Silicon Valley Saga series

News
    Front page stories
    National network
    International
    Analysis
    Editorials

Supplements
   Headstart
   Lifemate

Weather

Letters
to the Editor

Columnists

Express Interactive
   Chat rooms
   Ebate

Muslims and the Indian Elections...

Neither in the current election nor in any previous elections in the last about 25 years, Muslims have achieved adequate representation in the parliament.  In these years, the number of Muslims elected to the lower house of parliament, with the solitary exception of 1984, has remained at 30 or less, or 5.5 percent, whereas Muslims comprise 12 percent of the population. This deprivation exists despite the fact that there are at least 70 parliamentary constituencies where Muslim population ranges between 20 percent and 66 percent.

Muslims do not have a political platform or party of their own. In contrast, other minorities like sikhs, dalit hindus and backward caste hindus have their own political parties, that are strong in the regions where they have significant population concentrations, e.g. Punjab, UP, MP, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu. Politically active muslims are generally in one of the mainstream secular parties.However, in all elections in the last 25 years, these secular parties have been reluctant to nominate muslims as their candidates, even in muslim concentration constituencies. The record of successive elections shows that in only about half of the 70 Muslim concentration constituencies have any of the parties nominated a muslim candidate. In the remaining half constituencies, all parties have nominated non Muslim candidates.

This scenario has over and over resulted in a very large number of muslim concentration constituencies represented in the parliament by non muslims. The record also shows that the non muslims elected with solid muslim votes, from Muslim concentration constituencies, often pay much greater attention to their own caste. Obviously that results in the continued lack of any attention to the social & economic deprivations of the 120 million strong muslim community.

Kaleem Kawaja,Washington, DC.