On June 3, the day before India’s election results were to be revealed, most Muslims went to bed worried about their future. The campaign had been like none they had seen before. In April, after India completed the first phase of polling, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a speech in Rajasthan that shocked even some of his own supporters.
He referred to Muslims as infiltrators, people who produce more children, who would take away the resources of the Hindu population. He and his party had uttered anti-Muslim dog whistles before, but this was a new extreme. Amit Shah, India’s home minister, said that if he came to power, he would hang cow traders and smugglers who slaughter cows, and hang them upside down.
Others among Modi’s cabinet ministers and top leaders invoked the specter of “love jihad” (Muslims marrying Hindus) and “land jihad” (land grabbing by Muslims in Hindu-dominated areas across India). In another electoral video campaign by Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, Muslims were depicted as plunderers of India’s glorious past.
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But on the morning of June 4, as the vote totals started coming in, the atmosphere shifted. I sat down with Javed Mohammad, a human rights activist who considers himself a bridge between local Muslims and the administration in Prayagraj in northern India. Mohammad was incarcerated for nearly two years before a judge found there was no evidence he committed a crime. There were seven others, including activists and students, at Mohammad’s house in Jamia Nagar, a Muslim neighborhood in Delhi home to important citizen movements.
As Mohammad checked the election commission website for the latest numbers from Uttar Pradesh, the northern bastion with 80 of the 543 seats in the lower house of India’s Parliament, he looked reassured. In Faizabad, home to the controversial new Ram temple and where close to 80 percent of the population is Hindu, voters chose a candidate from a secular socialist political party, the Samajwadi Party, over the nominee of Modi’s BJP. In a generally surprising national election, this was among the biggest shocks. “Muslims in India have largely put their weight behind the INDIA alliance,” Mohammad said, referring to the Modi opposition, “because they believe that, eventually, secularism in India will prevail [over] parties that work on the basis of religion.”
On television, a news anchor said the election would not fulfill Modi’s hopes to win more than 400 seats in Parliament. A palpable sense of relief filled the room.
It isn’t as if the INDIA alliance represented Muslims well. They were grossly underrepresented in this election; the number of Muslims in Parliament — 22 — will be the lowest since independence. Many in the room felt that the opposition parties were afraid to counter Modi’s anti-Muslim politics for fear of losing their Hindu base.
Nevertheless, a reduced majority for Modi and an increase in numbers for the INDIA alliance mean stronger checks on the prime minister’s majoritarian, anti-Muslim politics — especially because the opposition parties have promised to protect the Indian constitution.
“This election might give Modi a third term, but now his wings have been clipped,” Ali Javed, leader of a small policy think tank called Nous Network, said while seated next to Mohammad and holding his 2-month-old son on his lap. “He is at the mercy of coalition partners.”
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This result, Javed said, gives Indian Muslims “a breathing space.”
Modi will now have 240 seats, many fewer than the halfway mark of 272. This is the first time in his political career, beginning as Gujarat’s chief minister, that he has not garnered a complete majority. After a campaign in which Modi claimed to be a divine incarnate, his myth of invincibility has been punctured.
Nadeem Khan, an Indian civil rights leader whom I met with separately, attributed Modi’s reduced support to a concerted effort by Muslim organizations, especially in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, to make sure that Muslims voted as a bloc.
“There was despair and fear,” Khan said, “and we had to work on that and tell people that the only solution was to consolidate and cast their vote irrespective of the outcome.”
Modi tried to divide the Muslim community with his “Pasmanda outreach” — his bid to divide Muslims on lines of economic and social class, to blame upper-class Muslims for the woes of those who are marginalized.
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“I think the move backfired,” Khan said, “because many of the Pasmandas include the cattle traders who have been victims of the hate crimes against Muslims, which was a consequence of hate speech by BJP and Hindu-nationalist leaders.”
Muslims voted in large numbers in this election to protect their own rights and India’s constitution. In the Sambhal region of Uttar Pradesh, cases of voter suppression made headlines. Muslim voters said police officers forced them to leave a polling station. Videos of voters being beaten were widely shared, along with testimonies of those who were attacked by the police to stop them from voting.
Call it poetic justice: In Sambhal, the BJP was defeated by 120,000 votes.
The election surprise has made Muslims feel somewhat more comfortable about their future in India. “The ones who were till now scared of speaking up, consolidating their voices, fighting for their constitutional rights might now start doing it,” Khan said.
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Ahmer Mohammad, a trader who lives in Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, told me he might pause looking for job opportunities in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait: “I wanted to move my family out of here. I wanted to give my children some dignity in their lives and not grow up like second-class citizens. If things get better, I might not have to move.”
Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in India, recorded one of the highest voter turnouts in the past 20 years. It was what Kashmiris called “a vote to get themselves heard.” Notably, they elected a local politician, Engineer Rashid, who had been jailed by Modi in 2019 and ran while behind bars. (He is still in jail and will need a court’s permission to attend sessions of Parliament and his own swearing-in.)
It might be too early for Muslims and other minorities in India to foresee a drastically new future. But they know their active participation has made a difference, and now their despair is giving way to a sense of optimism and belonging.
