Why Hindu liberals and Muslims are divided on poll verdict

This columnist has spent the past week tracking the respective reactions of Muslims and liberal Hindus to the general election results — and I was surprised how differently the two groups see the verdict despite their common antipathy to the Sangh parivar in general and Narendra Modi in particular.Celebrations in liberal circles. Almost radio silence from the Muslim ‘street’. Not a squeak even from the usual suspects — the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) or the likes of the ever eloquent Asaduddin Owaisi of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and any of the various clerical voices normally quick to react.Nothing from the otherwise articulate Muslim intellectuals either.I will come to the ‘why’ of it in a bit, but meanwhile liberal Hindus are cock-a-hoop projecting the result as a rejection of all that the Sangh and Modi stand for — lock, stock and barrel.Not just the prime minister’s imperious style of governance but his core ideological philosophy premised on converting India into a majoritarian ‘Hindu Bharat’.To them, the result marks a return to the “old normal”, “practical Hinduism” and restoration of the nice old inclusive polity. Back to the pre-2014 shangri la.According to veteran commentator Harish Khare, people have decisively “rejected the politics of hate, abuse and violence”.“By voting as they did, India’s Hindus have gently turned down Modi’s invitation to a permanent civil war…” he writes. medium110870660Kapil Komireddi, author of A Malevolent Republic: A Short History of India, has described the result as “an extraordinary affirmation of Indian ecumenicalism” and “the beginning of his (Modi’s) end”.“After a decade in which Hinduism had been elevated to the status of de facto state creed, the result was an extraordinary affirmation of Indian ecumenicalism,” he wrote in The Sunday Times (London).Much of the liberal interpretation of the June 4 verdict has an unmistakeable whiff of wishful thinking — most verging on breathless optimism while ignoring the hard reality that millions of Indian voters still voted for Modi/BJP and their policies, which one assumes includes their majoritarian agenda.Typical of this wishful thinking is the view that the old “idea of India is reborn”, as distinguished US-based academic Ashutosh Varshney has written.“In short...we are witnessing a re-birth of the idea, heavily suppressed for the last several years. What is even clearer is that if the BJP had returned to power with a majority of its own, the constitutionally enshrined idea of India would have been subjected to vigorous assault, leading to its decimation,” he wrote.His thesis and that of other cheery liberal optimists is heavily derived from the BJP’s dismal performance in its Hindi/Hindu heartland of Uttar Pradesh, especially its jaw-dropping defeat in Faizabad, home to the Ayodhya movement and the Ram temple in which Modi personally invested so much — hailing it as his government’s ultimate achievement.There is no doubt about the significance of its humiliation in UP but to extrapolate from it that it means a rejection of its Hindutva agenda and reaffirmation of faith in the old idea of India is to ignore myriad other factors — unemployment, price rise, BJP leaders’ “arrogance”, which most voters have identified as being behind their disillusionment with the party.Other contributing factors included the widely reported intra-party tensions over ticket distribution and attempts to sideline the RSS, resulting in a lack of enthusiasm among its cadres who have traditionally been central to the BJP’s voter mobilisation efforts.Mind you, few voters have publicly said that they voted against its masjid-mandir agenda or the politically stoked culture wars.Watch: Decoding BJP's poor show in Uttar Pradesh medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/MV99YYw4_3U?si=baUXKmBjeix-JPbMOn the the other hand, the construction of the Ram temple has been almost universally acknowledged by Hindu voters as the BJP’s big achievement. Their grouse is that this has not been accompanied by the redressal of their everyday existential issues.We got the jam, thank you. But where is the bread?The Faizabad defeat particularly has been attributed by local voters to the huge disruption caused to their daily lives — including loss of wages and homes — because of the massive makeover of Ayodhya undertaken in a tearing hurry to prettify the town to coincide with the consecration of the temple.Watch this video to get a sense of what really lay behind Ayodhya’s rejection of the BJP.Social media is swarming with such accounts.An open letter from an anonymous Hindu resident of Ayodhya on why the BJP lost there has gone viral.It says that the outside world may have been surprised by the BJP’s defeat “but it was barely a surprise to me and many others around me” considering “the things a common man in Faizabad had to go through these past 18 months”.Here’s a summary of the writer’s personal experience:“My house happens to be located on Rampath. In this massive road-widening and modernisation project, they have destroyed around 5,000 houses and businesses; without proper or any compensation. They chopped away about 8-9m from my two-storey house, which also had our shop on the ground floor, and compensated with about ₹5 lakh. With land and construction charges so high, it was barely a compensation for us to extend our house upwards, while we also lost a considerable area of our shop, our only livelihood. They also mandated windows instead of balconies in all houses.Watch: Why Ayodhya's traders are angry at BJP medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/jBL0o7qKSqA?si=YD8Q2nC1rjlnBqVH“Many others were not as fortunate as us though. They got nothing for the land they had to relinquish because they didn’t have proper documents for it (it was their ancestral property and they were not aware enough to have proper documents).“I saw many tea shops and small general stores disappear overnight with their owners getting nothing in return. They uprooted all the electricity poles. Our fiber internet has been down since December 2023.”We can quibble much as we want that the BJP has managed to win “only the numbers but not the mandate” as noted political activist Yogendra Yadav has argued in the Indian Express.However, the bottomline is that the BJP is back in power with no indication yet of any change in its programme except speculation that pressure from its coalition allies may force it to go slow on some of its more controversial plans like a Uniform Civil Code.And this is why Muslims are not celebrating. So far, they have failed to detect any sign of a more conciliatory tone in the speeches of the prime minister and other BJP leaders.If anything, their fears that little is likely to change were confirmed after two Muslim truckers from Uttar Pradesh were allegedly lynched by cow vigilantes near the temple town of Arang in Chhattisgarh last week while transporting buffaloes. A third reportedly suffered critical injuries.As the French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same)”.Yet, it’s still early days and who knows optimism might eventually win the day. So, Amen.Read more from the author here.