Owaisi Represents Only The Elitist Section, And Not The Entire Muslim Community

The sphere of politics shares an intimate connection with culture. And it is precisely the cultural hegemony of the RSS achieved through incessant mass work, symbolic integration of subjugated castes through creative revisionism, and institutional density in civil society that anchors the flourishing of the BJP. Further, the charisma and strategic depth of the Modi-Shah duo in combination with impressive propaganda-electoral machinery supported by big business, has produced a ‘Hindu ecosystem’ that has shifted the grounds of political engagement. The distorted translation of secularism as pandering to the elite Muslims, social justice as electoral calculus and domination of a few numerically significant castes, various instances of political opportunism and corruption and so on, have all contributed to the erosion of the legitimacy of non-BJP political parties. The putative secular and social justice forces simply seem to be at a loss to offer a convincing politico-cultural counter-narrative to the dominant Hindutva discourse.

The recent results of the Bihar assembly election once again demonstrate the ability of the BJP to accomplish a political majority sans Muslims. The widespread negative valuation attributed to ‘Muslimness’—a code for fundamentalism, terrorism, backwardness, love jihad, conversions, cow slaying, patriarchy, hyper-fertility, etc. in the Hindutva imagination—has put the secular forces in a quandary. If they invoke Muslim symbolisms they are accused of Muslim appeasement and confront the possibility of offending Hindu sensibilities, and if they don’t the Muslims get disenchanted with their invisibilization and taken-for-granted status. The silence or endorsement of secular parties on critical issues like cow vigilantism and lynchings, CAA-NRC, Article 370, UAPA amendments, allegedly biased investigation of Delhi riots and so on, has frustrated significant sections of Muslims.

As correctly pointed out by various commentators the gains of the Asaduddin Owaisi led All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) in the Seemanchal region of Bihar with dense Muslim populations, particularly Surjapuri and Kulhaiya Muslims, is a testimony to this alienation. Asaduddin Owaisi clearly senses a political opportunity at this moment and is going all out to incarnate himself as the pan-Indian voice of Muslims. Yet, the intended expansion of AIMIM footprints in other regions, particularly West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, need to be reflected upon for their attendant political fallouts.

The activists of the Pasmanda Movement, a movement of backward/dalit/adivasi Muslims, have consistently characterized Owaisi-led AIMIM’s politics as being typical high caste Ashraf politics—that privileges a combative stance towards the Hindus as the external other, while simultaneously repressing the question of an internal caste other. While AIMIM has often raised the issue of political under-representation of Muslims, it has failed to stress its caste composition. In the absence of availability of caste-wise break up of Muslim population accurate data on caste-wise political representation is not possible. However, P. S. Krishnan, Syed Shahabuddin and Pasmanda ideologues like Ali Anwar broadly agree to the population ratio of 15 (Ashraf): 85 (Pasmanda). If we apply the 15:85 population ratio to an analysis by the late parliamentarian Ashfaq Hussain Ansari, then it is revealed that Ashrafs with a 2.1 per cent share in the country's population had a representation of 4.5 per cent from the first to the fourteenth Lok Sabha. On the other hand, the Pasmanda Muslims with a population share of 11.4 per cent merely had a 0.8 per cent representation. The broad trend of Pasmanda exclusion continued in the 17th Lok Sabha. According to my calculation out of 25 Muslim MPs, 18 were Ashrafs while 7 were Pasmandas. Again the higher caste Muslims were adequately represented with just over 3 per cent representation while the representation of the Pasmanda Muslims was around 1 per cent. The recent Bihar assembly elections have returned 19 Muslim MLAs: 16 Ashraf and 3 Pasmanda. That translates to 7.8 per cent Muslim representation in the Bihar assembly which is very low vis-à-vis their population share of 17 per cent. However, on breaking it further in caste terms it turns out that Ashrafs with a 2.5 per cent population share have 6.6 per cent representation and Pasmanda with a population share of 14.5 per cent has just 1.2 per cent representation. One could clearly infer that the Ashraf Muslims, an erstwhile ruling class, are politically overrepresented at the expense of Pasmanda Muslims. This is true even for elections, like the recent Bihar one, where shrill complaints of secular neglect of Muslims were registered.  

The introduction of caste in the data on Muslim political representation complicates the picture and reveals the power differentials within the community. Pasmanda ideologues have long argued that if the Muslim category is complicated by introducing caste in other spheres like education, employment, health, catalogue of victims of communal violence and lynchings etc., then one is likely to arrive at more contextualized and revealing understanding of social exclusion and victimization of the community. Owaisi, who used to mock caste-based reservations among Muslims as against “Islam and Shariat” earlier, has of late reluctantly begun to acknowledge the relevance of Muslim caste.

However, his comfort zone is to speak on behalf of the entire Muslim community and characterize it as a subaltern community without serious status differentials. Like most Ashraf politicians he often reiterates the rhetoric that the condition of Muslims is worse than Dalits which is clearly based on a factually incorrect reading of the Sachar Committee and Ranganath Mishra Commission reports. His portrayal of Muslim caste as a North Indian issue, particularly UP and Bihar, is again problematic in the face of some excellent Telugu poetry by Pasmanda Muslim poets like Yakub Kavi, Shaikh Peeran Boraywala, Shahjahana and so on, that sharply raise caste-based discrimination within the Telangana/Andhra Muslim community.

