Mumbai: A bespectacled, mild-mannered Muslim cleric stands on a potholed sidewalk in the south Mumbai suburb of Nagpada and speaks to around 150 people seated on red plastic chairs on the street. He wants their votes in the 30 April election.
Traffic crawls slowly behind the audience and curious residents of surrounding buildings gather at their windows to hear the speech and watch the spectacle.
Fingers crossed: A file photo of Maulana Ather Ali, the SP candidate from Mumbai South, at a campaign meeting in Mumbai. Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint
Maulana Ather Ali, 56, sporting a perfectly trimmed white beard and skull cap that make him look more like a scholar than a politician, begins by speaking of emotive issues—of young Muslim men arrested after bomb blasts, communal riots and systemic discrimination. All he can evoke from the crowd in response are polite nods. Aware that the emotional spiel is not striking a chord, Ali deftly moves on to other topics—economic development and education for Muslims—and immediately connects with the audience.
“Why do Muslims have to wait for development? Is this the life we want? Is it not time we asked for our rights as the citizens of this country?” demands Ali and the crowd comes alive, whistling and applauding the Maulana and then chanting, “Maulana Ather Ali aage badho, hum tumhare saath hain”. (Maulana Ather Ali march ahead, we are with you.)
Ali is fighting for election to the Lok Sabha from the prestigious Mumbai South constituency, home to an electorate of 1.7 million people. At a time when emotive issues such as religion have moved to the centre stage of Muslim discourse elsewhere, development and education have emerged as the most pressing issues for Muslims in a constituency where the community has traditionally backed the Congress party.
This time, the All India Ulema (Clerics) Council has decided to field one of its own—Ali—on a Samajwadi Party ticket. The Congress, says the Ulema, has neglected Muslims’ well-being for decades and undermined the community’s legislative representation by not giving a sufficient number of party tickets to Muslims.
“We all want the same thing. We want a decent home. We want education for our children. We want good roads, hospitals. Everything else is just politics,” says S.M. Haroon, who owns a medical supplies store in the Nagpada suburb, where Muslims comprise about 35% of the population. Muslims constitute about 9% of the population in Maharashtra and about 15% in Mumbai.
To be sure, few give Ali a realistic chance of winning in a field of 19 from a constituency where the Congress has lost only two elections in the last three decades—in 1996 and 1999, both times to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).