India’s ‘political iftars’ once stopped riots. Are they corrupt stunts now?

Lucknow, a center for India’s Shia community, was at the forefront of the month of Ramadan in 1974.

Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, a stalwart of India’s then-ruling Indian National Congress party, had taken over as the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, whose capital is Lucknow, only a few months earlier. At a time when the Muslim calendar calls for peace, prayer, reflection, and a sense of community, there had been a wave of Shia-Sunni conflict.

To push for a truce, Bahuguna invited Shia leader Ashraf Hussain for a meeting. Hussain rebuffed, claiming that he was unable to attend because of his fast.

So Bahuguna made Hussain an offer: He could break his fast at the chief minister’s residence. Hussain consented. The menu included fruit, sherbet, sheermal, kebabs and Lucknow’s famous biryani. and successful negotiations for a truce.

At a time when Hindu-Muslim tensions in Uttar Pradesh and many other parts of India were also on the rise, Bahuguna’s iftars became a yearly affair. The meals were planned throughout the years, and guests started growing.

In his book An Indian Political Life: Charan Singh and Congress Politics, Paul R Brass noted that Bahuguna established “a happy rapport with the Muslims” by acting boldly to suppress “anti-Muslim rioting”.

The veteran politician spearheaded a trend that has since become a staple of India’s political calendar: Ramadan is full of iftars hosted by politicians and political parties eager to welcome powerful Muslims in order to win their support. Over the past 50 years, these iftars have become shows of political strength and platforms to forge alliances or to forgive past skirmishes to move on.

Political iftars, according to analysts, help to highlight India’s secular identity by hosting Muslims for meals during the holy month. “Iftar reflected a certain notion of plurality, an idea of celebrating differences in commonality”, sociologist Shiv Visvanathan told Al Jazeera.

Political iftars have, however, attracted more and more opposition, not just from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has largely shunned these events. Critics have argued that these iftars are performative acts that are more about the interests of the leaders hosting them than about the Muslim community.

Muslims did not seek it, and we must always remember that. Political iftar parties were not a creation of the Muslims”, said Rasheed Kidwai, a political analyst who has attended several such events. Political iftar was a “religious outreach program” in its purest form.

“It was envisaged by non-Muslim political actors, and the Muslims were guests. They were merely “the showpieces.”

When Indira Gandhi attempted to revive using iftars but was unsuccessful.

By the mid-1970s, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s relations with Bahuguna, her party leader in charge of the politically critical state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous, often dominated headlines. The courtiers tried to persuade Gandhi against the state leader because of Bahuguna’s popularity in Uttar Pradesh, across all communities, and the narrative.

In 1975, Bahuguna resigned. Some claimed that he was pressured into quitting. That year would prove the start of one of independent India’s most tumultuous periods.

A High Court found Gandhi guilty of using state resources to win the elections of 1971 in the wake of a student movement against her and a resurgent political opposition. A day after India’s Supreme Court upheld that verdict, which also barred her from contesting elections for six years, Gandhi imposed a state of national emergency, arresting opposition leaders and suspending civil liberties.

The Congress party’s ties to one of its most devoted supporters, the Muslims of India, would also be strained by the state of emergency.

Since independence in 1947, the community — India today has 200 million Muslims, behind only Indonesia and Pakistan — had largely voted for the Congress party, initially under the nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and then under Gandhi. A secular Nehru, who made it his best bet, was viewed as the country’s best chance for survivors of the bloody division of British India, which resulted in the displacement of millions of people and the deaths of millions of people.

That pattern held all the way up until and including the 1971 elections, which Gandhi won, Theodore P Wright Jr, the late political scientist known for his work on South Asian politics, wrote in 1977 in Asian Survey, a California-headquartered journal.

However, Gandhi’s government was in charge of two campaigns that alienated Muslims during the national emergency.

An aggressive family planning initiative aimed at controlling population growth used forced sterilisations that spawned fears among Muslims that a Hindu majority country was in essence trying to end the growth of their community. Men from villages with significant Muslim populations were rounded up and taken to sterilization camps where they were forced to have vasectomies in numerous instances. In some cases, the men fought back, leading to deadly clashes with security forces. Between 1974 and 1979, India sterilized more than 18 million people, twice the total number of people who had undergone sterilization in the previous five years.

At the same time, Gandhi’s government led a large slum demolition campaign as part of an urban beautification effort that sought to clear informal settlements in cities. As a result of bulldozers’ demolition of their shanties, tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes. In many cases, they were not offered any alternative housing. Muslims, India’s least-beyond-herald by religion group, suffered disproportionately.

Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, was the face of these campaigns, which stirred widespread resentment among Muslims.

Bahuguna left the Congress to join a newly formed group of other defectors known as the Congress for Democracy (CFD). Religious leaders like Abdullah Bukhari, the shahi imam of Delhi’s Jama Mosque, openly backed the new group, underscoring the disenchantment with Indira Gandhi among many in the community.

According to analysts, Indira Gandhi began courting the Muslim electorate more frequently as she made preparations for snap elections in 1977 as she hoped to recoup them. She nominated 38 Muslim candidates for the elections, an increase from 25 nominations in 1971. Prior to more senior judges, she elevated Justice Mirza Hameedullah Beg to the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court.

And she picked a trick from her ally-turned-rival Bahuguna’s playbook: She began to hold lavish, carefully curated iftar parties during Ramadan, sharing the evening meal with a range of prominent Muslim diplomats, bureaucrats and journalists.

Nehru used to host iftars for Muslim friends and associates at the Congress party headquarters.

But Indira Gandhi’s iftars were different. Hilal Ahmed, a political scientist whose work focuses on political Islam and Indian democracy, said she used them as a strategy to mobilise elite Muslims. “They projected an impression that the political class is sensitive about the minority community and its culture,” Ahmed said.

Kidwai, the analyst, said: “]Indira Gandhi’s] guest list was curated, keeping international perception in mind”. According to Kidwai, she wanted to demonstrate to the world that “Muslims have a prominent place in India.” And to do that, she invited “the so-called cream of]Muslim] society”.

However, Indira Gandhi couldn’t be saved politically by the iftars. Muslims “shifted away from Indira, resulting in her downfall”, Wright wrote.

A diverse coalition of parties, including the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, which later became the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well as regional left-wing groups, won the election.

Still, the practice of the political iftar continued, offering stories of communal amity even as they also grew more controversial.

An iftar to remember

Chandra Shekhar, the Janata Party’s president, began organizing iftar parties close to the Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory in Delhi, after taking office in New Delhi. He would briefly serve as prime minister a decade later. These would be attended by senior politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders.

Iftars have been held at various prime ministers, state chief ministers, and major political parties since then. Once again, Uttar Pradesh led the way: Regional parties like the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party each held competing iftars.

These were strong demonstrations. Who attended and who didn’t would reveal political allegiances. Who was invited and who wasn’t would be seen as a sign of a host’s devoted circle and who was in trouble.

Some iftars stood out.

Kidwai fondly recalls events that Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s eldest son, hosted.

Indira Gandhi had come back to power in 1980. After her 1984 death, Rajiv assumed her post as prime minister.

One particularly memorable occasion for Kidwai was in the late 1980s – Kidwai thinks it was 1987. In a Mercedes W126, the prime minister Rajiv took his own vehicle to the iftar. Foreign diplomats were in attendance.

Kidwai and other Muslims began the evening Maghrib prayer after breaking the fast when Zail Singh, the nation’s first Sikh president, spotted him. Singh was wearing his trademark crisp white sherwani coat with a rose in the breast pocket.

Kidwai recalls being shocked and recalls that “he joined in, and nobody could tell him not to,” “he is the president.” “Despite being a Sikh, Singh knew how to offer]Muslim] prayers, and he offered it with us”.

That memory serves as a reminder to Kidwai of how the times were at the time forty-eight years later.

“It was also a thing about how easy religion was – and nobody was debating, no columns were written”, he said.

However, such iftars were always “problematic” to Ahmad, a political scientist.

Unlike when friends host an iftar, he said, “a politician’s invite is to capitalise on the secular element of it, a very rigid and very problematic form of secularism”.

Never to be in the way of common Muslims

The emergence and evolution of political iftars are a postcolonial phenomenon, Ahmed said. In contrast to colonial authorities, who aimed to avoid interfering with Indian cultural or religious life, independent India celebrated “religion as a form of culture,” he claimed.

The political iftars fit neatly into that paradigm. The parties occasionally resembled extravagant galas. Non-Muslim politicians would scramble to acquire churidars, keffiyehs, achkans and skull caps to wear to these gatherings. Academics and political analysts criticized the iftars for their exclusive nature and carefully curated guest lists, despite their claim to be inclusive.

“This was never to serve common Muslims. According to Asim Ali, a political analyst and columnist, “it is the political class reaching out to a handpicked section” that could serve as a mediator for the larger Muslim population.”

