Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) leader Mayawati (extreme left) greets crowds during a party rally in Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh state on Feb. 7. (Photo: IANS)
Religious and caste divisions will play an acrimonious role in upcoming state legislative elections in Uttar Pradesh, which threatens to further fuel sectarian tensions in India's broader electorate.
Religion-based voting will be one of the biggest issues when the state starts a seven-phased election on Feb. 11, said Muslim political scientist, Arshi Khan from Aligarh Muslim University.
"The exercising of electoral franchise through parochial prisms is happening everywhere these days especially in India and states like Uttar Pradesh, and there are many reasons for it," said the professor.Muslim centers like Aligarh and Agra — where Hindu organizations tried a reconversion of Muslims in 2014 and Mufazzarnagar, where Hindu-Muslim riots rendered hundreds homeless and claimed many lives — are particularly vulnerable to sectarian voting, Khan said.
However, this pattern of voting has always been part of the process and political parties have often "banked upon it."
What has come to be known as "vote bank politics," where a political party takes for granted the support of people from a particular religion or caste, is especially evident in states like Uttar Pradesh which has a large number of Hindus and Muslims.
The state's 200 million people are mostly Hindus who form 79 percent of the population. However, the Muslims number almost 40 million (about 20 percent) and are concentrated in pockets in certain districts so they form a decisive voting block. Uttar Pradesh is India's largest state based on population and accounts for 16.5 percent of the country's 1.2 billion people.
People from other religions: Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs and Jains, form less than 1 percent of the population combined. The roughly 360,000 Christians of all denominations come mostly from poor caste backgrounds, live scattered across the state and are politically negligible.
Lower-caste people have emerged as a powerful voting block in the state's elections in the past three decades with every political party trying to woo them. But Kumari Mayavati, who heads the Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP), projects her party as the one to best protect their interests.
Her latest argument against rival Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is that the pro-Hindu party is against an existing policy of reserving government and educational seats and jobs for lower-caste people. The upper-caste BJP "will take it away" if they come to power, she said while addressing an election rally.
For the BJP, a victory is important in the state as elections are viewed as a report card of its two years in power. However, Khan said that with its explicit "pro-Hindu politics" the BJP has only made things worse.
Congress party politician, Jamiluddin Qureshi, based in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, agreed. "The BJP knew about political polarization" and orchestrated conflicts to create a fear of Muslims among Hindus allowing it to project itself as the protector of Hindu interests."The voters in Uttar Pradesh have become more sectarian" in the past decade and Hindus from the Jat caste (traditionally an agricultural caste) "regret their decision to walk into the BJP trap" when they voted for them in the 2014 national elections, he said.
Politics-based-on-religion has been part of Indian voting ever since India became an independent nation in 1947 but increasing sectarianism is a problem for "the future of the nation," said Arshi Khan from Aligarh.
"Muslims often feel aggrieved" because laws are strictly applied to them and their leaders but the same law enforcement agencies look the other way when it comes to radical Hindu leaders, he said.