New Delhi, India – It was the month of Ramadan in 1974, and the northern city of Lucknow, a hub of India’s Shia community, was on the boil.
Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, a stalwart of India’s then-ruling Indian National Congress party, had taken over as the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, whose capital is Lucknow, only a few months earlier. Shia-Sunni clashes had erupted at a time on the Muslim calendar that represents peace, prayer, reflection and a sense of community.
To push for a truce, Bahuguna invited Shia leader Ashraf Hussain for a meeting. Hussain refused, saying he was unable to come because he was fasting.
So Bahuguna made Hussain an offer: He could break his fast at the chief minister’s residence. Hussain accepted. The menu included fruit, sherbet, sheermal, kebabs and Lucknow’s famous biryani. And successful truce talks.
At a time when Hindu-Muslim tensions in Uttar Pradesh and many other parts of India were also on the rise, Bahuguna’s iftars became a yearly affair. In subsequent years, the meals were planned, and guest lists started expanding.
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In his book An Indian Political Life: Charan Singh and Congress Politics, Paul R Brass noted that Bahuguna established “a happy rapport with the Muslims” by acting boldly to suppress “anti-Muslim rioting”.
The veteran politician started a phenomenon that has since become a staple of India’s political calendar: Ramadan is crammed with iftars hosted by parties and politicians eager to host influential Muslims as they court the community’s votes. Over the past 50 years, these iftars have become shows of political strength and platforms to forge alliances or to forgive past skirmishes to move on.
On the one hand, analysts said, political iftars help underscore India’s secular identity – non-Muslim political leaders hosting Muslims for a meal during the holy month. “Iftar reflected a certain notion of plurality, an idea of celebrating differences in commonality,” sociologist Shiv Visvanathan told Al Jazeera.
But political iftars have also attracted increasing pushback — and not just from current Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which has for the most part shunned these events. Critics have argued that these iftars are performative acts that are more about the interests of the leaders hosting them than about the Muslim community.
“It was not sought by Muslims, and we must always remember that. Political iftar parties were not a creation of the Muslims,” said Rasheed Kidwai, a political analyst who has attended several such events. “Political iftar was a kind of religious outreach programme.”
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“It was envisaged by non-Muslim political actors, and the Muslims were guests. They were just the showpieces.”
When Indira Gandhi used iftars for revival — but failed
By the mid-1970s, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s relations with Bahuguna, her party leader in charge of the politically critical state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous, often dominated headlines. The narrative: Bahuguna’s popularity in Uttar Pradesh, across all communities, unsettled Gandhi, whose courtiers tried to shape her mind against the state leader.
In 1975, Bahuguna resigned. Some said he was pushed into quitting. That year would prove the start of one of independent India’s most tumultuous periods.
Faced with a student movement against her and an emboldened political opposition, Gandhi was also found guilty by a High Court of misusing state resources to win the 1971 elections. A day after India’s Supreme Court upheld that verdict, which also barred her from contesting elections for six years, Gandhi imposed a state of national emergency, arresting opposition leaders and suspending civil liberties.
The state of emergency would also strain the Congress party’s ties with one of its most loyal support bases: India’s Muslims.
Since independence in 1947, the community — India today has 200 million Muslims, behind only Indonesia and Pakistan — had largely voted for the Congress party, initially under the nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and then under Gandhi. Survivors of the bloody partition of British India, which killed more than 2 million people and displaced millions, India’s Muslims faced questions about their place in the new nation, and a secular Nehru, who committed himself to safeguarding their security, was seen as their best bet.
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That pattern held all the way up until and including the 1971 elections, which Gandhi won, Theodore P Wright Jr, the late political scientist known for his work on South Asian politics, wrote in 1977 in Asian Survey, a California-headquartered journal.
However, during the national emergency, Gandhi’s government oversaw two campaigns that alienated Muslims.
An aggressive family planning initiative aimed at controlling population growth used forced sterilisations that spawned fears among Muslims that a Hindu majority country was in essence trying to end the growth of their community. In several instances, men from villages with large Muslim populations were rounded up and taken to sterilisation camps, where they were forced to undergo vasectomies. In some cases, the men fought back, leading to deadly clashes with security forces. In all, from 1974 to 1979, India sterilised more than 18 million people — double the number that underwent sterilisation in the previous five years.
At the same time, Gandhi’s government led a large slum demolition campaign as part of an urban beautification effort that sought to clear informal settlements in cities. Tens of thousands of people were forcibly evicted from their homes as bulldozers tore down their shanties. In many cases, they were not offered any alternative housing. Muslims, India’s poorest community by religion, were disproportionately impacted.
Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, was the face of these campaigns, which stirred widespread resentment among Muslims.
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After the state of emergency was lifted, Bahuguna left the Congress to join a newly formed group of other defectors called the Congress for Democracy (CFD). Religious leaders like Abdullah Bukhari, the shahi imam of Delhi’s Jama Mosque, openly backed the new group, underscoring the disenchantment with Indira Gandhi among many in the community.
As she prepared for snap elections in 1977 after lifting the emergency, analysts said, Indira Gandhi began courting the Muslim voter base more than before, desperate to woo them back. She nominated 38 Muslim candidates for the elections, an increase from 25 nominations in 1971. She promoted Justice Mirza Hameedullah Beg to the Supreme Court’s chief justice over more senior judges.
And she picked a trick from her ally-turned-rival Bahuguna’s playbook: She began to hold lavish, carefully curated iftar parties during Ramadan, sharing the evening meal with a range of prominent Muslim diplomats, bureaucrats and journalists.
Nehru too used to hold iftars at the Congress party headquarters for Muslim friends and colleagues.
