Modi’s baffling pitch to woo Muslim voters

With this year’s elections in progress, every minority vote that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) puts in its column adds to the chance for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition to move past 400 seats in the Lok Sabha elections. Therefore Modi, despite being a confessed member of the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has made an unlikely pitch to win the hearts of India’s nearly 200 million Muslims.

Helping his chances is the fact that India’s minority communities no longer vote in lockstep. Hindu-majority parties resolved that former tendency to their advantage years ago through the genesis of the “Hindutva 2.0” voting bloc. Hindutva, a form of cultural nationalism, centers on a unified approach to Indian identity, but it now has been supplemented with a second prong: a heavy emphasis on India’s economic progress.

But according to the consensus view of observers, BJP strategists have concluded that the alliance coalition needs to do more than simply duplicate its performance in the 2019 elections. It must outperform in southern states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, where the BJP has had very limited success in the past. That means generating a limited but concerted appeal to India’s large Muslim population. To do this, BJP is threading the needle between cultural and economic issues in an attempt to move the electorate in its favor.

Take Kerala as an example. A report in The Economic Times recalls the experience of the BJP’s sole Muslim candidate in the country, M Abdul Salam, who had difficulty connecting with Muslim voters, particularly in a constituency where 70% of the 4 million people are Muslims and where the Indian Union Muslim