Opposition’s victory in Kairana defeats apartheid against Muslims in Uttar Pradesh | Opinion

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It’s hard to miss the socio-political import of RLD candidate Tabassum Hasan’s victory against the BJP’s Mriganka Singh in Kairana. Together with the Noorpur assembly seat the Samajwadi Party wrested from the BJP, the Opposition’s gain is way bigger than the legislative presence it secured at the expense of the ruling dispensation

The 16th Lok Sabha finally has a Muslim representative from the country’s most populous state. For the first time since Independence, not a single representative from the minority community — which is also the country’s second largest majority — was elected from Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 polls. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) offered no Muslim candidate. Those who contested from other parties did not win.

It was apartheid through ballot against a social group accounting for 19% of the state’s population of 200 million. It’s hard, therefore, to miss the socio-political import of Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) candidate Tabassum Hasan’s victory against the BJP’s Mriganka Singh in Kairana.

Together with the Noorpur assembly seat the Samajwadi Party (SP) wrested from the BJP, the Opposition’s gain is way bigger than the legislative presence it secured at the expense of the ruling dispensation. The tide could turn against the saffron party in the 2019 polls if the social alliance that shaped up in the seats the RLD and the SP have won gains wider traction. The stakeholders have good reasons now to consolidate the four way, inter-party rapprochement including the BSP and the Congress.

Alliances at party-level cannot succeed without popular support that determines their longevity. Cases in point of failed top-tier pacts without sustainable social foundations include Kanshi Ram’s short-lived partnership with Mulayam Singh (1993) and Mayawati’s with the BJP (1995). Ditto for the alliance between Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress and the Congress in West Bengal.

Subject to clause force majeure, they have now a semblance of a social plinth on which they can raise the envisioned edifice of an anti-BJP front in UP. The inter-caste, inter-communal fusion is tenuous by some accounts. A joint effort at incrementally strengthening the social bonds between Dalits, Muslims and Jats should start right away. For the process isn’t going to be easy.

The wounds of the 2013 Jat-Muslim violence that helped the BJP polarise UP haven’t fully healed. They rankle still. But in the role of a peacemaker, Jayant Chaudhary, the RLD’s young face who has striking resemblance with his grandfather Charan Singh, can make a difference.

The former Prime Minister had a pronounced pro-rural bias. That made him, after Indira Gandhi, the second most important leader in the Indo-Gangetic plains. His social base of Muslims, Jats and backwards rested on the commonality of their economic interests. In influence and reach, it extended from Haryana to Bihar across UP. Jat strongman Devi Lal, Yadav chieftain Mulayam Singh and Bihar’s OBC icon Karpoori Thakur were students out of Charan Singh’s political school. They ran academies of their own in their states later.

The path ahead for the combined Opposition is in aggregating — in the manner in which it was done in Kairana and Noorpur — what the BJP successfully segregated in 2014. To negotiate that social road will be difficult, almost undoable in circumstances the saffron parivar is adept at simulating.

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