There is a video circulating on social media in which Ritesh Tiwari, a newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party legislator from the Kashipur-Belgachia constituency, says after winning Bengal assembly election 2026 that he will not do a single work for Muslim community, nor even issue certificates to them, because neither did they vote for him nor did he seek their votes.
Unfortunately, such remarks are no longer unusual in the world’s largest democracy. After elections, BJP leaders and legislators increasingly make statements that openly draw political lines along religious identities. In Bengal, before Tiwari, Suvendu Adhikari — now the chief minister — had made a similar remark soon after the results from his Nandigram seat were announced.
The larger question, therefore, is this: how are Muslims in India expected to vote for the BJP?
Representation Crisis: The Vanishing Muslim Candidate in BJP
Whenever elections are announced, political parties begin selecting candidates. Yet, election after election, the world’s largest political party has almost completely stopped nominating Muslims. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP did not field a single Muslim candidate among its more than 400 contestants. The pattern has been repeated across several Assembly elections as well. It followed during Bengal assembly polls too. A decade ago, in rare cases, the party would still field one or two Muslim candidates. Today, even that token presence has nearly disappeared.
Some BJP leaders argue that Muslims are not sufficiently associated with the party, and therefore there are not enough viable Muslim faces to nominate. But that explanation appears weak. The BJP has minority wings across districts in India, and its outreach among sections of Pasmanda Muslims has visibly expanded over the years. More importantly, a party capable of producing chief ministerial candidates out of no where can surely identify Muslim candidates too — if it genuinely wishes to.
Increasingly, the absence of Muslim candidates appears less like an organisational limitation and more like a political strategy (marginalization of Muslims) aimed at consolidating Hindu votes through polarisation.
Campaigning and Manifestos: Decoding the Strategy of Polarisation
But the issue is not limited to candidate selection alone. Muslims — India’s largest religious minority — can still choose to vote for the BJP. Yet between the declaration of candidates and the casting of votes, two crucial phases shape the political atmosphere of every election.
The first is campaigning. From district-level leaders to MPs, ministers, chief ministers, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hate speeches has repeatedly become part of election campaign. Civil society groups often write open letters to the Election Commission of India demanding action against communal campaigning and inflammatory remarks. Yet meaningful intervention rarely follows. Over time, such rhetoric has become so routine that many Indians barely react to it anymore. What was once considered extraordinary is now treated as standard election language.
The second phase is the manifesto. Every party releases a document outlining its vision and priorities for the next five years. Yet BJP manifestos and campaign promises frequently include proposals centred on minority-related laws, religious conversions, madrasa regulations, or the Uniform Civil Code — issues that many Muslims interpret as signals directed against them. In this way, campaign rhetoric gradually transforms into policy language.
So when Muslims are denied representation in candidate selection, targeted through polarising election speeches, and confronted with manifestos that often amplify their insecurities, how are they expected to feel politically included within the BJP’s project?
The Trust Deficit: Why the Saffron Brigade Struggles for the Muslim Vote
It is also important to note that Muslims, in most constituencies, vote overwhelmingly for non-Muslim candidates. Their voting behaviour is not solely driven by religious identity. In fact, one of the enduring ironies of Indian politics is that Muslims are repeatedly asked to prove their secularism, while parties openly mobilising religious majoritarianism rarely face the same scrutiny.
Perhaps that is why the real question is not, “Why don’t Muslims vote for the saffron brigade?” The more uncomfortable question is: what meaningful political, symbolic, or moral reason has the BJP offered Muslims to trust it with their vote?
Needless to revisit what is already well documented in the public domain — the BJP’s political rise was closely linked to the Rath Yatra movement centred around the demand for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Over the last decade as well, new political phrases and narratives such as ‘Love Jihad’, ‘Land Jihad’, ‘Ghuspethia (infiltrator)’, and even ‘bulldozer justice’ have increasingly entered mainstream discourse, almost always with Muslims at the centre of suspicion or hostility.
The citizenship question has increasingly been turned into a life-altering and fear-driven issue through policies such as the CAA and NRC. And now, the newly introduced Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is widely being perceived by many as merely a new name for the NRC, further deepening anxieties around identity, documentation, and belonging.
At the same time, the country has repeatedly witnessed how crimes involving Muslims are often projected as civilisational threats, while cases where Muslims themselves become victims frequently fail to evoke the same outrage, urgency, or justice. In such an atmosphere, the real surprise is not that Muslims hesitate to vote for the BJP. The real question is whether the BJP has genuinely attempted to create the conditions in which Muslims can feel politically respected, represented, and secure enough to trust it with their vote.
