by AJIT KUMAR JHA
The Muslim consolidation of votes strategically against the BJP has been higher in Bihar since 2015, given the overwhelming hegemony of the BJP across North India in 2014 and 2019.
There is a certain myth that moves around Indian elections as smoothly as the holy river Ganges through Bihar – a myth insistently simple and yet quietly complex. That the ‘Muslim vote’ is a single, easily counted thing you can herd into a booth and, like cattle, brand with the mark of a single party.
Walk through Phulwari Sharif in Patna late at night or stand by a chai stall in Siwan at dawn. Mingle among minorities in Sakri (a Nagar Panchayat in Madhubani district) or among shoppers and shopkeepers of Glesan Bazaar (named after British administrator and linguist George Abraham Grierson) in Madhubani town. Or wander along the small lanes of Kishanganj.
And one sees the absurdity of that simplicity. Voting is unequivocally strategic and intimate; it is a conversation between memory and fear, between grievance and hope. It is also arithmetic and algebra.
The Caste Within The Minority
While travelling across Bihar, learn to look for the small inner maps a place keeps of itself: the way a city will remember a river, a language, a habit.
Bihar keeps such maps within its Muslim population – not one map, but many: the old, vertical lines of ashraf/ajlaf/arzal; the newer political edges traced by the Persian word Pasmanda; the scattered geography of Seemanchal and Mithilanchal, where numbers change the rules of the game.
To ask ‘how do Muslims vote?’ in Bihar is to ask a question that wants a single latitude and longitude but will only accept a constellation of answers.
Muslims Vote According To Caste, Numerical Strength In Constituency
Two insightful and useful rules have been argued by scholars who specialise in minority voting behaviour.
The pioneering work was conducted by Yale Professor Harry W Blair, now at Bucknell University, who explored the intersection of caste and religion in Bihar. Writing from an older, careful, and empirical perspective, he argued Muslim voting in Bihar tends to be shaped by caste divisions and by numbers.
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