How Do Muslims Vote? Case of Seemanchal 2014 Parliamentary Elections
| Published date | 01 June 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023015575216 |
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
| Subject Matter | India’s 2014 Elections |
How Do Muslims Vote?
Studies in Indian Politics
3(1) 81–93
Case of Seemanchal 2014
© 2015 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
Parliamentary Elections
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023015575216
http://inp.sagepub.com
Manindra Nath Thakur1
Abstract
The voting behaviour of the Muslim community has always been a puzzle for the students of Indian
democracy. There are available two extreme positions: (a) Muslim community always votes en bloc and
hence it is treated as vote bank by the political parties and (b) like any other community in India Muslim
community too is not monolithic, and there are many subcommunities based on language, region,
local interest and so on; the voting behaviour of this community is influenced by these factors and
hence does not vote en bloc. This article aims at examining these positions by conducting a fieldwork
in the Seemanchal region of Bihar during the parliamentary elections 2014. The finding suggests that
Muslim community is sociologically heterogeneous and this has impact on the electoral behaviour of the
community; however, at times the community do go for en bloc voting depending on the contingent
factors. In the parliamentary elections 2014, the community’s voting behaviour was guided by the Modi
factor and it voted en bloc to any candidate who had an advantage over the BJP candidate.
Keywords
Democracy, Muslim community, subcommunity, en bloc voting, heterogeneous
Introduction
One of the major challenges that Indian democracy is facing today has to do with an inadequate repre-
sentation of the religious minorities in the parliament. It is a matter of concern for scholars and people
alike who value democracy that the number of Muslim members in the parliament has declined signi-
ficantly compared to the percentage of their share in the population. Particularly, the representation of
the Muslims in the 16th Lok Sabha is the lowest since the general elections of 1952. It has gone down
to 24 compared to 30 in 15th Lok Sabha. This is despite the fact that there are at least 145 seats where
Muslim voters are around 10–20 per cent, around 38 seats where they are between 21 and 30 per cent
and at least 35 seats where the Muslim population is more than 30 per cent (Deshmukh, 2013). This
difference in the percentage of Muslims in the total population and the number of representatives in
1 Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Corresponding author:
Manindra Nath Thakur, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Email: manindrat@gmail.com
82
Studies in Indian Politics 3(1)
the parliament has emerged as a puzzle for many of the political analysts and that has brought the
question of Muslim voting behaviour to the centre stage.
The aim of this article is not to answer the question as to why there has been a decline in the number
of Muslim representatives in the parliament but to explore the patterns in the voting behaviour of the
Muslim community. However, there is a deep link between Muslim voting behaviour and the decline in
their representation. One can go into the issue of cross-community leadership appeal, which I think has
declined in India and it is not a good sign for the health of democracy. Since this question does not fall
in the scope of this article, I would refrain from addressing it directly, and therefore, I would like to
leave it to the reader to see a linkage between representation, cross-community engagements and voting
behaviour. The main aim of this article is to understand the electoral behaviour of the Muslim commu-
nity and particularly to read the logic behind this behaviour. So, the idea is to capture the generative
mechanism of the voting behaviour of the Muslim community by closely observing the process of
decision-making by the individual, group and the community.
The article has five sections. In the first section I will try to discuss the puzzle of Muslim voting
behaviour that social scientists are trying to solve in different possible ways.
In the second section, I will introduce the field I have chosen to study, which constitutes four parlia-
mentary constituencies in Bihar: Purnea, Katihar, Araria and Kisanganj. This region is called Seemanchal
due to its proximity to the international borders with Nepal and Bangladesh. The third section deals
with the choice of method for this study. The fourth section of the article deals with one of the most
significant questions of the puzzle regarding the relationship between the sociological heterogeneity
and its implications for the voting behaviour of the community. The fifth section of the article is a report
based on the fieldwork and it revisits some of the propositions discussed in the first section.
Electoral Behaviour of the Muslim Community: A Puzzle
The electoral behaviour of the Muslim community has always been a subject of interest for political
analysts. The most widely accepted and commonsensical understanding has been that Muslims vote en
bloc and the political parties have been treating them as part a vote bank. There is no doubt that in the
early years of the electoral history Indian Muslims voted mostly for Congress party despite the partition
of India and subsequent communal riots and the party could articulate the immediate concerns of the
community (Wright, 1977). The behaviour of Muslim voters started deviating from this standard path
gradually, and the signs were clear in 1967 general elections as the defeat of the Congress party in the
Hindi belt was attributed to this change (Hasan, 1997). However, the initial shift was quickly over as the
Muslim community found the unstable coalition state governments incapable of dealing with the com-
munal forces and the alliance with the Congress party continued. Once again during the 1977 general
elections, Muslim voters voted against the Congress party due to the atrocities committed during the
emergency under the leadership of Sanjay Gandhi. Even today the memory of the actions taken to clean
and beautify the Turkman Gate area, which forced the Muslims to migrate to different parts of Delhi, is
still alive in the minds of the Muslims in India. So it was taken by the Muslim community as an atrocity
aiming at controlling the population. One can even today find a colony of Muslims in Delhi, which is
inhabited by the Muslims on the land provided by the government in lieu of sterilization. The colony
is still known as ‘Nasbandi colony’. With this disillusionment, the so-called Muslim vote bank politics
started changing and the Muslim community started looking for new alliances (Krishna, 1967).
The major shift in the Muslim voting choice came in the post-Babri Mosque demolition phase as
the Congress party supposedly made a move to play the Hindu card in order to counter the growing
Thakur 83
consolidation of the Hindutva forces. The post-Babri Masjid demolition and the consequent communal
violence rudely shocked the Muslim psyche (Engineer, 1995). This disenchantment of the Muslims with
the Congress party was reflected in the subsequent assembly elections. With the rise of the forces of
social justice led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, Laloo Yadav, Nitish Kumar and Mayavati, the Muslim com-
munity moved towards them. This OBC and Muslim alliance worked for almost a decade very well.
During this period Congress lost the favoured position. This was a relatively more vibrant phase of the
Muslim community as the regional parties gave more representation to the community.
One may use the metaphor of ‘marriage’ to identify the nature of the behaviour of the Muslim voters
in these two phases. In the first case the marriage was with the Congress party and in the second the mar-
riage was with the regional parties (Verma, 2014). The rise of Bharatiya Janata Party and the larger
Hindutva politics has unsettled this marriage model and several new theses are proposed. Hilal Ahmad
has argued that the Muslim vote bank is a myth (Ahmad, 2014). It is not clear if he thinks that it was
always a myth or this myth is more or less universal. Probably, the episodes or statements he mentions
are indicative of the perceptions of some of the political leaders who are interested in attracting the
Muslim voters or else they are sure that this group is not going to vote for them. However, it is difficult
to say that there is no element of truth in this perception. Hilal argues that the Muslim community should
not be treated as a monolithic whole as it is divided on the grounds of caste and sects. Also, different
sections of the community have different issues and different expectations depending on their class posi-
tions and geographical locations. One would agree with Hilal’s overall argument that the community is
sociologically divided; however, it does not mean that there is any guarantee they are voting according
to these sociological categories. In short, the fact that the Muslim community is constituted of many
castes and multiple social or economic aspirations does not give sufficient reasons to believe that the
idea of vote bank is also a myth.2 It is entirely possible that the Muslim community votes strategically
and the choice fluctuates between voting as a vote bank and a subcommunity.
There is another thesis on the Muslim voting behaviour, which suggests that since...
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