IN THE enumeration of castes to be done in the forthcoming Census, as announced by the government Wednesday, Pasmanda Muslims as a whole may figure in the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) category. “Pasmanda Muslims will be given their due share in the national caste census,” said a senior BJP leader. Leaders of the BJP Minority Morcha and OBC Morcha confirmed the same. “As per the Mandal Commission recommendations, some groups among Muslims are included in the state and Central list of Backward Classes. These Muslims will be enumerated as such in the caste census (among OBCs),” K Laxman, the national president of the BJP’s OBC Morcha, told The Indian Express. The national president of the BJP Minority Morcha, Jamal Siddiqui, said: “Pasmanda Muslims too are citizens of this country. So they will be enumerated as per their backwardness in the caste census.” So far, all Census undertaken by the government, including the last one in 2011, included Muslims as a separate, single bloc. The move is significant as the BJP, which is accused of being anti-minority, has been wooing Pasmanda Muslims, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi leading the way. Enumerating them as OBCs, entitles them to the quota for OBCs. ‘Pasmanda’, a Persian word, means the ‘ones left behind’, and is used to describe depressed classes among the Muslims. The Sachar Committee in its report put the number of OBC and SC/ST Muslims at 40% (all India 2004-05). But Pasmanda activists and scholars say that the Pasmandas make up 80-85% of the total Muslim population in India. This broadly tallies with the 1871 Census that said only 19% of Muslims in India were upper caste, while 81% were made up of the lower castes. While confirming that Pasmandas may be counted as OBCs in the caste census, Laxman made a distinction between the surveys conducted by Bihar and Telangana, both of which counted Pasmanda Muslims among backward classes. The national enumeration cannot be “as haphazard as was done in the Telangana caste survey”, he said. In Telangana, where the Congress government of Revanth Reddy carried out the caste survey, 81% of the Muslims were found to be Pasmanda. According to Laxman, “In Telangana, the government was trying to appease Muslims and included almost all of them under the Pasmanda Muslim category. Muslims were once rulers of Hyderabad. How can rulers be OBCs?” The Bihar caste survey, which put Pasmandas at 73% of the Muslim population, was more of “an example to emulate”, Laxman said. While the Mahagathbandhan government including the Congress and RJD was in power when the Bihar caste survey was carried out, the Chief Minister then was Nitish Kumar, who is now a BJP ally. Incidentally, at his press conference Wednesday after the government’s caste census announcement, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had urged it to emulate the Telangana survey. Another leader of the BJP Minority Morcha said that Pasmanda Muslims are already included in some state lists for reservation. “For instance, Mapila is an OBC in Kerala. But among the Muslim population in Kerala, we don’t have figures on the number of Mapilas as Muslims have been considered a single backward bloc,” the leader said. Supporting such a distinction for Pasmanda Muslims, a Pasmanda Muslim activist said the Ashraf Muslims (who are seen as the ‘elite’), and Pasmanda Muslims, including the Ajiafs (Backward Muslims) and Arzals (Dalit Muslims), cannot be considered as a single bloc. “The caste census will help bring out the difference. Pasmanda is a term which in India has largely stood for Backward Class Muslims, who are marginalised due to their socio-economic backgrounds,” he said. However, Ali Anwar Ansari, seen as among the foremost Pasmanda Muslim leaders, told The Indian Express, “What is the point of just enumerating Pasmanda Muslims in a separate category? Some state lists of OBCs already do this. The Central government should ideally look for socio-economic upliftment of Pasmanda Muslims, by including Dalit Muslims in the Scheduled Caste list, for example. They are not ready to do this.” IUML MP Haris Beeran said the inclusion of Pasmanda Muslims among OBCs would be another bid to bring “some kind of a division within the community”. “When the Supreme Court itself has said that Muslims as a group are backward, what is the rationale for subdividing them without giving any inkling of uplifting the community?” It was from Telangana that the BJP’s Pasmanda outreach incidentally began. In 2022, addressing a BJP National Executive in Hyderabad, PM Modi urged party leaders to reach out to marginalised Muslims. During the Lok Sabha campaign last year, while speaking in Aligarh, Modi accused the Congress and ally Samajwadi Party (SP) of “marginalising Pasmanda Muslims” and said the community “must be given opportunities”.
