Saal ek, shuruaat anek: Why PM Narendra Modi's meeting with Muslim leaders matters

It’s not even a month since Narendra Modi’s first year anniversary in office as the Prime Minister but the PM seems to already have taken his slogan, ‘saal ek, shuruaat anek’, to heart. First on the ‘change’ list: a strong message to the saffron parivar. Hate speech will not be tolerated,  he said in an interview to UNI : “Asked how he would rein in such elements, PM Modi said, “Some unfortunate comments have been made, which were totally uncalled for. Our Constitution guarantees religious freedom to every citizen.” Modi doubled down on that message on Tuesday when he met with a 30-member delegation of Muslim leaders led by Imam Umer Ahmed Ilyasi, the chief of All India Imam Organization, and appealed to them to judge him on the basis of his actions and performance not by what his opponents have been saying about him. According to reports, the Prime Minister assured the leaders that he did not believe in politics which seeks to divide people on communal lines and neither should they. [caption id=“attachment_2276924” align=“alignleft” width=“380” class=” “] Representative article. AFP[/caption] “Politics of majority and minority had caused a lot of damage” to the country, a PMO statement said. Speaking to The Indian Express , Ilyasi said that the PM assured them that he was responsible for every Indian and added that “if you knock on my door at 12 in the night, I will respond”. “We told the PM that while he speaks mann ki baat, we have come to tell him our dil ki baat, our concerns about how, when he was talking Make in India in Germany, some people here were talking to destroy India.” Modi’s statement can be seen by some as a clear message to the Sangh Parivar and right wing fringe groups who have mired the government in multiple controversies in its first year in power. It’s not just those outside the government, even the BJP’s MPs and other leaders have managed to stay in the headlines thanks to insensitive statements towards minorities. An  article in The Economist  in January had pointed out that BJP workers were as inspired by the party’s Hindutva agenda as they were by Modi’s zeal to work for a modern India, and thanks to this, were being an impediment to the government’s plans. Firstpost columnist  Saroj Nagi had noted  in her article: “The BJP’s victory and Modi’s elevation has given a boost to the votaries of the Sangh ideology to raise their decibel levels, flex their muscles, speak their mind and act on their agenda of hammering society into a shape they want in full faith that they will not be punished.” The Prime Minister’s silence over every one of the controversies was seen as turning a blind eye towards them since he had relied on their backing to come to power. His views in the public arena largely dealt with providing good governance while sidestepping the headlines that his followers were making. Even the Prime Minister’s rally at Mathura to celebrate a year of being in power was seen as another attempt at reaching out to his key voter base. As Sandip Roy noted in this Firstpost article, “By making the trip to Mathura, Narendra Modi is not just paying his respects to Deen Dayal Upadhyay, as he is perfectly entitled to do, but also signalling one more step in a far more ambitious project of setting the new ideological normal.” However, are things really in for a change? The Prime Minister’s meeting with the Muslim community leaders and a denouncement of communal activity could be seen as a rap on the knuckles for the right wing that doesn’t seem to fall in line with his government’s line. But this isn’t  the first time Modi is meeting with the Muslim community’s representatives. They’ve met with him as recently as April  when he promised to tackle all their grievances on all social issues in the coming days. The shadow of the 2002 riots in Gujarat continue to dog the Prime Minister when it comes to the Muslim community. As this piece by Ehtasham Khan noted , most Muslim community leaders who have attempted to build bridges and deal with the Prime Minister still aren’t the ones who have a support base to ensure that it translates into a change of sentiment on the ground. The Prime Minister’s meetings with community leaders so far has yielded the right optics but aren’t really making deep inroads into earning the trust of the community just yet. Following the vandalism in churches in Delhi, the Prime Minister in February showed the initiative by saying that the government wouldn’t allow any community to incite hate against any other one. Such meetings may be small steps towards repairing his relations with the community but he he has a long way to go before he can claim to enjoy their trust.