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While the ministers were being sworn in, 150 million
Muslims could not help observing in helpless frustration
that even though Muslim voters had helped turn the tide
that got this coalition into power, they have been
deliberately and contemptuously kept out of the power
equation in the ‘secular’ political formation of the new
order.
DMK
joined the cabinet, while even a man like Cho Ramaswamy
admitted publicly on TV, that DMK left NDA mainly for
fear of losing their Muslim votes. DMK’s remarkable
turnout in sharp contrast to Jayalalitha’s pronounced
anti-Muslim posturing. There is not a single Muslim
minister from DMK’s side too. DMK’s alliance with
Congress made a big difference to the whole changeover.
In Maharashtra, Shiv Sena’s Uday Thackerey too admitted
openly that their less than expected results were mainly
due to their failure to win Muslim voter support. Muslim
voters in Maharashtra who have fresh wounds from a
series of communal riots under Congress-NCP government,
preferred the coalition rather than vote for BJP/Shiv
Sena, even ditching the widely popular Samajwadi Party’s
Maharashtra Chief Abu Asim Azmi for his attempt to open
a Lok Sabha account after over 12 years robust
representation of Muslim causes.
The
saddest part is the step-motherly treatment by Sonia
Congress to Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest State with
largest number of seats in the Lok Sabha, where Muslim
voters chose to support Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi
Party which not only retained its largest party
position, but even improved its elected member count
against Congress suffering loss of another seat from
their earlier count. In a secular turnaround, the
absence of another big count of secular members of
Samajwadi Party is nothing but a old-style Congress
arrogance still showing up in its more garish colours.
In the
coalition age, all coalition government should be tied
up as national governments and not heavily tilted
towards the largest party, this time, Congress, when the
largest count is not large enough to be claimed to be as
clear and explicit endorsement from the electorate.
Once
more, in Congress disposition, where the inner coterie
is supposed to be from the soft Hindutva brigade,
Muslims got a raw deal.
NDTV’s
brilliant commentator Rajdeep Sardesai regretted it as
representing the "nature of mandate". However he missed
to highlight the fact that Uttar Pradesh heavily
committed itself to secular tenor of the new Lok Sabha,
which is now glaringly neglected in the Congress led
coalition.
It is
time, Sonia gives some drastic new direction to
Congress’s old anti-Muslim malign neglect of a very
vibrant and ever-restive Muslim population of a
multi-ethnic pluralist country, that will have to
perforce open up to a world, where Muslim world would
like to count India as a friend.
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