How ‘political iftar' parties disappeared during Modi's rule

New Delhi: The month of Ramzan this year saw fewer political iftar parties hosted by politicians than in the past, especially before 2019.

It was expected that in the run-up to the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, a few political parties eying on the Muslim vote bank would host one but they chose not to.

Barring one state-level event that was organised by Congress-ruled Telegana’s Chief Minister Revanth Reddy on the first Friday of Ramadan, no opposition party, including Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, hosted any political iftar party in the election year.

RJD hosted a political iftar party as latest as last year when it was in the government with Nitish Kumar.

A tradition started by independent India’s first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru at the All India Congress Headquarters in New Delhi continued for decades, barring Lal Bahadur Shastri’s tenure in office.

Political analysts claim that at that point it was Nehru’s way of proving India’s secular credentials and not necessarily a planned mode to reach out to the minority population.

Indira Gandhi, who became the prime minister after the death of Shastri, revived the Nehru tradition but by then the political iftar had changed its character and became the symbol of tokenism, with politicians of different faiths routinely donning symbolic Muslim clothing such as skull caps, scarves and sherwanis.

Iftar parties started being perceived as vote bank politics in the 70s after Indira Gandhi used these lavish events to reach out to upper-class and influential Muslims.

The flavour of political iftar was no longer an honest marker of inclusiveness but it still had a shelf life of about five decades, including the Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s coalition government.

Recalling the political iftar of the 90s, senior journalist and political analyst Shekhar Iyer said that these events were commonplace to find political bigwigs including prominent journalists. 

“Islamic tradition is to feed poor people during the month of Ramzan. In fact, President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam never hosted any political iftar party at Rashtrapati Bhawan and decided to donate that money to orphanages for distributing food and blankets,” Iyer said.

It was the Narendra Modi government that stayed away from political iftar. 

“It is not that these events continued in other forms for other festivals. A pattern was seen during these political iftar periods. If you do not host or do not attend a political iftar, you are not seen as secular,” Iyer added.

A picture from 2011 that remains forever in our memory is the one where Modi was seen refusing to wear a skull cap. Three years later, he clarified saying Mahatma Gandhi never wore one. 

Contrary to popular belief, it was the rejection of any sort of tokenism by Modi, said Iyer.

Modi never attended any political iftar after 2014 including the ones hosted by President Pranab Mukherjee.

The political iftars are reduced to the opposition and regional parties where you will find a handful of prominent Muslim leaders and personalities as a token. 

But they also had to stop such tokenism completely after the country including Muslim intellectuals started speaking in one voice against appeasement politics. 

When asked if it was fear of losing votes of other faiths behind distancing from political iftars, Iyer nodded in yes. 

“RJD, which engineered the Muslim-Yadav equation for decades and hosted political iftar parties as recent as 2023, distanced itself from hosting a political iftar in a crucial election year. Not hosting political iftar further establishes that it was just a rhetoric around tokenism. Every party has realised that their appeasement politics was hurting the majority,” Iyer said. 

Iyer added that even as the opposition has distanced from the optics of political iftar, their basic character has not changed. 

“Now they have devised other ways to please their minority voters and one of the popular ways is to hurt Hindu sentiments by openly cooking and consuming non-veg food during Navratri and Saavan months. In effect, political iftar has made way for the display of non-veg food on social media, suggesting the character cannot be changed. Have you seen any Muslim leader eating in public during fasting hours in the month of Ramzan? Are they not secular? But the Hindu leaders and intellectuals mock the majority faith and still go scot-free,” Iyer added.