The virtue of inclusiveness
The new Maharashtra and Haryana Assemblies have only 12 Muslim MLAs between them and no Muslim Minister. The number of Muslim Ministers in nine major BJP-ruled States thus remain just one. The non-BJP-ruled States do better, the share of Muslim legislators and Ministers being much closer to their share in the population, but some Congress-ruled States like Uttarakhand too have no Muslim Minister. On the back of a General Election that swept the BJP to power but produced a Parliament with the lowest proportion of Muslim MPs in over 50 years, this is cause for concern. Undoubtedly, this has to do with the communalisation of political parties, but it is also about the communalisation of voters. Under the first-past-the-post system, Muslims are now likely to win only from constituencies with an unusually large Muslim population. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the likelihood of a Muslim winning dropped, falling to just 1 per cent in constituencies where Muslims formed less than 20 per cent of the population. Political parties breed and then react to this communalisation, responding by nominating ever fewer Muslims from constituencies where they are not in sufficient numbers for reasons of “winnability”. Following the BJP’s sweep in Uttar Pradesh in May despite nominating no Muslim, the Samajwadi Party, which has nominated more Muslim candidates than any other national party over the last 50 years, reduced the number of tickets given to Muslims in the recent by-elections in Uttar Pradesh.
But Muslims being in positions of power does not necessarily ensure development outcomes for Muslims, the argument goes. However, the dignity of political representation and high office is not only a means to an end; it is an end in itself too. Moreover, while political representation is certainly not the only mode of development, the Rajinder Sachar Committee Report recommended it as one of the solutions to the disproportionate educational and economic backwardness of Muslims. The century-old fight of backward class empowerment movements and political parties to gain political representation in the southern States led to a situation where backward classes in Tamil Nadu and Kerala today have better development indicators than upper castes have in some northern States; political empowerment matters. Some dismiss these findings as a legitimate concern for a democracy, subscribing to what the late Professor Iqbal Ansari called a sort of “political Darwinism”. By this same token, he wrote, concerns about the representation of women in politics would be dismissed as sexism. Expecting the legislatures to represent its diversity more fairly is not tokenism; it’s what inclusive democracy truly looks like, as opposed to majoritarianism.
