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Asaduddin Owaisi, an outspoken politician and parliamentarian from Hyderabad, has spilt the beans about one of the worst-kept secrets this election season: That the votes of Muslims are much coveted but their company is a no-no for our so-called secular leaders.

If Sam Pitroda makes a disparaging remark about 1984 anti-Sikh riots, no less than the Prime Minister takes umbrage. But if a Yogi Adityanath or a Giriraj Singh makes their usual, provocative remarks targeted at Muslims, Congress president Rahul Gandhi and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav as other ‘secular’ leaders look the other way.

The silence in most Muslim-dominated habitations in India’s hinterlands is almost eerie. As if there was no election happening! Leaders stay away. Photo-ops with prominent Muslim clerics and politicians are a thing of the past. No political party has sought endorsement from the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid this time. There are no more talks of mob-lynching or references to “Hindu fundamentalists” or attacks on secularism. It takes Prime Minister Narendra Modi to remind the liberal intelligentsia of their “award wapsi” campaign. Yesteryear’s flag-bearers of secularism seem convinced today that the best way to protect it is to avoid Muslims.

The irony is when the Congress party’s Bhopal candidate, Digvijaya Singh, was dialling Hindu seers to visit his constituency, Union home minister Rajnath Singh was visiting Shia clerics in Lucknow to canvass.

Also read: Muslim votes matter: Here’s how they voted for BJP after 2014

At a meeting in Sikandarpur last week, Union minister and Ghazipur MP Manoj Sinha gave a rousing speech: “Don’t vote for me if you think the amount of work I have done in the last five years doesn’t outweigh those done in the previous 50 years.” As he left the dais, a group of Muslim villagers thronged him. “Meet Doctor Javed. He has quit the Samajwadi Party to campaign for me,” Sinha introduced one of them.

About 250 km north of Ghazipur, Union agriculture minister and MP from Motihari Radhamohan Singh was waiting for Hema Malini to show up at his meeting at Kesaria — unmindful of the farmers from nearby villages standing a few metres away. They saied they got “nothing” from the Modi government. Talks of Modi’s promise of doubling their income by 2022 had them in splits: “All we know is ka (k) se kamao, kha se khao.” They will vote for Modi, nonetheless. The minister couldn’t care less. Whenever Radhamohan Singh spotted a visitor from Delhi, he would send him to Muslim-dominated villages and line up dozens of them to say on oath how his development works have compelled them to vote for him.

Nobody could grudge BJP MPs the smile — and smirk — they wear when Muslims show up in their public meetings. Make no mistake. These MPs have no false notions about how many Muslims will vote for them. Just that the presence of Muslims around them gives these MPs a sense of accomplishment.

‘Sabka saath, sabka vikas’ has been finally achieved, howsoever symbolically. Let the secular camp disagree and resent. The Congress party’s 2019 election manifesto has no mention of ‘secular’ or ‘minority’; they figured four or five times in the party’s 2014 election manifesto. Of the 423 Congress candidates in fray in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, only 32 are Muslims — the community constitutes 14.2 per cent of the country’s population.

Also read: BJP wants to defeat the idea of Muslim vote bank by using Muslims

Asaduddin Owaisi sounds helpless when he says Muslims are asked not to speak out because it would help the BJP. No wonder, the irrepressible leader of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) has been rather quiet in the past couple of months. Even Azam Khan, the Samajwadi Party candidate from Rampur who has a penchant for stoking controversies, has been rather restrained. He did trigger a controversy with his “khaki underwear” remark, but he is known for worse. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, not many candidates want him to campaign for them. The only one who invited Azam Khan to canvass for him was ST Hasan, Samajwadi Party candidate from Moradabad.

So why have Muslims become untouchables for the secular camp? AK Antony, of course, convinced Rahul Gandhi that the Congress lost in 2014 because of its pro-minority image. So, the Congress president became a janeu-dhari Shiv-bhakt, visiting temples and sometimes dargahs. He wouldn’t overtly woo Muslims. When was the last time you heard him talking about Muslims and their interests? Wasn’t there something called Sachar committee report?

But Rahul Gandhi expects Muslims to vote for the Congress: First, because they have no other option at the national level; and, second, because he speaks against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its former pracharak, Narendra Modi. If the Congress leaders have a third reason, they haven’t communicated to the Muslims as yet.

Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav defends his secular commitments by citing how he has fielded a Muslim candidate in Kairana constituency that was ravaged by communal riots in 2013. He, however, conceded in the same breath in a recent TV interview that secular parties were on the defensive vis-à-vis Muslims. “Yeh nahin hai ki hum kisi cheez se bachana chahate hain, lekin un cheezon se zaroor bach rahen hain jisse BJP laabh nah uthaa le (It’s not that we want to avoid something, but we are certainly avoiding certain things that the BJP could use for its benefits),” he said. The “something” or the “things” that Akhilesh Yadav was referring to were Muslims.

Also read: What Muslims in India say about Balakot, national security, ISIS and Kashmir

There was a time when the BJP’s political rivals accused it of pursuing an agenda to make Muslims “second-class citizens” in India. Today, the same secular camp is, for all practical purposes, treating Muslims no differently. Owaisi says it would lead to the “marginalisation and ghettoization” of the minority community. You can’t but agree. Talk to Muslims and you will know that they are not quite convinced by the arguments of their self-styled political patrons about their compulsion to play majoritarian politics in Modi era, as they say. In their lame excuses, the minority community sees signs of cowardice, opportunism and lack of ideological conviction.

As a Muslim taxi driver told me in Bhopal last month: “Arre sahib, both Digvijaya Singh and Pragya Thakur love us. And so do Modi and Rahul Gandhi. Only patrakars (journalists) pretend not to understand.”

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