes first ruling party in India’s history without a single Muslim MP

Wednesday 6 July marks a moment of political history for India – with the resignation of minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, the country’s ruling party is left without a single Muslim MP for the first time since independence.

Naqvi is the last of three Muslim MPs for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to stand down in the space of just over a week, resigning on Wednesday evening one day before his term was due to end. The term of former junior minister for external affairs MJ Akbar, who stepped down from his government post following #MeToo allegations in 2018, ended on 29 June. The party’s only other Muslim MP – Syed Zafar Islam – saw his term end on Monday.

All three politicians represented the party in the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, which has traditionally seen better representation for India’s 170 million Muslims – a minority making up around 14 per cent of the population, and the second-largest population of Muslims in the world behind only Indonesia, at the last census in 2011.

The Hindu nationalist party has had no Muslim MPs in the lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, since the tenure of its last Muslim MP Shahnawaz Hussain ended in 2014.

The development comes at a concerning time for Muslims in India, with a recent spate of communal violence around Hindu religious festivals, followed by state-sponsored demolitions of mostly Muslim properties. In recent weeks the government has also found itself at the centre of an international diplomatic row with a number of Muslim-majority nations, after derogatory comments about the Prophet Muhammad were made on live TV by a then-national spokesperson for the BJP, Nupur Sharma. She has since been suspended.

And the arrest of a prominent Muslim journalist and Modi critic, Mohammad Zubair, whose fact-checking service had brought attention to Sharma’s comments, has been met with outrage by those who fear it represents a broader crackdown on dissenting minority voices, as well as freedom of the press in the country.

The absence of Muslim politicians for the BJP in parliament, critics say, not only represents an unprecedented moment in Indian democracy, but also casts a shadow over the party’s slogan of Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas (Collective efforts, inclusive growth). And this lack of representation is all the more stark given the sheer number of MPs the party boasts – 302 out of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, a rare absolute majority after a storming victory in the 2019 election.

In the lower house as a whole, there are 27 Muslim MPs – four more than there were in the last parliament. At 11 per cent of non-BJP MPs, this comes considerably closer to representing the demographics of the country.

Speaking to The Independent, the chief of the BJP’s minorities wing Jamal Siddiqui says that the party does not look at “religion, caste or creed, but instead searches for ideal candidates and good human beings”.

“Congress and other parties have had Muslim MPs over the years. Yet Muslims have been left behind,” he says. “It’s not about including Muslims in parliament; the party believes in taking them forward through government schemes. For that, it’s not necessary to be a Muslim.”

Siddiqui points to the fact that the party has fielded Muslim candidates in the last two general elections – although only seven of its total 427 in 2014, and six out of 437 in 2019. Their failure to win seats, he says, is “not the party’s fault”.

“Society must decide that they want to vote for Muslim faces,” he says. “The BJP changes its tactics according to the demands of politics.

“When the BJP had three Muslim MPs in the Rajya Sabha, then no one raised questions. Now that their term is ending people are linking it to religion. The fact is BJP has never discriminated on the basis of religion. We have given a chance to everyone and will do so in future. This should not be seen through a religious lens,” he adds.

Critics say that the absence of Muslim faces in parliament raises questions of representation as well as of the pluralism that is enshrined in India’s constitution.

Zoya Hasan, a professor emerita at the Centre for Political Studies at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, says it is not enough for the ruling party to offer verbal guarantees to minority communities if they are otherwise left outside the corridors of power.

“This marks an unprecedented moment in the history of our democracy when, for the first time, the ruling party will not have a single MP from the largest minority, signalling their distance from political power, thereby curtailing their opportunities of making their voices heard in the forum where it matters most,” she tells The Independent.

“This raises questions about how inclusive India is to its large Muslim minority population. What is at stake is not the question of representation of Muslims as much as a series of questions about the contemporary dynamics of representation and the future of pluralism, the bedrock of India’s democracy.

“Just guaranteeing equal rights is not important. You need to have a presence in institutions too.”

Hasan says the majoritarian politics of the BJP “changes the very meaning of liberal democracy, reshaping it to provide expression through state power to the majority will, while ignoring and excluding minorities”.

“So while it is infinitely more desirable to be represented by nonsectarian parties, political parties must recognise that diversity in public institutions is essential and lack of representation circumscribes the role and participation of disadvantaged groups and minorities in important public institutions.”

Hilal Ahmed, associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), says that historically the Rajya Sabha has been the source of greater Muslim representation in the Indian parliament because most parties remain unwilling to put forward many Muslim candidates in open elections for the lower house – but even this template has been discarded by the BJP.

“The practice of ‘winnability’ as claimed by the BJP is not new. Even the Congress (now the main opposition party) relied on winnability while giving tickets. But the BJP is using this for ideological reasons. For the first time it is not using Rajya Sabha to show adherence to sabka saath sabka vikas. The party is now using Hindutva as an identification marker,” he tells The Independent.

Nonetheless, Ahmed warns against oversimplifying the BJP’s policies or appeal to Muslims based only on the religious identity of its candidates and MPs. He notes that previous Muslim BJP parliamentarians have hardly been rebels. “Whether it is Naqvi or (another former Rajya Sabha member) Najma Heptulla or anyone else, they have always toed the party line,” he says.

And when it comes to voters, there are many reasons why some might opt for the BJP beyond religious identity. “From 1996 to 2014, 6 per cent of votes for BJP were from Muslims,” he says. “From 2014 it increased to 9 per cent. This shows that Muslims are drawn to the BJP at the constituency level. The fact is the BJP is the dominant party and it gets votes from different communities for different reasons, so it is misleading to pin it on identity alone.”

The BJP’s Siddiqui says that this is not the end of the road for Muslim representation within the party, and notes that elections are not the only route to appointing MPs to the Rajya Sabha. He hints that it is “possible” the new president will select at least one Muslim as part of the 12 technocratic seats they can nominate to the upper house. “There will be many opportunities in the future,” he says.