Having been here, there and everywhere, seen everyone, is it going to be yesterday again for Indian Muslims? Remember the era when election after election the Congress was the “natural party for governance” riding the Brahmin-Muslim-Dalit “rainbow coalition”? Recall the 1984 Lok Sabha elections when, in its most stunning nationwide performance ever, the Congress bagged 83 out of 85 seats in Uttar Pradesh. Just five years later, as Brahmins gravitated towards the BJP and Muslims towards the Samajwadi Party, “Maulana” Mulayam Singh Yadav took charge of UP in 1989. Now, 20 years of banvaas later, with the Congress in UP emerging as the biggest story of the recently concluded polls, there are clear signs of Muslim readiness to embrace the Congress again. But it’s a different India now and one thing is certain: both the Congress and Muslims will need to discover new terms of endearment, for neither tokenism nor the good old patron-client equation will work.

Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the pogrom against Mumbai’s Muslims under Congress rule in New Delhi and in Maharashtra, Indian Muslims described the party as their “hidden enemy”. Mulayam in UP, Lalu Prasad in Bihar, the Left in West Bengal and the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh were the Muslims’ new friends. Their estrangement from the Congress led to the first, and so far only, defeat of the party in the 1995 assembly polls in Maharashtra.

But the experience of the last two decades has taught them that there is little to choose between the “hidden enemy” and the “new friends”. Undoubtedly, the new friends reassured insecure Muslims and proved with their riot-free regimes that communal carnages are only possible when the political bosses want them to happen. But how long can one live on gratitude alone? What about education, employment, access to credit, civic amenities? The report of the high-powered Sachar Committee (released in end-2006) was a real eye-opener for Muslims. It provided incontrovertible evidence of institutionalised and rampant discrimination against Muslims. What is worse, the report showed that on bread and butter issues the track record of the communists in West Bengal was worse than that of the Hindu communalists of Gujarat. The performance of the socialists, Lalu and Mulayam, was not much better.

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