By the early 1990s after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by a mob of far-right Hindus, Muslim insecurities were high across India. When color television first arrived in the homes of millions of people in India.

The iftar parties became a “shortcut” for politicians to signal “inclusion”.

According to Ali, “Click a photo with a sherwani, like wearing a skull cap,” adding that providing an iftar meal was much less expensive than resolving the community’s issues. “Iftar parties are theatricalisation of politics”.

According to Kidwai, “corruption in a moral sense” had frequently taken over iftar parties, which in turn gave Islamic scholars a warning against attending political iftar parties.

Abdullah Bukhari, shahi imam of the Jama Mosque, described political iftar parties as “a vulgar display of material wealth and power” while speaking to reporters in 2000. Iftar parties have been politicized, according to the statement “instead of highlighting the Islamic character of this holy month.”

At times, for instance, hosts had to be reminded not to serve alcohol, forbidden in Islam, at iftar parties. According to Kidwai, there is frequently “class segregation” at the events.

“People would start eating before the time. Kidwai told Al Jazeera that there occasionally was a “proper prayer arrangement.”

As India’s politics changed, so did the iftars – mirroring the currents shaping the world’s largest democracy.

The difference disappears,

In December 2001 when the right-wing coalition government headed by BJP veteran Atal Bihari Vajpayee was struggling to keep its alliance together, Sonia Gandhi, then-Congress chief and leader of the opposition in parliament, hosted an iftar at the party headquarters on Delhi’s Akbar Road.

Her guest list, which included angry ministers from the ruling coalition, Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav, sparked rumors of a political realignment.

Ultimately, Vajpayee would complete his term before losing elections in 2004 to Congress.

The tectonic shifts in India would once more be reflected in Sonia Gandhi’s iftar party a decade after a Modi-led BJP-led Congress came to power in 2014. This time, her major alliance partners – including regional parties from Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu-Kashmir – were missing.

During Ramadan, Vajpayee hosted iftars in spite of the BJP’s Hindu-majoritarian politics. He would wear a skull cap and check on guests at the parties, making sure they were eating well.

Vajpayee relied on the support of secular parties to maintain control of the parliament because she never had a majority.

“After the Babri Masjid demolition, the BJP had become a party which nobody wanted to ally with. Ali said that Vajpayee’s motivation behind iftar parties was more to support the alliance of other secular parties than to win Muslim supporters.

Vajpayee also understood the symbolism of iftar imagery for international relations, Kidwai noted. He hoped that these strategies would help India counteract the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), particularly Pakistan, and make up for the oversight or excesses committed on the grounds of communal violence. The OIC has consistently been critical of India’s position on Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is claimed by both New Delhi and Islamabad and partly held by both.

In contrast, Modi won the elections in 2014 and 2019 with an absolute majority, which means that, in contrast to Vajpayee, he was free to offer favors to allies.

He has never hosted an iftar or attended one. When Modi first came to power, President Punjab Mukherjee would hold annual iftars. Modi skipped them all. Some of his cabinet ministers were initially scheduled to visit, but over time they all stopped.

Some political leaders still attend iftar parties – like Delhi’s newly elected chief minister, the BJP’s Rekha Gupta, this month – but such instances are rare.

President Ram Nath Kovind stopped hosting iftars after Mukherjee left the president’s office in 2017. “After the president took over office, he decided there would be no religious celebrations or observances in a public building, such as Rashtrapati Bhavan]the official residence of the president], at taxpayer expense”, Kovind’s office told reporters.

For a while, Sonia Gandhi and the Congress held their iftars. The 2015 iftar was held over chicken biryani, fish fingers and paneer lathered with masala, followed by jalebi and phirni.

However, the Congress has stopped holding iftar parties since 2018.

That isn’t surprising, Ahmed said. He argued that the vocabulary and actions of all political actors have been influenced by the predominate narrative of each period in postcolonial India.

“During the Congress’s time, inclusiveness and secularism were the dominant discourse of Indian politics”, Ahmed told Al Jazeera. Hindu nationalism is the driving force behind Modi’s dominant political narrative.

Parties other than the BJP have “started believing that if they raise the question of Muslims, it will become counterproductive, and they eventually lose]Hindu] votes”, he said.

Despite their flaws, the political iftars, according to Visvanathan, represented a “joy of difference.” What’s happening now, he said, is the “loss of difference, the celebration of difference”.

Source: Aljazeera