BJP hopes to win 6 million Muslim votes

As the curtain came down on Monday evening on campaigning in Gujarat’s all 26 constituencies for Wednesday’s Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made last-ditch efforts to woo the six million-odd Muslims in the state without whose support it cannot fulfil its dream of a clean sweep.

With the mercury hovering around 42 degrees Centigrade, the hard-pressed minority community just went through the motions and were not all hot and bothered but the saffron party, which rules Gujarat, dispatched top-drawer leaders of its national Minority Morcha to rush to Muslim pockets throughout the state and hold group meetings.

Armed with development statistics to prove how Muslims were better off in BJP-ruled Gujarat and that is why a record number — 48,000 — apply to go for Haj, the officer-bearers of the Morcha accompanied by local lawmakers had been lecturing for the past four days on the sorry plight of the community under the rule of the Congress-led UPA regime.

In Muslim-dominated Junagadh, Jamnagar, Bharuch, Kutch, Vadodara, Kheda, Anand, Panchmahals and Sabarkantha as well as in Gujarat’s largest Muslim ghetto of Juhapura, as many as 240 local Muslim councillors and elected panchayat members remained at the beck and call of the Morcha leaders to make their job easier. But according to social worker Salim Shaikh, only Memons, Khoja and Bohras seemed to be impressed by their talk at such street-corner meetings.

He said the down-at-heel crowds were, of course, gung-ho when male supporters distributed booklets listing advantages of backing the BJP and promises to improve the lot of the youth and womenfolk, while the Muslim women volunteers accompanying them put a henna lotus on the young girls and offered gifts comprising saffron-hued lotus-shaped hair clips, hair band and rubber bands.

Sources told Khaleej Times that in areas where the Congress was strong, efforts were made by hook or by crook to see that the Muslim families did not come out to cast their votes and one way was to bribe the lower-middle-class households with a one-day outstation trip — an experiment successfully tried by the BJP in the last assembly polls.

Though there are 67 Muslims among the 334 candidates in the fray for 26 seats, neither the BJP nor the Aam Aadmi Party has fielded a single contestant from the minority community whose conditions in terms of poverty, literacy, health, economic empowerment, employment, etc either remain stagnant during Modi’s 12-year rule despite accounting for about 10 per cent of Gujarat’s 60-million population.

Even the Congress, which has been out of power in the state for almost 20 years, boasts of a lone Muslim challenger in Navsari in south Gujarat. The rest among the 67 Muslims include mostly independents, besides seven of the Samajwadi Party, two of the Bahujan Samaj Party and one from the Janata Dal-United. “The fact that there are no Muslim independents against L.K. Adavani (Gandhinagar) and Modi (Vadodara) shows that the dozens of Muslim independents in the fray elsewhere have been sponsored by the BJP to split Muslim votes,” said Gujarat Congress chief Arjun Modhwadia.

mahesh@khaleejtimes.com

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