#dnaEdit: Stay off my vote

Shiv Sena MP and Saamna editor Sanjay Raut’s article demanding that Muslims be disenfranchised represents a new low in Indian politics. Raut’s perverse and twisted logic for making this demand was that Muslims will have no future and cannot advance on the path to development if parties use their numerical strength as votebanks. More preposterously, Raut advises Muslims to take the initiative for their own disenfranchisement. To expect a community to forsake the primary right that comes with citizenship — the right to vote — is a repudiation of the constitutional ideals that form the bedrock of the modern Indian state. Politicians like Raut would do well to remember that India guaranteed its citizens universal adult suffrage in 1950, long before even the world’s oldest democracy, the US, could institutionalise this in 1965. If Muslims, Hindus, Yadavs, Dalits, Christians, Jats, Vokkaligas, Lingayats, Kapus, Kamas, Reddys, or Marathas are voting on religious or caste lines, as has been commonly alleged, it has to do with the country’s difficult social and political history, and the success of politicians across the ideological spectrum to prey upon these divisions.

Another interesting aspect of Raut’s diatribe was that he claimed to be only reiterating the Shiv Sena icon, Bal Thackeray’s, demand for taking away the voting rights of Muslims. At one level, this represents the crisis that has dogged the Shiv Sena ever since Thackeray’s death in late-2012. Rather than evolve new slogans and political ideas, the Shiv Sena leadership is still engaged in a desperate attempt to evoke the fiery rhetoric and the strong-arm tactics from the Thackeray era. But cynical electoral motives, too, appear to have played a role in the Shiv Sena’s rhetoric of polarisation. Raut’s attack on Muslims has coincided with the determined push by the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM) to wrest the Bandra East seat from the Shiv Sena in the upcoming assembly bypoll. The AIMIM has gone about brazenly wooing the Muslim community and aspires to build a Muslim-Dalit social coalition. Not surprisingly, it was the AIMIM, rather than the traditional rival Congress, which was the target of Raut’s ire. The Shiv Sena leader accused the AIMIM of replicating the Congress strategy to secure Muslim votes, suggesting the party has grown into a significant presence in Maharashtra.

But the bluff has been called on Shiv Sena’s attempt to polarise. Even its own ally, the BJP has reiterated its commitment to the constitutional scheme that gave citizens the right to vote irrespective of their religion and caste. Despite the BJP distancing itself from the Sena’s view in quick time, the two parties are in a political alliance at the state and Centre. Following the love jihad-ghar wapsi campaigns and the spate of attacks against Christian institutions, there is considerable anxiety among minorities who believe India’s secular ethos to be under threat. That the two parties have similar ideological positions will not be lost on minorities. Taking the cue from Raut, a Sena leader in UP has demanded that Muslim men should undergo vasectomies and adopt birth control measures if they are to be empowered. The same leader also called the BJP a party of “fake Ram bhakts”. The foregrounding of religion, religious differences and religious idioms in politics is reaching unacceptable proportions. The politics of the AIMIM and the Sena are feeding off the polarisation that each engineers. Political parties have demanded an FIR be lodged against Raut for hurting communal sentiments. Many such criminal cases have been lodged against politicians, but rarely has there been a conviction. In 1995, the Supreme Court debarred Bal Thackeray from voting or contesting elections for six years for communal and inflammatory speeches made in 1987, a judgment which won the Election Commission’s approval. For what Raut has espoused, he deserves no less a punishment.