In Search of Development: Muslims and Electoral Politics in an Indian State

Abstract

West Bengal's Muslim minority are in many respects excluded from both the developmental and political processes in the state. Muslims score significantly lower on a range of socio-economic indicators compared to other sections of the population, and their representation in the political sphere is poor. However, recent years have witnessed an increasing mobilisation of Muslim organisations seeking to address and overcome this ‘development deficit’. As part of this mobilisation in search of development, these organisations have used the Muslim electorate's strength of numbers to promote issues of concern to Muslim voters. In doing so they have succeeded in putting significant pressure on all political parties in the state, who for much of 2010 and 2011 were engaged in an intense political competition that culminated with the ouster of the incumbent state government at the 2011 assembly elections. In this paper I analyse the background for this recent emergence of a distinct Muslim voice in the debates over the state's development trajectory. I examine how some Muslim organisations have bargained for inclusion in West Bengal's development agenda by demanding that special quotas for Muslims be introduced in, e.g., education and government employment. Tellingly, this demand spawned prompt and positive responses from political parties in the state, who have gone to great lengths to accommodate Muslim demands for development. I argue that this overwhelmingly positive response is the result of successful and strategic operations in what Partha Chatterjee calls ‘political society’ by a marginalised Muslim electorate in search of development.

Keywords:

• Political society
• democracy
• development
• West Bengal politics
• social exclusion
• Indian Muslims
• affirmative action

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were given at the workshop on ‘Social In- and Exclusion in Contemporary India and Beyond’ at Aarhus University, Denmark, in June 2010; at the workshop on ‘Practices and Experiences of Democracy in Post-Colonial Localities’ at the ‘2nd International Conference on Democracy as Idea and Practice’ in Oslo, Norway, in January 2011; and at the international seminar on ‘Social Exclusion: Meanings and Perspectives’ at the University of Hyderabad, India, in March 2011. I thank the participants for their comments. I am particularly grateful to G. Krishna Reddy, Radhika Chopra, Arild Engelsen Ruud, Pamela Price, Staffan Lindberg and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism. A special thanks also to Abhijit Dasgupta, Uwe Skoda and Stig Toft Madsen for their careful reading of the preliminary draft.

Notes

¹ There are, however, competing explanations for why rural poor and marginal communities have supported the LF. See Bhattacharyya (2009).

² In 2006 the LF also benefited from the fact that the TMC, the leading opposition party at the time, was in disarray and was considered by many to be on the decline as a political force in West Bengal (Nielsen, 2011, p. 174).

³ For a brief overview of the key features of the Sachar Committee's report, see Basant (2007).

⁴ The marginalisation of Muslims in Bengal did not originate with the coming to power of the LF. As far back as 1871 W.W. Hunter (2002, pp. 138–206) wrote of how colonial rule increasingly adversely affected the Muslim community. The question of reservations for certain sections of Muslims was also raised from time to time during colonial rule (Dasgupta, 2009, p. 92). What the Sachar Committee Report did was rather to underline the failure of the LF to address these historically produced inequalities.

⁵ Contrary to a widely held negative stereotype, most Muslims do not reject the value of education per se. According to Zakir Husain (2005) both literacy and education are in demand among Muslims in West Bengal. However, Muslim boys in particular tend to lose interest in education because they perceive a bias against them in the labour market. And similarly, the belief that their children will not get jobs leads Muslim parents to devalue the importance of education (Borooah, 2010, p. 33). In terms of primary completion rates the difference between Muslims and other communities appears to not have diminished in the wake of the publication of the Sachar Committee report. If anything, it has continued to widen (Husain and Chatterjee, 2009).

⁶ For instance, the LFs total tally of gram panchayats decreased in all 17 districts. A comparison with the previous panchayat elections also brings out the decline in support for the LF. In 2003 the LF had won in 15 of 17 zilla parishads and had gained a majority in 85% of the panchayat samitis and 72% of the gram panchayats.

⁷ Syntax in the original.

⁸ One crore is 10,000,000.

⁹ Syntax in the original.

¹⁰ Other organisations that have similarly demanded reservations are inter alia Naya Zamana West Bengal, Muslim Youth Federation, TMC's Minority Cell, All India Minority Forum, and the Indian National League (Haque, 2010b).

¹¹ Existing legislation already provides for 33 percent reservation for women in the three-tier panchayat system as well as in urban municipal bodies.

¹² Arild Engelsen Ruud (2011) similarly reports from neighbouring Bangladesh how rural voters see the delivery of development and welfare as perhaps the key function of democracy.

¹³ Successfully – Devi's son won.