Muslims are gravitating toward the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam, response to the party’s membership drive suggests.
The BJP had penetrated the Adivasi and Hindu Bengali voters — two of three “traditional” vote banks of the Congress — to come to power in Assam in 2016 with two regional parties as allies. Most of the State’s 34.22% Muslims had been elusive.
No longer, party leaders said. State BJP president Ranjeet Kumar Dass has been claiming that the party has 29-30 lakh Muslims supporters in Assam. He attributed this to the BJP “delivering” on its promise of ‘ sab ka saath , sab ka vikas ’, meaning inclusive development. Other leaders said he was not off the mark, but that it would be difficult to specify the number of Muslim members of the party.
“The first membership drive in 2015 saw about 3.5 lakh Muslims joining us. We organised another drive before the last Lok Sabha elections till August this year and received more than 5 lakh missed calls from minority communities in the entire northeast,” said Syed Mominul Awal, in charge of the BJP’s minority cell for the eight States in the region.
The party’s State vice-president Vijay Kumar Gupta said it would be difficult to immediately sift the Muslim membership applicants from other minority communities in the northeast. “Membership through missed calls is not a new process,” he said.
