Opinion BJP may be finally reaching out to Muslims in Gujarat

Visuals of a few men wearing skull caps in the crowd at Shah’s tea event were streamed out of Dariapur, as they “watched” prime minister Narendra Modi’s monthly monologue on radio on a huge screen.

The BJP began this purported connect with Ahmedabad’s traditional Muslim neighbourhood, even as Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi undertook road shows across Gujarat, sipping tea at wayside stalls along with the traditional fried gram flour snack- the ubiquitous ganthiya – as his party strategists carefully kept any Muslim symbolism out of his tour plan.

Riding on the Patidar quota agitation led by Hardik Patel, the Congress is playing a wild “soft-Hindutva” card this time, hoping to wean away a huge chunk of Patel votes from the BJP. In its internal meetings Muslims have been advised to “keep a low profile”, but assured the Congress is staunchly with them.

But the saffron BJP is also elbowing its way into the space created by this Congress distancing, albeit by avoiding any open connect with Muslims.

The Muslim vote has suddenly become critical to the BJP in Gujarat after the apparent disenchantment of the Patidar community. The party is hard-selling its win in Uttar Pradesh as part owing to “Muslims supporting Modi”. And Shah, the claimed architect of this victory, showcased himself as being present in a part of Ahmedabad that was founded by a Muslim emperor — his presence meant to impact at least the two seats in the walled city, Dariapur and Jamalpur-Khadia.

Even when Latif was alive, this constituency that then went by the name of Dariapur-Kazipur, was won by the BJP. This continued till 2012 and post-delimitation, when Congress’s Gyasuddin Shaikh wrested it and Bharat Barot who had been MLA from Dariapur for four terms since 1990, lost. Much of the votes in this constituency had been polarised against Latif and in favour of BJP after he was arrested during the Keshubhai Patel regime, and killed in a police encounter when a government backed by Shankersinh Vaghela was in power.

Barot is the BJP candidate this time again. Last Sunday he was seated beside Shah at an event that was low on that bonhomie, which is unusual for a “tea event” and that too in this crucial time.

In Jamalpur-Khadia, the constituency cheek-by-jowl with Dariapur, BJP candidate Bhushan Bhatt launched his campaign recently with a public meeting of Muslims who constitute nearly 61 per cent of the vote. After the delimitation exercise of 2009, the name of the seat was changed from Khadia to the Muslim-sounding Jamalpur-Khadia, much to the BJP’s discomfiture.

Bhatt inherited the constituency from his father, the late Ashok Bhatt, who was minister in the Keshubhai government and later speaker of Gujarat assembly and had held on to the constituency from the 1980s till his death in 2010. Unlike his father who won by large margins,  Bhushan won only by 6,000 votes.

Taking the cue from Modi’s serial fasts targeted to reach out  to  Muslims – for example the ‘Sadbhavna mission’ in 2011, when he got a “clean chit” from a metropolitan court on a petition filed by Zakia Jafri who was widowed in the 2002 riots, Bhatt called his meeting with Muslims ‘Sadbhavna-Samrasta sammellan’.

However, just as Modi refused to wear a skull cap presented to him by a cleric during the ‘Sadbhavana’ fast in 2011, Bhatt carefully also avoided any overt Islamic gestures. It was former MLA Girish Parmar who kicked off the meeting with an ‘Assalaam-alaikum’, for him.

The BJP’s claimed warming-up  to Gujarat’s Muslims is both uncomfortable and clinical and is likely to last only till the elections.

Starkly absent from the BJP’s campaign footnote was the fact that this very part of the city, covering the constituencies of Dariapur and Jamalpur-Khadia, had recently won  the World Heritage City status from UNESCO,  and was in the midst of celebrating the Heritage week when BJP leaders were campaigning.

The BJP, which heads the Ahmedabad city government and the state government of Gujarat, is still fighting to align the city’s history with the saffron ideology, and does not accept the name taken from its founder, the pre-Mughal emperor Ahmed Shah in 1411.

When the BJP first won the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation elections in 1995, it proposed to change the name of the city to ‘Karnavati’ after the 11th century Hindu king Karnadev of the Solanki dynasty.The renaming proposal, however, had found no takers in Delhi even in 1998 when the BJP-led the NDA government with LK Advani, an MP from Gujarat as the union minister for home affairs and remains a millstone around the BJP’s neck.

Till the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Walled city continued to be a communal tinderbox and Hindus had begun to move outside of it, which was also a reason for the BJP’s diminishing interest.

Back then, it had been an uphill task- convincing the political wing to launch Gujarat’s first heritage walk in 1997. In fact, Ashok Bhatt was perhaps the only among top BJP leaders to have walked this path fairly comfortably.

The ‘Ahmed’ in Ahmedabad disturbed the BJP so much that eventually the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, changed all official signages to ‘Amdavad’- the Gujaratified name of Ahmedabad. All this in the years when the city was pushing for the heritage status. Ironically, although it was unable to officially change the name, all of BJP’s stationery continues to say “Karnavati Mahanagar”, instead of Ahmedabad.

And so the BJP press release detailing Amit Shah’s presence at the prime minister’s “Mann ki Baat” event read the following : Dariapur, Karnavati Mahanagar. What’s in a name, the BJP must have thought, even it’s the name of a fictitious city.