Faith Accomplice

Danish Ansari’s role in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Pasmanda politics

- ERAM AGHA

“You are a muslim, what are you doing in a saffron brigade?” Danish Azad Ansari recalled being asked when he was a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Ansari would reply that he had joined because the ABVP was a nationalist organisation. The 34-year-old gave me a similar response in April this year, when I asked him about becoming the only Muslim minister in the Uttar Pradesh government, run by the RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Janata Party. “What I had learnt in the Vidyarthi Parishad,” he said, “the BJP taught me how to implement that in the mainstream.”

A few weeks earlier, Ansari had been named minister of state for minority welfare. He was an unlikely choice. Although he had been an office-bearer in the ABVP and the BJP, as well as the state government’s Urdu committee, he did not receive a ticket for the assembly elections and was elected to the legislative council only in June. Ansari belongs to an oppressed-caste Pasmanda community, whereas the BJP’s appeal to the Muslim community has historically been directed at Shia clerics in Uttar Pradesh.