Sangh Parivar

There are all sorts of chimeras
in India. But some illusions are more real than others. Take the ‘Muslim
vote’, for instance. Now, whether there exists such an entity could be
debatable, given that members of the community tend to vote much like everyone
else, along regional and caste lines.

However, as a category this
just has to be the most favourite among politicians. And now, the Marxists have
also fallen prey. Forget all about the inherent atheism members of this breed
are supposed to possess, faith and all its categories are fair game in India.

CPI(M) politburo member M K Pandhe has just cautioned the Samajwadi
Party that it may lose Muslim support if it goes with the government on the
Indo-US nuclear deal. A Congress wag countered this saying after all the nuclear
deal may actually be executed by Hassan Obama and not Bush!

Apart
from the scorn heaped upon the spectacle of a communist shamefacedly
contributing to the communal discourse, hardly anyone has pointed out that the
fact is the ‘Muslim vote’ has been deployed as a perfectly plausible
plot. And that, indeed, is the rub.

The wider problem, of course, is
the general acceptance of this category. So, forget the fact, as the Sachar
committee pointed out, that the Muslim community remains largely backward and
uneducated. We can all happily be led to believe that your average poor Muslim
is completely unconcerned about his economic travails.

What he is
most concerned about is matters related to nuclear technology and our
international relations with the US. That, you can be sure, is what the Muslims
will be thinking about as they make their way into the polling booth in, say,
that remote dusty village in Gonda or Bahraich in UP.

There was some
global poll or the other that said the US was actually quite admired in Muslim
countries. But, as our politicians assure us, India’s Muslims are a
different lot. Everybody seems to know what they really want, except no one
seems to be really asking them.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorials/Can_the_Muslim_sp...