Narendra Modi needs to do much more to reach out to Muslims

Narendra Modi needs to do much more to reach out to Muslims

IBNLive                                 

"He is an expert in turning a lie into the truth. It is the BJP's principle to divide the nation and rule. Wherever the BJP government is in power, there is more corruption. Modi has started thinking that by promoting a few industrialists and a constant presence in the media, he can take over the nation. He does not understand that 70 per cent of India is rural and this is not going to affect them. He is not only poor in calculation, but poor in history".

That severe indictment of the BJP's prime ministerial candidate came in December last year from Sabir Ali, the politician who now has the dubious distinction of having been a member of the BJP for just 24 hours. All it took for Mr Ali to change his views on Mr Modi was the fact that he was denied a re-nomination to the Rajya Sabha by the Janata Dal United in January.

Ali is a brazen political opportunist who has travelled from the Lok Janshakti to the Janata Dal United to the BJP. MJ Akbar, the other high profile Muslim face who has embraced the BJP, is eminently more qualified than Ali, whose exact business interests have been the subject of much speculation. Akbar has, after all, been one of the country's finest writers and editors. His political journey from a Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress to a Modi-led BJP has been nicely masked in intellectual sophistry, but he too has much to live down. After all, Akbar too once likened Modi to Hitler in the aftermath of the Gujarat 2002 riots, and even suggested awarding the Gujarat chief minister a Nishan-e-Pakistan for dividing communities.

Ali and Akbar, both originally from Bihar, represent the BJP's unspoken desire for token Muslim representation to defend itself against the charge of being a Hindus-only party. So, through the 80s and 90s you had Sikandar Bakht, a soft-spoken gent who seemed happy to remain in the shadows of the Atal-Advani duo. In the last decade, the BJP's Muslim "faces" have been Mukhtar Abbass Naqvi and Shahnawaz Hussain, both of whom have enjoyed political benefits disproportionate to their limited mass base. Both have also zealously guarded their exalted space as a "minority within a majority" as Mr Ali has found out to his cost already. There is also Najma Heptullah, another Delhi drawing room neta, whose political u-turn coincided with the onset of the 2004 elections when she, like many others, expected Mr Vajpayee to return to power.

Now, the wind is blowing once again in the BJP's direction with Mr Modi as the helmsman. Only the Indian Muslim has steadfastly refused to be swayed by it. In the opinion polls done by CSDS for CNN IBN, Mr Modi at the moment enjoys higher popularity than his rivals across all social categories except the Muslims. Just a little over ten per cent Muslims have said they are inclined to vote for the BJP in the coming elections. The majority remain firmly opposed to the idea of Modi as prime minister.