Rethinking the Role of Minorities: Status of Muslims in India Today

A well-planned fieldwork ensures diversity among respondents. This diversity is useful for research that intends to find maximum variations in the voters’ perceptions and opinions to gauge the political and social processes at play. In my research on UP’s Muslims, I met a range of voters, from the sophisticated to the basic. For instance, I met a group of voters who liked the AIMIM’s idea of Muslim qayadat (leadership) in the 2022 UP Assembly elections; however, they argued that the Party must get into an alliance with the BSP or give a ticket to a Scheduled Caste candidate, which would ensure winnability. They used the phrase ‘plus karna padega!’, which means that a Muslim candidate would not be able to win an election from their constituency on his/her own. This opposition to the flying one’s own flag strategy was absent in another constituency where Muslims are quite high in population. A non-Muslim MLA from this place is unthinkable for the voters. Besides this palpable difference, they are similar in situating their voting choice not solely in the candidate’s religion but in other factors like population context, candidate popularity, party standing, etc.