In the run-up to the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, Mulayam Singh Yadav's close confidante Amar Singh was denied entry at the gates of Dar-ul-Uloom, Deoband. The clerics at one of the oldest and biggest Islamic seminaries in Asia were upset with the Samajwadi Party (SP) chief and his man-Friday for having tied up with Kalyan Singh, the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister under whose tenure the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya was demolished in 1992.
A rattled Mulayam Singh dashed off to Deoband the very next day. With some help from a local SP leader who had good contacts with the establishment at Dar-ul-Uloom, Mulayam Singh got an audience with the rector - the 102-year-old Maulana Marghubur Rehman.
Pictures of Mulayam Singh being "blessed" by the Deoband clergy were flashed across newspapers, especially in the Urdu press. Three months later, when it came to casting their votes, minorities in pockets moved away from the SP in large numbers to hand the Congress its best-ever performance in UP in two decades.
Singed by the turn of events, Dar-ul-Uloom initiated a course correction in earnest. To underscore its 'apolitical' character, the Deoband seminary has since pointedly refused an audience with its top administrative leadership in the run-up to any elections. Of late, requests have been fewer and far between. All India Majlis-e-Musalmeen (AIMIM) leader Asaduddin Owaisi had sought an appointment with the rector during his visit to Saharanpur in October last year but to no avail.
Others in the 'secular block' have also treaded with extreme caution. Akhilesh Yadav has thus far done two big rallies in western UP. One in Budhana in Muzaffarnagar district focused entirely on backward mobilisation and was touted as an OBC (Other Backward Castes) conference to mobilise fisherfolk and boatmen communities. The second was a joint rally organised with the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) at Meerut, seeking to rally Jats behind the opposition grand alliance.
The known rabble-rousers in SP are also lying low. Rampur MP Azam Khan is behind bars, and his party has not made extended incarceration of its most prominent Muslim face an election issue. Sambhal MP Shafiq-ur-Rehman Barq, too, has maintained a low profile. So has Mehboob Ali of Amroha. And there are no takers for dons-turned-politicians, the likes of Mukhtar Ansari and Ateeq Ahmed, this election.
Now, this is a far cry from the competitive minority politics in UP which had its genesis in the rise of former Congress chief minister Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna in the 1970s. Bahuguna, an upper-caste Brahmin from the hills of the undivided UP, made Allahabad his 'karmabhoomi' and sought to emerge as the messiah of the minorities. He was the progenitor of iftar-politics and said to be very close to Ali Mian, the vice-chancellor of Nadwatul Ulama, the famous Islamic Seminary at Lucknow.
When Bahuguna quit the Congress, he competed with his parent party for Muslim votes. Mulayam Singh and Kanshi Ram's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) later picked up this thread to challenge Congress' near-total command over minority voters. In the past, a Mayawati could mop up 206 seats in the assembly of 403 in 2007, garnering a fraction more than 30 per cent votes in a multi-cornered contest. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress, which had been marginalised to the fringes, romped home in 22 Lok Sabha seats in UP with 18 per cent votes. In 2012, Samajwadi Party logged its best-ever performance with 224 seats with less than 30 per cent votes.
Post-1989 Mandal-Kamandal rupture turned a full circle in 2012 when the UP Assembly registered the highest Muslim representation since Independence.
The 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots polarised the polity. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has consistently polled more than 40 per cent or more popular votes in the last three elections (two Lok Sabha and one Assembly). The winning threshold is raised to the extent that minorities plus Yadavs or minorities plus Dalits does not make for a winning combination anymore.
The 2019 Lok Sabha polls demonstrated that even a consolidated Muslim vote for the formidable SP-BSP-RLD alliance could not surpass the BJP's counter mobilisation. So, within days of the election results, Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav parted ways in search of alternative social combinations.
As campaigning gains pace for the 2022 polls, parties are experimenting at the hustings. Campaigning by key political players in the first week of this year is in itself quite telling.
On New Year's Day, Owaisi was in Behat, addressing a rally just 50-odd kilometres from Deoband, taking potshots at Akhilesh Yadav, seeking to know from minorities the benefits of having backed the 'secular block' for seven decades and more.
A couple of days later, Akhilesh Yadav held the year's first significant event in Lucknow, paying obeisance at the Lord Parashuram temple in an apparent bid to woo Brahmins. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath travelled to Deoband on Wednesday to lay the foundation stone of an anti-terror-squad commando training centre to crush any "conspiracy against the nation".
As in life, in politics too, necessity is the mother of all inventions.
(The writer is a journalist)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
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