Shams Ahsan

Saudi Gazette



JEDDAH — A senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assures Indian Muslims that once in power his party will transform into justice all the injustices done to them in the past 60 years.



“Others have been doing lip service; we will do service,” Syed Shahnawaz Hussain, BJP’s lone Muslim member of parliament in the outgoing House, told Saudi Gazette in an exclusive interview here Saturday evening.



Hussain, who is here to perform Umrah after a hectic 10-week election campaigning in India, admitted that Muslims have not associated with BJP because of negative propaganda against the party.



“But now things are changing,” he said.



On a question as to why the party which talks about inclusiveness and equal treatment for all gave only seven tickets to Muslim candidates for the parliamentary elections being fought for 543 seats, Hussain said that gradually more and more Muslims are joining BJP.



There are two Muslim members in the legislative assembly of Rajasthan, a BJP-ruled state. One of these two MLAs is a minister, said Hussain, who is a member of the party’s central election committee.



But how will the voice of Muslims be heard in parliament with such a low representation from their community?

“Muslims don’t need desk-thumping leaders. I alone am enough to raise the issues relevant for the welfare of the Muslim community,” he said.



Four days are left before the outcome of the Indian parliamentary elections, and Hussain exudes the same confidence as other members of his party who believe that they will sweep the polls. “We are going to form the government. There is no doubt about it. We have fought the elections on the plank of development. Our opponents have made communalism and secularism election issues. People have totally rejected this kind of politics.”



The confidence level of BJP leaders is so high that they seem unable to even think of a scenario whereby they fall short of a majority.



“BJP will on its own have the full majority. We will win 300 plus seats with our allies. We are not even considering any other scenario, because we are very confident that we will form the government on our own,” Hussain said.



To a question on the contentious issue of a uniform civil code, a proposal to replace personal laws based on Islamic Shariah or customs with a common set of rules governing every Indian, Hussain said that it is just an issue of the reform of marriage laws.



“This is just a case of marriage registration. We are not going to interfere in personal laws,” he says, addressing the concerns of Muslims on the issue.



On the other contentious issue of scrapping Article 370, which gives special autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir, Hussain is more forthright.



“I want to build a cottage in Gulmarg (a town in Jammu and Kashmir) to spend the summer there. And I want Omar Abdullah (chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir) to build a house in Bhagalpur (Hussain’s parliamentary constituency). As an Indian Muslim, I have full rights in every nook and corner of Kashmir,” he said.



He also said that his government will have zero tolerance level against terrorism.



But as Hussain talked in Jeddah, his party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and BJP’s president Rajnath Singh were meeting the leaders of the Hindu-chauvinist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP’s ideological fountainhead, in Delhi.



Hussain played down the question of whether the RSS will hold the remote if BJP forms the government, just as Sonia Gandhi allegedly remote-controlled the Manmohan Singh government. “We are simple people. We don’t know what a remote is. And Modi cannot be dictated to by anyone.”



What Hussain says and means may appear to be tall tales to many at present. But come May 16, it will become clear whether BJP will get the chance it has been waiting for to deliver on its promises and govern the country from the high moral platform which it claims has been building all along.