– Akhilesh Tripathi/Lucknow
In the by-election to the Assembly in Ghosi constituency of Uttar Pradesh, ‘Pasmanda Muslims’ have rejected the BJP. The Samajwadi Party’s Sudhakar Singh secured a landslide victory against his closest rival BJP candidate Dara Singh Chauhan. Singh got 1,24,427 votes, while Chauhan managed to get the support of 81,668 voters. However, the term ‘Pasmanda Muslims’ per se is not prevalent in the Muslim society.
The BJP was working to divide the Muslims into backward and forward i.e. 80 and 20 per cent among the Muslims by following the policy of the British “divide and rule”. For this, the BJP was working to divide the Muslims by saying that 80 per cent of the Muslims were Pasmanda Muslims and the remaining 20 per cent were other Muslims. The BJP’s thinking behind this was that if Muslims fall into the trap of this scheme, the votes of Muslims will be divided and they will get the benefit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself was making efforts and putting a lot of emphasis on wooing the Pasmanda Muslims and bringing them together with the BJP. For this, many conferences were held in UP and work was done to connect the Pasmanda Muslims with the BJP. But its first test took place in the by-election of Ghosi Assembly.
In a bid to woo Pasmanda Muslims to the BJP in the Ghosi assembly by-election, the BJP deployed Minister of State for Minority Welfare Danish Azad Ansari and UP President of BJP Minority Morcha Kunwar Basit Ali in Ghosi and camped in Ghosi throughout the election. These two people went from door to door to explain to Muslims and described the BJP as their ‘true benefactor’.
Ghosi has over 90,000 Muslim voters, including over 70,000 Pasmanda Muslims. There are 45,000 Yadavs, 15,000 Thakurs, 40,000 Rajbhars, 20,000 Nishads, about 90,000 Dalit voters. The BJP was assuming that if it gets 50,000 votes from the Pasmanda community besides its own traditional votes, it will win in Ghosi. But this did not happen and the Muslims of the Pasmanda community rejected the BJP and did not vote for it, which led to the crushing defeat of the BJP.
