Shivam Vij: What it’s like to be a young Muslim in Uttar Pradesh after voting for Modi
Kanpur: Arshad
Khan (not his real name), 31, runs a small business in Kanpur. In this
interview, he explains why voters in his polling booth have lost interest in
elections.
Something has died
inside us in the last few years. Dil mar gaya hai. Muslims here
feel more besieged than ever. There has been no violence but the general
anti-Muslim sentiment has increased so much, it’s suffocating. The other day,
three Muslim schoolchildren were playing cricket in the Green Park stadium. One
of them was wearing a skullcap. A group of adults went up to them and said, why
are you playing here? Don’t you support Pakistan? They called them ‘katua’
and asked them to say Bharat Mata Ki Jai. Incidents like this make
me ask just one question: Why?
Another such incident
was when a skullcap-wearing Muslim was passing by a Hindu religious procession.
They dragged him into the crowd and forced him to scream Hindu religious lines.
Such incidents didn’t happen earlier. It is after Yogi Adityanath became chief
minister that troublemakers feel empowered
I live in Chamanganj in
Kanpur, what you would call a Muslim ghetto. The place has had a history of
communal violence, especially when the Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya.
I was a toddler then. I knew of the BJP’s
anti-Muslim positions but in 2014, I thought Modi was trying to do something
different. He was emphasising development over the BJP’s traditional politics
of religion. And so, despite being a Muslim in Chamanganj, I voted for Modi. That was not all. I
voted for the BJP again in 2017. I thought that the Samajwadi Party (SP) or the
Congress had no solutions. They were not taking us anywhere. What have the SP
or the Congress ever done for Chamanganj? These parts remain the city’s most
under-developed — stuck in time.
By 2017, one had seen
incidents such as the lynching
of Akhlaq in Dadri. For me, that was all the more a reason to engage
with the BJP. We should vote for them, join them, make ourselves matter to
them, I thought, because they’re clearly sweeping election after election. I even went around
telling my friends to vote for the BJP. Some of them said I was mad. Did you
know, they asked, BJP will make Yogi Adityanath the chief minister? Come on, I said, don’t
be ridiculous. Modi won’t make someone that anti-Muslim the chief minister. I
thought Modi wanted to at least keep up the pretence of being moderate. He
wants to say he’s doing Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas. When Yogi Adityanath
became chief minister, we went into a shock. As a result, Muslims in Chamanganj
and Kanpur had no interest in the election this year (Kanpur voted on 29
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