Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president Mayawati on Friday asked the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to stop opposing reservation for backward Muslims, adding all the BJP-led governments should implement reservation for the community in an honest way and fill the backlog in recruitment to prove that they are different over the issue from other parties.
Ms. Mayawati made the remarks after the statement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Bhopal that majority of Muslims living in India came from backward classes.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly saying at a BJP programme in Bhopal that 80% of Muslims living in India are ‘Pasmanda, backwards, exploited’ is acceptance of the bitter reality that supports the need for reservation for Muslims. So now, in such a situation, apart from stopping the opposition of reservation for backward Muslims, all their governments should honestly implement reservation and fill the backlog in recruitment to prove that they are different from other parties,” wrote Ms. Mayawati, a four-time Uttar Pradesh CM on Twitter.
Addressing a BJP programme in Bhopal on June 27, the Prime Minister said that Pasmanda Muslims were never treated as equal because of vote bank politics.
The term ‘Pasmanda’, derived from Urdu, refers to the socially and economically backward Muslims comprising more than 80% of their population.
In recent times, the BJP made attempts in U.P., India’s politically most crucial state, of reaching out to the Muslim community primarily the Pasmanda, by fielding roughly 90% out of 395 Muslim candidates from the sub-group in Uttar Pradesh Urban Body election held in May 2023 with party leaders including Deputy CM Brajesh Pathak addressing the party’s Pasmanda meetings.
