“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”-Aldous Huxley
The current pattern of identifying and creating voter bases is a direct result of years of Colonialism and Congress rule. Things have much improved during the course of time but still the practice of dismembering and carving voter bases hasn’t changed a lot.
But if the BJP wants to dominate the Center for the next 15-20 years with an absolute majority in both the houses it must create new voter bases apart from its existing ones.
One such method is creating a voter bloc among the Muslim population. BJP needs to increase its voter base it by attracting the weaker sections of the community first – namely the Women, Shias, Ahmadis, Dawoodi Bohras, Ismaili, Barelvis, Intellectuals, Liberals and all other sects that are pissed off with Wahabism and Conservative Sunni ideology.
Some interesting statistics:
Muslims constitute only 14.2% of India’s population
But they constitute a good portion of the population in three key states of UP(19.26%), Bihar(16.87%) and Bengal(27%). These states account for nearly 30% of the seats in Lok Sabha.
With India’s first past the post voting system their balance can make or break the Government, Example -Bihar. The major problem is that Muslims do bloc voting, they stand as a united block for a party, the weaker sections have no choice but to go with the dominant forces in the society.
The first thing to do is to break this pattern of bloc voting by Muslims. And this is how it can be done:
Muslim women leaders- Cultivating Muslim women leadership is the easiest way to break the bloc. Let me show the advantages of having strong Muslim women leadership within the party: –
1.They constitute the largest part of weaker sections of Muslim society cutting across sects, this will help the BJP to gain more access to Muslim electoral base. Seeing the large women participation, it would be easy to attract Shias, Ahmadiyya, Bohra Men into their fold.
- A strong women leadership would help in pushing through reforms like Triple Talaq, UCC, Women empowerment more easily than any Hindu Male Leader will ever be able to do.
- A strong support for Muslim women’s cause led by their own women leader will clearly isolate the conservatives from the masses, the conservatives will hardly get any support from any major political parties since it would show their hypocrisy and give the party a bad image.
4.The humongous rise in Muslim population can be attributed to the fact that vast majority of women have hardly any control on birthing babies, empowering them will help
in population control for the country.
- It will be a slow process time but gradually when women see rapid development in their lifestyle coupled with more freedom it will be easier to push across reforms on a broader scale cutting across religions by removing the ‘secular’ parties like Samajwadi and TMC completely out of the picture.
- Like polio India can be a role model for other Muslim countries on Women empowerment thus creating permanent friends in the Muslim world which will be a role model for them.
Without taking along half of the population in a country, no nation can develop. It’s a shame that all political parties have failed to address this issue in the past. Women’s issues are hardly highlighted in election manifesto and ‘Mahila Shakhas’ of different parties have leaders who are either ‘Pseudo-feminists’ talking senseless stuff or kin of the local political leaders.