“Dalits, tribals and Muslims are the groups on which the RSS works hard.
Dalits of Uttar Pradesh, sad with the fall and decline of the Bahujan Samaj Party, have almost en masse embraced the BJP. The BJP has successfully brought many social classes who recently maintained some distance from the party into its fold. The Mahaz advocates for the Pasmanda Muslim cause concerning personal law, reservation and electoral politics. The Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz is a loose coalition of social reform organisations bringing awareness to the plight of the Pasmanda Muslims and their complete neglect and persecution by the upper-class Ashraf Muslims in India. The Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, founded by Ali Anwar Ansari in 1998 in Bihar, spearheads Pasmanda politics in the Hindi Belt. Unfortunately, the voice of Pasmandas went unheard as the franchise to legislatures was limited to the wealthy class, and Pasmandas were under-represented in legislatures. The Conference feared that the creation of Pakistan with the Muslim League as the ruling party, which represented only the interests of Ashrafs, would further aggravate the sorry state of Pasmandas. Zaheeruddin, president of the Conference, stated: “The Pakistan scheme is a mirage which is taking us towards destruction…we should not forget that a Muslim farmer in Punjab has more in common with a Hindu farmer than with a Muslim from outside”. The Momin Conference advocated Hindu-Muslim unity for a joint struggle for freedom. The Conference was a part of the Azad Muslims’ Conference led by Allah Baksh Soomro, which opposed the Muslim League’s Two-Nation Theory and the proposal for the partition of India. It resisted the oppression which was meted out to them by Ashrafi Muslims. The All-India Momin Conference, which represented socially backward Pasmanda Muslims, especially weavers, was a voice of the oppressed and the downtrodden amongst the Muslim masses in pre-independent India. Pasmanda Muslims were at loggerheads with the Ashrafis represented by the All-India Muslim League in colonial India. The socio-political interests of Pasmandas have always been distinct from and conflicting with the elite Ashrafi Muslims. Ajlafs and Arzals are collectively called Pasmandas. Using evidence from decennial censuses, Ghuas Ansari opined in 1959 that Muslims in India were divided into three broad social groups-the Ashraf (nobles), Ajlaf (lowly), and Arzal (excluded). In his Muslims in India: Caste Affinity and Social Boundaries of Backwardness, Nadeem Hasnain wrote that while Islam may not have caste or caste-like groupings, the Indian Muslims do have caste. All of these apply to Muslim castes as well. The significant elements of a caste are endogamy, occupational specialisation, hierarchical order, and restrictions on social intercourse and commensality. They constitute the lion’s share of India’s Muslim population.īefore vivisecting the BJP’s new social engineering move, one must briefly analyse the anatomy of the caste system prevailing among Indian Muslims.
Pasmanda is a Persian term that means the ‘ones left behind’ used to describe depressed castes among the Muslims.
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