Mohammad Imran Pratapgarhi
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YEAR-WISE DEVELOPMENTS
As in 2021
Radhika Ramaseshan, June 7, 2021: The Times of India
An appointment in an ancillary outfit of the Congress has rarely provoked the kind of attention and level of debate that Mohammad Imran Pratapgarhi’s drew when he was elevated as president of its minority department. Pratapgarhi was not short on the celebrity quotient, but he owed his fandom to the “nazm” and “shayari” that flowed from his mastery over Urdu than his political skills. That facet bothered notable Muslims, who thought that the selection of Pratapgarhi reflected the Congress’ nostalgia for a past when Muslims were typecast as poets and lyricists presiding over “mushairas”, rather than show an understanding of the upheavals that the community has been subject to with an ascendant BJP, and the resultant travails it has suffered. Think Bollywood of the ’60s, and the communal stereotypes the films perpetuated that had little to do with the realities, even in a more inclusive era. Pratapgarhi was handpicked by the Gandhis. He reportedly became a Priyanka Gandhi Vadra favourite once she started paying attention to Uttar Pradesh, Pratapgarhi’s home state.
In a series of tweets, Navaid Hamid, who heads the All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, an advocacy group founded in 1961 after the first serious post- Partition communal violence occurred in Jabalpur, questioned why the Congress handed over its minority cell to a “professional poet” when his predecessors were illustrious men such as AR Antulay, CK Jaffer Sharief and Arjun Singh. “What an achievement,” remarked Hamid, adding ruefully that Pratapgarhi’s appointment reinforced a perception that the Congress needed a “shayar” as its Pied Piper to “lure” the Muslims, and not a mature political leader who could espouse their rights and articulate their concerns.
Pratapgarhi didn’t grow out of the Congress. His political origins are obscure. It seems he dallied with the Aam Admi Party and the Samajwadi Party (SP) for a while. He joined the Congress before the 2019 elections and got a ticket from Moradabad where every evening, he regaled audiences with his poetry. He lost the seat to ST Hasan of the SP. But Pratapgarhi can’t be accused of writing only balmy verses on flowers, birds, love and longing. There is an indelible streak of activism in his poetry which demonstrates that he is more in tune with the tribulations endured by Muslims than the Congress’ upper echelon. For example, his Madrasa nazm was inspired by the increasing and unwanted attention paid to the theological seminaries after terror attacks. He implored his listeners not to link madrasas with terrorism and taint the students. Pratapgarhi wrote on Palestine, on one of the first documented lynching of Alwar’s Umar Mohammad by cattle vigilantes, and the ‘disappearance’ of JNU student Najeeb Ahmed.
The trouble with Hamid and other Pratapgarhi detractors is their belief that the minority department chief moulds the Congress’ perspectives on the non-Hindu communities and shapes its policies. That is not the case. In 2002, even a leader with more political heft like Antulay, quit the post over the Congress’ “failure” to intervene significantly in the Gujarat violence. True, the Sachar Panel formed to look into the condition of minorities was conceptualised and constituted by the UPA government. But when some of the Congress’ senior Muslims wanted Rahul Gandhi to pressure the dispensation to act upon the recommendations, he was apparently indifferent and suggested that he was more absorbed with the plight of the Dalits.
However, it’s that time of the year when Muslims get on the radar of parties because UP goes to polls in eight months. Soon enough, you can expect scads of print and oodles of air time on which way Muslims will vote, as though the community is the sole determinant of electoral outcomes. On the contrary, Muslim representation in the state legislature plummeted from 17.1 per cent in the 2012 Assembly elections, to 5.9 per cent in 2017 - one-third of what it should be in proportion to their population, which is almost 20 per cent, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of data gleaned from the Election Commission and The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy. The 2012 elections marked a watershed in that for the first time since Independence, Muslim political representation in the Assembly was nearly proportional to the community’s population.
How does the non-BJP spectrum acknowledge and act upon the support reposed in it by the Muslims? Largely through symbolic gestures. Consider the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and its president Mayawati’s switcheroo in the limited space she occupies in Parliament and the UP legislature, to get a sense of how she views Muslims. First, Mayawati named Danish Ali, her Amroha MP and once an HD Deve Gowda favourite, as the parliamentary party leader. Ali was replaced by Shyam Singh Yadav, because he refused to endorse the BSP’s support to the reading down of Article 370 and Jammu and Kashmir’s trifurcation. Two months later, Ali was reinstated and removed in exactly the same number of months. An official BSP statement was candid and cynical about the move. It said since the UP BSP unit was headed by a Muslim, Munkad Ali, there was no need to have another Muslim in an important position. Danish Ali made way for Ritesh Pandey, a Brahmin, because Mayawati suddenly figured that Brahmins were “unhappy” with Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister, and could be wooed by her.
The SP’s approach is not much creditable. Although Akhilesh Yadav was the principal beneficiary of the Muslim votes in 2012, he delivered little other than promoting the SP’s individual community leaders. Right now, the party’s dilemma is to try and “live down” the pro-Muslim tag fastened on it by the BJP or risk losing Hindu votes. The losers in the mug’s game are the Muslims.
Radhika Ramaseshan keeps an eagle eye on all that's hot in the corridors of power
