Why BJP Values The Pasmanda Votes Among Muslims In India

Few took note when the senior Pasmanda leader Ali Anwar thundered in 2007: “Hum shuddar hain shuddar; Bharat ke moolniwasi hain. Baad mein musalman hain (We are Shudras first; the indigenous people of India. We are Muslims later).” Fifteen years later, and nearly a century after the launch of the first Pasmanda movement in India, the concept has finally begun dominating public discourse after Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently directed his party members to focus on weaker sections of Muslims. With the Pasmanda (Persian for backward), constituting some 80 per cent of all Muslims in India, the BJP’s move has a potential to upset Muslim politics.

But it’s not an easy game for Modi’s men. Having breakfast at a Lucknow hotel on a July morning, the chief of BJP’s Minority Morcha in UP, Kunwar Basit Ali, asks for ginger tea twice. The bulky man faces a tough task—how to explain the party’s Pasmanda outreach, when he himself barely grasps the term. “Har koi puch raha hai—are ye kya Pasmanda le aaye? Sidhe sidhe kaho na kasai aur teli ki baat ho rahi hai (Everyone is asking—from where did you bring this Pasmanda? Why don’t you say that you are talking about communities of butchers and oil presses).”

Few Muslims know about the term. Be it the residents of Shaheed Nagar, an urban slum in Lucknow, staff at famous monuments of Bada Imambara and Chota Imambara, or tailor Amir Khan who lives at Gaffar Manzil near Jamia Nagar in Delhi. Is the term fictional then? No. Muslims are classified under several hundred biradaris (hierarchical communities) in India. Such are the hierarchies that some castes like Topchi and Bandukchi are unique to Muslims, without any Hindu equivalent. There are sharp divisions between upper caste Syeds and Sheikhs, and Dalit Muslims like Lalbegis and Doms.

How did the labyrinthine biradaris pervade Indian Muslims who follow a religion that rests on egalitarianism? Pasmanda leader and retired IAS officer Anis Ansari goes deep into history. “Maulana Ziauddin Barni’s 14th-century Arabic text Fatwa-i- Jahandari (Code of Governance) is similar to the Manusmriti. It legitimises castes,” Anis Ansari tells Outlook at his fabulous home in Lucknow.

“Barni wrote that there were three categories of Muslims since azal (beginning)—Ashraf, Ajlaf, and Arzal. The term Pasmanda came into circulation only recently, but this classification has existed among Indian Muslims for 700 years.” The Ashrafs are noble, upper-caste Muslims. Ajlafs indicate lowly, but ritually ‘clean’ occupational communities and converts from low-caste Hindus. Arzals are converted from untouchable Hindus. This discrimination in daily life, as is the case with the Hindus, is often denied by upper caste Muslims, but asserted by their lower castes. “There’s no community like the Pasmanda. There’s undeniably biradarivaad within Muslim society in India, but any attempt to bring caste is completely mischievous,” says Congress leader Yusuf Ahmad Ansari. Such assertions disregard the sentiment Pasmanda Muslims harbour against the Ashrafs. “Those who say that caste system doesn’t exist in Muslims, are either unaware or lying,” says Anis Ansari.

While the Pasmanda movement had taken birth in Bihar in the 1930s, the campaign gained momentum when journalist-turned-politician Ali Anwar formed the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz in 1998. It brought forth a new generation of leaders like Mahaz’s chief general secretary Waqar Hawari and his wife Kahkasha, who live in a modest rented apartment in Lucknow. On a humid afternoon in July, after a little drizzle in the morning left the city perspiring, Kahkasha turns furious narrating stories of discrimination. “The Ashraf women are well-educated but when our women began studying, they were confined to religious education,” she says.

“While Ashraf women wore quality jewels, Maulanas told us that if you don’t give zakat we couldn’t afford, these bracelets will become snakes and bite you in jahannum (hell).” Zakat is an Islamic tax levied on people having a minimum property and is distributed among the needy and poor.

The lower caste Muslims faced discrimination at every instance. “If we don’t have proper sheen or qaf (pronunciation), the Ashrafs laugh at us and say, ‘Tumne ilm to le liya, lekin tahzeeb aane men naslen lagengi (You may have got some education, but it will take generations to become cultured)’,” Kahkasha says.

At a little distance from Kahkasha lives Sadaf Jafar with four Persian cats—Rani, Timur, Gabbu Singh and Bibbo, named after the character Jafar played in A Suitable Boy. The hall of her tastefully decorated home has a tall cat tree with scratching posts. But the cats don’t scratch it. They scratch Sadaf and her two teenage children. “Cat moms,” the small family calls itself.

