In 2017, Hilal Ahmed, an author and associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, had noted, “Not naming anyone is a special kind of politics. If I tell you that you’re bad, then I recognise your existence. But if I start ignoring you and do it in such a way that I keep denigrating you, but I cease to address you, then that would have a greater impact. It’s a special kind of politics.”
Two years later, in a dusty gully in Jaipur’s Amritpuri, Hilal Ahmed’s words ring true. A predominantly Muslim area, Amritpuri is situated near the upscale Adarsh Nagar. But Amritpuri’s residents are no longer part of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s plans to win Rajasthan in the Lok Sabha Polls. “During the last elections — when Congress won, and BJP lost — the BJP MLA did not even come to our locality to ask for votes. Not just an MLA, not a single party worker came here to ask for votes,” Mohammed Rafiq, a social worker in the area working towards educating children from low-income families, told NewsCentral24x7.
“Muslim vote unhe chahiye hi nahi (They don’t want the Muslim vote at all),” chimed in Ibrar Ahmed, who runs a sweet shop in the locality with his cousin. “Not a single rally, not a single meeting. Nothing.”
Speaking to NewsCentral24x7, Matinuddin, Ibrar’s cousin, said, “I run my shop from six in the morning till 11.30 at night. I stay here all the time. Not once have I seen a BJP car in this area during the elections. Not even one of those rickshaws with loudspeakers attached to them.”
The BJP doesn’t care for Muslim votes says Rafiq — as per the 2011 census, there were 5,67,521 Muslims (18.63 per cent of the total population) in the city — adding, “It has been worse this time around.” According to him, the BJP seems to have almost forgotten them. Ashok Parnami, the BJP legislator from Adarsh Nagar Vidhan Sabha constituency for ten years, did not care much for the locality; or any other Muslim area in his constituency.
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Cleanliness, water and no government schools in the area are the biggest problems in Amritpuri, said Rukhsana. Her four children attend a government school in Paharganj, a couple of kilometres away. “But the teachers are terrible there,” she told NewsCentral24x7.
It’s not just Ashok Parnami who is said to have been indifferent to his constituents. As per Irfan Bharti, a disabled social worker in the nearby Topkhana locality, Ramcharan Bohra, the BJP MP from the Jaipur City constituency, too, never visits any of these areas. “The elections will get over, and Bohra ji won’t set his foot here. He never does. It’s his negative thinking that Muslims never vote for BJP. But if the BJP doesn’t discriminate based on religion, why would we not vote for the party?” Bharti asks.
He added, “If I gather even a hundred people here and ask them if they have ever seen Ramcharan Bohra, you know what they’ll say!”
Kaleem Ahmad, a former Jaipur Municipal Corporation councillor, who also resides in Topkhana, told NewsCentral24x7 something similar, “Ramcharan Bohra hasn’t met his constituents in the last five years. If he comes here and stands, the people around would not even recognise who he is.”
When NewsCentral24x7 asked Rafeek Khan, the Congress MLA from Adarsh Nagar, about the saffron party’s alleged politics of exclusion, he had a hearty laugh. He said, “I don’t like commenting on what others do and don’t do. But if so many people say this is the case, there must be a grain of truth in it?” He added that it was obvious that the BJP did nothing for these areas in the last ten years, and one could only guess why. “When you question them about development, they bring in their divisive politics.”
The BJP, of course, refuted this. On being asked about the lack of campaigning in minority neighbourhoods, BJP state spokesperson Jitendra Shrimal told NewsCentral24x7, “Look, it is not like that. The BJP is campaigning everywhere. We don’t campaign on the lines of caste and religion — this election is about nationalism and national security… It’s a Modi versus Others election,” before moving on to topics like triple talaq and the Congress using Muslims as a vote bank. He also insinuated that those making these allegations must be supporters of the Congress party.
The residents of Amritpuri and Topkhana alike, however, stated over and over again to NewsCentral24x7 that they do not care if it’s the BJP or the Congress in power. They just want a leader who looks after them. And they seem to have found one in Rafeek Khan. According to the locals, Khan is accessible — he listens to them and helps them when they call on him.
“Parnami ji did nothing for us in the last ten years,” says Bilal Qureshi, adding, “But look at Rafeek Khan. The moment he got elected, he made sure we had three borewells in the area — water is a huge issue here. He also made sure we had streetlights and even this road. He made sure that the roads in the area were better.”
They expressed similar optimism for Jyoti Khandelwal, a former mayor of the city and the Congress candidate against Ramcharan Bohra in the upcoming polls. “Jyoti Khandelwal had done a lot of work for us when she was mayor. She would come here. She was responsible for getting this neighbourhood cleaned,” Rafiq told NewsCentral24x7.
The Narendra Modi government’s lack of interest in even trying to woo Muslim votes is not a new one. In 2014, when the saffron party came to power, it had not a single Muslims name in the Lok Sabha. In his book, Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism Is Changing India, Christophe Jaffrelot had stated, “The BJP decision not to field any Muslim candidates aimed to liberate the party entirely from the ‘Muslim vote’ that other parties were accused of wooing for electoral gain at the expense of the Hindu majority.”
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It would seem that the party has now officially (or unofficially) implemented this stance: only Hindu votes matter to them. The testimonies of the residents of Amritpuri and Topkhana, the party’s tacit endorsement of derogatory language from a chief minister — “green virus” — and fielding a far-right terror accused are all proof of that.
Jaipur votes on May 6. Reacting to the reporter’s comment that there is still time for the BJP to come to Amritpuri and campaign, Rafiq said, “Aa jaye BJP waale toh badhiya hai na. Hume koi dushmani thodi hai unse. Lekin yaar, maange to sahi. Thodi samman toh kare” — It would be great if the BJP people come here. We have no enmity with them. But they should at least come here and ask for our votes. They should give us at least some respect.