Asaduddin Owaisi is also a member of the regressive All India Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) which is nothing but a pan-maslaq (sect) upper caste men’s club. In this context, his endorsement of communitarian positions on issues like the practice of instant triple divorce had raised a few eyebrows. Critics have also cast aspersions to AIMIM’s claims to work for the development of the Muslim community at the national level, when the old city of Hyderabad, represented by Owaisi family for decades, itself faces utter neglect.

Pasmanda activists have emphasized the symbiotic and co-constitutive nature of Hindu and Muslim communalisms and the need to contest them simultaneously. In their view, while the foot soldiers and victims in communal violence are often the subjugated castes, the pan-religious caste elite turns out to be the key beneficiaries. The AIMIM, with its historical proximity to Jinnah’s Muslim League and association with the violence orchestrated by its Muslim militia called the razakars against the ‘Hindus’ and communists, definitely has a tinged communal past.

Even at present the relative sophistication of Asaduddin Owaisi and the unruly performances of his brother Akbaruddin Owaisi are often seen as a mutually agreed upon division of labour to consolidate the Muslim constituency. The Hindu ecosystem needs the idea of Muslimness as its constitutive other; both the contending communalisms reinforce each other. Ali Anwar, ex-MP and President All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, often makes disguised references to the Owaisis when he exhorts the Pasmanda sections to be cautious from Muslim communalists: “Someone plans from the old Hyderabad city...someone utters an irresponsible statement from Dilli 6...someone uses the sermons from the religious pulpit (mimbar) irresponsibly. All this is counterproductive. There is a reaction”. Amit Shah’s comment before the Bihar assembly elections of 2015 that “Asaduddin Owaisi is a bigger opponent than RJD’s Lalu Prasad Yadav” is therefore very telling indeed. It almost seems that if there was no Asaduddin Owaisi the BJP simply had to invent one.

The late Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, Asaduddin’s father and former AIMIM chief, used to say with pride that “siyasat humarey ghar ki laundi hai” (politics is our domestic slave-girl). Asaduddin Owaisi has played smart and in his political alliances with Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) in Maharashtra earlier and with RLSP and BSP in Bihar assembly elections recently, AIMIM has been the greatest beneficiary. AIMIM’s allies need to think about why this is so. Moreover, the idea of Dalit-Muslim unity as encapsulated in the AIMIM slogan ‘Jai Bhim, Jai Meem’ is strategically flawed and will go to the advantage of the Hindu Right. The ‘Muslim’ in the Dalit-Muslim equation is by default the hegemonic Ashraf-Muslim, the prime mover and beneficiary of Muslim Right politics. That is why Pasmanda activists have always contested the notion of Dalit-Muslim alliance and instead incessantly emphasized on the pan-religion solidarity of subjugated castes as encapsulated in the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz’s slogan “Dalit-Pichda ek saman, Hindu ho ya Musalman” (Dalits-Backwards are all alike, whether they be Hindu or Muslim).

As we know the Dalit-Muslim formula was attempted by BSP in UP during 2017 elections when it gave 100 tickets to Muslims, mostly Ashrafs. It failed miserably. Dr. Ambedkar too toyed with Muslim League politics for some time only to realize its grave dangers later. In 1947 he remarked candidly, “It has become a habit with the Scheduled Castes to look upon the Muslims as their friends simply because they dislike the Hindus.

This is a mistaken view. The Muslims wanted the support of the Scheduled Castes but they never gave their support to the Scheduled Castes. Mr. Jinnah was all the time playing a double game. He was very insistent that the Scheduled Castes were a separate entity when it suited him but, when it did not suit him he insisted with equal emphasis that they were Hindus”. The recent repositioning of Asaduddin Owaisi as a constitutionalist and champion of oppressed groups can only be taken with a pinch of salt.  Historically, the AIMIM has worked closely with powerful social groups and parties and Owaisi’s claim to represent the Dalits and OBCs will be put to test by its allies in the near future.

Asaduddin Owaisi is an Ashraf Muslim and there are hardly any instances where he has shown reflexivity about this inherited caste-based privilege. In 2017 the RSS spokesperson Rakesh Sinha embarrassed Owaisi when he stated that the latter’s “great grandfather was a Brahmin of Hyderabad”. During the EWS quota controversy, Owaisi asked boldly “Have the savaranas and janyadharus (sic) ever suffered due to untouchability, police encounters and atrocities, school dropouts, lower number of graduates […]?”

Ironically, Asaduddin Owaisi seems to be curiously oblivious to the fact that the same questions can be posed to the Muslim Ashraf classes to which he belongs. In a recent interview, Owaisi blasted at the secular parties, “You don’t have a Muslim voice, you don’t want to nurture a Muslim voice […] you assume that we are only voting machines”. The future of Indian politics depends on how Muslims address the seductions of this sentiment. Muslims have been known to vote strategically and support secular parties that stand a chance to form the government. However, if their recent frustrations lead them to join the AIMIM bandwagon then it will be advantage BJP out and out. As far as the Pasmanda discourse is concerned the unhyphenated “Muslim” voice is basically a euphemism for Ashraf interests. The Pasmanda activists are likely to continue to challenge Owaisi-led AIMIM’s politics, just like the Abdul Qaiyum Ansari led Momin Conference challenged Jinnah’s Muslim League and the two-nation theory before 1947. Yet Owaisi’s recent political successes in Muslim concentrated regions of Bihar and Maharashtra is a wake-up call for the non-BJP political parties. One would hope that they will take the Pasmanda critique onboard whenever they decide to weave a robust counter-narrative to dominant Hindutva at present.

(The author is director Dr Ambedkar Centre for Exclusion Studies & Transformative Action (ACESTA), Glocal University and tweets @KhalidAAnsari4. The views are personal)