A teacher and single mother, Congress leader Jafar contested the recent assembly elections from Lucknow. Her daughter Kaunain Fatima has just completed Class XII from La Martiniere. Kaunain loves Harry Potter, but not the “transphobic” J.K. Rowling. The girl, who has published poems in English, is associated with an organisation that fights for LGBTQ rights. If there’s a family that effortlessly demolishes the stereotypes about Muslims, it’s this. And if there’s a home that underlines the social gap between the Ashrafs and the Pasmandas, it’s also this. For Hawari and Kahkasha seem to find a poetic justice in Jafar’s electoral loss.

Enter the BJP

Taking note of the social divide, the BJP is now trying to make it political. Since the upper caste, educated Muslims are the most vocal and articulate opponents of the BJP, it has trained its focus on the Pasmandas. “The BJP has seen that aligning with the Ashrafs doesn’t help. We want to talk only about our representation. We don’t want to raise any emotional or religious issues,” says Hawari.  

The BJP’s project finds its first articulation in Uttar Pradesh where the party inducted several Pasmanda leaders at key positions including Minority Commission chairperson Ashfaq Saifi, Madarsa Board chairperson Iftikhar Ahmed Javed and Urdu Academy chairperson Chaudhary Kaiful Wara—besides Danish Ansari as the Minority Welfare Minister. The representation of the Ashrafs is nearly zero at key posts in the UP government.

There’s also a renewed focus on the Pasmandas in welfare schemes. “UP has 19.33 per cent of Muslims. As many as 39 per cent beneficiaries of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, 22 per cent beneficiaries of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, 37 per cent of Ujjwala Yojna and 30 per cent beneficiaries of Mudra Yojana are Muslims,” the Uttar Pradesh chief minister’s office tells Outlook in a statement.

Basit Ali admits that almost all of them are Pasmandas. “Around 43 lakh homes were constructed under the Awas Yojna in the state in the last five years. Of these, 20 lakh are for the Pasmandas only.”

Several upper caste leaders term it eyewash. “What’s the big deal if you make a Muslim chairperson of the Urdu Academy? If you want to give us representation, make a Muslim home minister. If the Pasmandas take this bait, nothing can help us,” says Jafar. “The whole Pasmanda initiative is a deliberate attempt to further fragment the already fragmented Muslim vote bank,” says Congress leader Yusuf Ahmad Ansari.

The BJP’s scheme is enabled by the discontent the Pasmandas have against the Ashrafs. They have a long list of allegations—the upper caste Muslims caused the Partition, Aligarh Muslim University was designed to exclude them and favour the Ashrafs, major community organisations like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board are dominated by the Ashrafs. Of the total 1,288 faculties at the AMU in 2016, upper caste Muslims occupied 1,138 or 88.35 per cent posts, with OBC Muslims held just 62 or 4.81 per cent of the posts—fewer than the 87 non-Muslim faculties.

And then they point out an infamous incident on December 6, 2007, when some Syeds and Pathans assaulted lower caste Ansaris and Mansuris over the right to pray and drove them out of a mosque in East Champaran district in Bihar. When Pasmandas built a thatched mosque nearby, the upper caste Muslims damaged it.

While the Pasmandas are not aligned with the BJP, unlike the Ashrafs they don’t reject the BJP’s outreach. “The political sphere has some autonomy from the cultural and economic sphere. There’s a cultural project of the RSS. There’s a political project of the BJP, and there’s an economic project of the plutocrats like Adanis. They work together, but they also have some autonomy and there are course corrections as well,” says Khalid Ansari, an associate professor at Azim Premji University.

Hawari, who is as opposed to the hate campaign against Muslims as any other Ashraf leader is, terms Modi’s call a “good move”. “The Ashrafs are worried for the first time. They are facing defeat. The BJP’s move can drastically improve our situation. It will scare the Ashrafs, and they will begin working for us,” he says. But Hawari is also aware that the BJP’s scheme “can create a further divide in the Muslim community”. This, perhaps, is the BJP’s precise hope.

But the party may not easily win the trust of a community it has considered its essential other for decades. Gau rakshaks and trolls don’t differentiate between the Ashrafs and the Pasmandas. “During elections, you talk about 80 versus 20, of abbajan and mamajan. First, treat us with dignity,” says Jafar. Basit Ali understands the crisis. He admits that despite a large number of Muslim beneficiaries of various schemes in UP, almost all of them poor, “only one lakh Pasmandas voted for the BJP in the elections,” he says.

A sustained anti-Muslim campaign has enabled the BJP to consolidate its voters. While Mahaz’s president Ali Anwar acknowledges the BJP’s move, he underlines that Muslims want “samman (respect)” and not “sneh (affection)”, and asks the Prime Minister to check the anti-Muslim campaign being run by his party leaders. If political expediency to bring the Pasmandas to its fold forces the BJP to revise its stand, it may weaken the influential Ashrafs. The bow is primed. The Muslim politics is at a defining moment.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Can The Pasmanda Speak?")

Ashutosh Bhardwaj in Lucknow/Delhi