BJP’s Pasmanda outreach interesting yet baffling, with a latent risk for Hindutva

On the concluding day of the BJP National Executive meet in New Delhi earlier this week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the delegates to reach out to all sections of society, including religious minorities, in the run-up to the 2024 general elections.

Many saw this as a continuation of the overtures the BJP has been making towards Pasmanda Muslims. An amorphous but sizable chunk among Indian Muslims, the Pasmandas are primarily members of Hindu lower and backward castes who converted to Islam. The BJP has also made claims in recent years that it wants to empower Muslim women and save them from patriarchy within their religion.

When the Supreme Court outlawed instant triple talaq in 2017, the Narendra Modi government followed it up with the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019, which was legislated to punish men who still gave instant triple talaq to their wives. This was widely criticized as a deeply flawed legislation that carved a criminal offence out of the otherwise civil contract of an Islamic marriage. Many critics dubbed this as an attempt to ‘target’ Muslim men. The government, however, insisted that the law was aimed at protecting Muslim women and their marital rights.

Invoking Shah Bano

On the morning of the second day of the BJP National Executive meet, the party officially tweeted the details of the Shah Bano verdict — the Supreme Court had granted maintenance for Shah Bano in April 1985 — that was reversed by the Rajiv Gandhi government via the parliamentary route under pressure from orthodox Muslim opinion. The tweet had a picture of a smiling Rajiv Gandhi with ‘Bharat Todo’ (break India) written as an obvious counter to Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra. Clearly, by projecting the BJP as more “progressive” on gender issues, the tweet set the tone for the day and anticipated what the Prime Minister was going to say.

Also read: BJP testing waters in Muslim votebank via Pasmanda outreach in Bihar

Modi’s latest outreach comes months after his government set up the KG Balakrishnan Commission to examine whether Scheduled Caste status can be given to those among the Dalit community who have converted to Islam or Christianity, religions that do not recognize the existence of any caste or class block. The mandate for the Balakrishnan Commission is important, as, under the currently prevalent reservation system, a person can enjoy the benefits of Scheduled Caste reservation only if he/she is a Hindu, Buddhist, or Sikh.

The setting up of the commission took many by surprise. The BJP is known to be a Hindutva party. As such, it is expected to be the last one to risk providing any ground for conversions to Islam and Christianity. However, as commissions take a long time, the gesture is unlikely to mean anything before May 2024 but will keep the suspense simmering among Pasmanda Muslims over the government’s intent. The gesture also projects Islam in India not as a homogenous community but as a hierarchical one that, like the Hindu community, is also split along caste lines.

Confusing gestures

These gestures have, however, have left many confused. It is clear that Modi and the BJP are trying to attract more Muslims to vote for the party in 2024. That apart, the BJP’s overtures towards Muslim women, coupled with the party’s public push for protecting their rights, also paints conservative male opinion within Islam as backward. This does assist Hindutva in an oblique manner.

Also read: Why Sangh Parivar’s efforts to reach out to Muslims remain hollow

The Pasmanda outreach, however, is as interesting as it is perplexing. It puts Pasmanda Muslims and Hindu/Buddhist Dalits at cross-purposes. Unless the reservation for Pasmanda Muslims is indeed given from the existing SC pie, the government’s gesture makes the Scheduled Caste community wary of Islam — something that can make them more receptive to the discourse of Hindutva organisations.

The pitch challenges the long-held premise of Hinduism being caste-ridden as opposed to more egalitarian Islam and Christianity, thus absolving Hinduism of the charge that caste hierarchy is essentially Hindu.

Danger in the pitch

However, there is a danger for Hindutva forces involved in this pitch. It brings Muslims back to some centrality in the public debate — a reversal of the situation prevalent through the past nine years, wherein Muslim voters have been rendered almost irrelevant in wake of the BJP carving out its overarching constituency of Hindu “upper castes,” Hindu OBCs, and sections of Hindu Dalits and tribals in north, western, and central India.

There have been several instances of such conflicting signals from Hindutva forces in the past, too. By the 1980s, the BJP was already saying that the ancestors of Indian Muslims were Hindus and Indians, and change in mode of worship cannot change ancestry. APJ Abdul Kalam was widely celebrated as India’s “missile man” who read the Gita and played the veena, with many reading the RSS and BJP’s praise for him as their attempt to distinguish the “ideal,” Indianised Muslim from the Muslim who looked towards Saudi Arabia for inspiration. In recent times, the RSS has also projected Aurangzeb’s pluralistic brother Dara Shikoh as the “ideal” Muslim, contrasting him with a “fanatical” Aurangzeb.

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In the first public lecture series by an RSS Sarsanghchalak in New Delhi in 2018, Mohan Bhagwat said that MS Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts, which dubbed Indian Muslims, Christians, and Communists “internal threats,” was written in another context and does not represent accurately the views of the RSS today. That is when Bhagwat had also first declared that he believed all Indians are Hindus, and that even calling all Indians “Bharatiya” would be enough if there were reservations in using the word “Hindu.” He had also called upon all communities to come closer to the Sangh to understand its working. This is not very different from what Bhagwat said in his highly publicised interviews to the Organiser and Panchjanya recently.

Element of surprise

Be that as it may, these recent developments do throw in an element of surprise about the machinations within the BJP and the wider Sangh Parivar. They also send out a signal globally that the BJP is not as “insular” as many Western commentators and global indices project it to be.

However, given the conflicting signals that its Pasmanda outreach and Citizenship Amendment Act send, it will take some time to fully understand whether there is a real change in the BJP’s outlook or if these overtures are largely being made with an eye on the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

(The writer is a columnist. He teaches at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai)