In all, 1,484 adult Muslims were interviewed in eight cities in the third week of November – Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Hyderabad, Kanpur, Patna, Ahmedabad and Calicut. Care was taken to ensure that the interviewees cut across various income groups. The findings are largely on expected lines, but there are a few surprises as well.
According to the 1981 census, there are 46 Lok Sabha constituencies with 25 per cent or more Muslims in the electorate. Of these, 35 have more than 30 per cent or more Muslims voters. In a tight finish, which is expected in the next battle of ballot, the Muslim voter could well prove to be one of the crucial factors in the selection of the party or combine to rule New Delhi in 1996.
There is both good news and bad news for the Congress. The good news is that the party is still seen as the most committed to the protection of minority interests by the Muslim community. As many as 42 per cent of those polled gave the ruling party at the Centre the edge in this regard. The bad news is that the Muslims have yet to recover fully from the psychological scars of the December 6, 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. An alarmingly high number – 62 per cent – hold Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao personally responsible for razing of the shrine, and the majority (51 per cent) feel that the Congress could increase its share of the minority votes if it had someone other than Rao to lead it at the hustings.
However, there are as yet no clear favourites among the clutch of Congress leaders as far as the minority community is concerned. With no real challenger to Rao's leadership of the party discernible, the Prime Minister, with 22 per cent support, is still ahead of Arjun Singh who is the second favourite Congress leader with 19 per cent support. The surprise sprung by the poll is the rapid ascendancy of young Rajesh Pilot, who is just 3 per cent behind Arjun Singh. CK Jaffer Sharief, who quit the Cabinet last week, is a distant fourth with just 12 per cent support from his own community. Pilot draws most of his support from the national capital with 39 per cent of the interviewees favouring him here (as against Rao's 16 per cent), while Rao makes up lost ground in his home state capital, Hyderabad.
In fact, the lack of faith in any single Congress leader is evident from the large percentage of people saying categorically that none of the named leader was really committed to minority interests. The number of such respondents was as high as 26 per cent, and only the BJP leaders have managed to evoke such a high level of cynicism with 49 per cent Muslims favouring no saffron leader.
The National Front-Left Front combine now has greater reason to woo former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav back into the fold. The state has 17 (our to a total of 85) Lok Sabha constituencies where the Muslims constitute 25 per cent and more of the electorate. And Yadav is the clear favourite with a whopping 63 per cent respondents in Kanpur favouring him over any other combine leader. Yadav also scores an impressive 24 per cent at the all-India level, a clear 5 per cent ahead of former prime minister VP Singh, who seems to have lost ground after his declaration that he was retiring from active politics. The NF-LF combine can also take heart from the fact that they outscore the Congress convincingly wherever they are in a dominant position. They are assured of the bulk of the minority support in West Bengal and Bihar and, should the alliance with Yadav come off, they could be in a good position in Uttar Pradesh too.
As far as the BJP is concerned, it is not surprising that it finds support of only 6 per cent Muslims at the all-India level. But by declaring senior leader Atal Behari Vajpayee as its prime ministerial candidate, the party seems to be on the right track. Asked to choose between various BJP leaders, 29 per cent of the respondents favoured this liberal face of the BJP over perceived hardliners like LK Advani. Advani got less than one-third of the votes polled by Vajpayee and ranked a distant second with a mere 9 per cent.
But what about the impression that Muslims tend to vote en bloc more than any other community or section of society? Social scientist Ashis Nandy feels that over the years, the Muslims along with the Dalits and the Jats have been known to vote blockwise more than any other segment. But, he hastens to add that this does not mean that close to a 100 per cent vote similarly. Studies have shown that when a political party or combine gets the 'block vote' of one section, it secures between 15 and 20 per cent more votes from this segment than its overall average from other communities. DL Sheth, a member of the Backward Classes Commission, and a man who has studied the phenomenon, feels that the tendency of the Muslims to vote en bloc has increased since the Ayodhya demolition. It was much more pronounced in the assembly elections in 1993, '94 and '95. But he also points out that the Muslim votes, because of their demographic distribution, have the capacity to influence assembly election results much more profoundly than parliamentary polls.
