Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 115

Does Muslim Vote Matter? Presence, Representation, Participation
立话语进行探究 , 该话语并不总是对印度教特性政治发起的挑战进行响应。
关键词 : 穆斯林 , 伊斯兰 , 印度教特性 , 选票库 , 代表 , 选举
I. Introduction
This paper asks a simple and
straightforward question: do
Muslim votes matter after the
Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP)s spectacular
victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha election?
Some political observers highlight
the declining numbers of Muslim
MPs in the present Lok Sabha to argue
that there is serious underrepresentation
of Muslims in the Parliament,
which reflects the political vulnerability
of Muslims. The BJP’s refusal to give
tickets to Muslim candidates, the aggressive
Hindutva-driven political campaign
to mobilize voters in the name of
nationalism, and the strategic silence of
opposition parties are cited as evidence
to demonstrate that the Muslim vote
has lost its significance. 1
There is also a positive response to
this question. It is claimed that non-BJP
parties used Muslims as a vote bank for
a long time. As a result, an exclusionary
form of Muslim politics emerged that
did not allow Muslims to join the political
mainstream. Muslims do not require
any special treatment/privileges;
hence, they should not be addressed as
a specific group of voter. The slogan Sab
ka sath, Sab ka vikas (and Sab ka vishwas!),
it is argued, expresses the commitment
of Modi-led BJP. 2 Precisely for
this reason, Muslims should not behave
like a vote bank and embrace the BJP as
their first political preference. 3
These seemingly contradictory
explanations of Muslim votes are certainly
relevant. Non-BJP parties did not
show any interest in addressing the
concerns or anxieties of Muslim communities
as electoral issues during
the election campaign. This apathetic
attitude of opposition parties contributed
to Hindu polarization in favor of the
BJP, especially in the northern states.
Thus, the argument that the Muslim
vote has lost its significance seems plausible.
BJP’s one nation-one political
community thesis that calls on Muslims
to vote along purely secular lines is also
persuasive, at least technically. No one
can ignore the fact that the Indian Constitution
disapproves of a separate electorate
and proposes an entirely secular
imagination of political processes. The
one nation-one political community thesis
helped the BJP justify its stated position
that the party does not believe in
Muslim appeasement. 4
These dominant descriptions of
Muslim electoral engagements in contemporary
India, however, suffer from
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