But Indira Gandhi’s iftars were different. She used them as a strategy to mobilise elite Muslims, “projecting an impression that the political class is sensitive about the minority community and its culture”, Hilal Ahmed, a political scientist whose work focuses on political Islam and Indian democracy, told Al Jazeera.
Kidwai, the analyst, said: “[Indira Gandhi’s] guest list was curated, keeping international perception in mind.” She wanted to show the world, Kidwai said, that “Muslims have a prominent place in India.” And to do that, she invited “the so-called cream of [Muslim] society”.
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But the iftars couldn’t save Indira Gandhi politically. Muslims “shifted away from Indira, resulting in her downfall”, Wright wrote.
She lost the elections to a diverse alliance of parties called the Janata Party, including the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, which later became the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and regional left-wing parties.
Still, the practice of the political iftar continued, offering stories of communal amity even as they also grew more controversial.
An iftar to remember
After storming to power in New Delhi, the Janata Party’s president, Chandra Shekhar, who would briefly become prime minister more than a decade later, started organising iftar parties near the Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory in Delhi. These would be attended by senior politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders.
Since then, several prime ministers, state chief ministers and major political parties have hosted iftars. Once again, Uttar Pradesh led the way: Regional parties like the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party each held competing iftars.
These were shows of strength. Who attended and who didn’t would reveal political allegiances. Who got invited and who didn’t would be seen as an indicator of who was in a host’s trusted circle and who was out of favour.
Some iftars stood out.
Kidwai fondly remembered some hosted by Rajiv Gandhi, the eldest son of Indira.
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Indira Gandhi had come back to power in 1980. Rajiv succeeded her as prime minister after she was shot dead in 1984.
One particularly memorable occasion for Kidwai was in the late 1980s – Kidwai thinks it was 1987. Rajiv, the prime minister, drove himself to the iftar in a Mercedes W126. Foreign diplomats were in attendance.
After breaking the fast, Kidwai joined other Muslims for the evening Maghrib prayer when he noticed that the country’s first Sikh president, Zail Singh, was alongside them. Singh was wearing his trademark crisp white sherwani coat with a rose in the breast pocket.
“He joined in, and nobody could tell him not to; he is the president,” Kidwai recalled, shocked. “Despite being a Sikh, Singh knew how to offer [Muslim] prayers, and he offered it with us.”
Four decades later, that memory is a reminder to Kidwai of how different the times were then.
“It was also a thing about how easy religion was – and nobody was debating, no columns were written,” he said.
But to Ahmad, the political scientist, such iftars were always “problematic”.
Unlike when friends host an iftar, he said, “a politician’s invite is to capitalise on the secular element of it, a very rigid and very problematic form of secularism.”
‘Never to serve common Muslims’
The emergence and evolution of political iftars are a postcolonial phenomenon, Ahmed said. Unlike colonial authorities, who tried to not intervene in Indian cultural or religious life, independent India’s approach to secularism involved celebrating “religion as a form of culture”, he said.
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The political iftars fit neatly into that paradigm. At times, the parties resembled fancy galas. Non-Muslim politicians would scramble to acquire churidars, keffiyehs, achkans and skull caps to wear to these gatherings. While the iftars were touted as inclusive, academics and political analysts pointed to their exclusive nature and curated guest lists.
“This was never to serve common Muslims. Basically, it is the political class reaching out to a handpicked section” that could mediate with the larger Muslim population, said Asim Ali, a political analyst and columnist.
By the early 1990s after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by a mob of far-right Hindus, Muslim insecurities were high across India. That was also when colour television had reached millions of Indian homes.
The iftar parties became a “shortcut” for politicians to signal “inclusion”.
“Like wearing a skull cap, click a photograph wearing a sherwani,” said Ali, adding that throwing an iftar meal was much cheaper than solving the community’s issues. “Iftar parties are theatricalisation of politics.”
In many cases, “corruption in a moral sense” had taken over iftar parties, Kidwai said, prompting Islamic scholars to issue warnings against attending iftar parties thrown by politicians.
Abdullah Bukhari, shahi imam of the Jama Mosque, described political iftar parties as “a vulgar display of material wealth and power” while speaking to reporters in 2000. “Instead of highlighting the Islamic character of this holy month, iftar parties have been politicised.”
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At times, for instance, hosts had to be reminded not to serve alcohol, forbidden in Islam, at iftar parties. Kidwai said there was often “class segregation” at the events.
“People would start eating before the time. Sometimes there was no proper prayer arrangement,” Kidwai told Al Jazeera.
As India’s politics changed, so did the iftars – mirroring the currents shaping the world’s largest democracy.
‘The loss of difference’
In December 2001 when the right-wing coalition government headed by BJP veteran Atal Bihari Vajpayee was struggling to keep its alliance together, Sonia Gandhi, then-Congress chief and leader of the opposition in parliament, hosted an iftar at the party headquarters on Delhi’s Akbar Road.
What grabbed headlines was her guest list: It included disgruntled ministers from the ruling government – Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav – and triggered speculation of a political realignment.
Ultimately, Vajpayee would complete his term before losing elections in 2004 to Congress.
A decade later after a Modi-led BJP decimated the Congress to storm back to power in 2014, the tectonic shifts in India would once again be reflected in Sonia Gandhi’s iftar party. This time, her major alliance partners – including regional parties from Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu-Kashmir – were missing.
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Despite the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian politics, Vajpayee hosted iftars during Ramadan. He would wear a skull cap and check on guests at the parties, making sure they were eating well.
Vajpayee never had a majority in parliament and needed the support of secular parties to stay in power.
“After the Babri Masjid demolition, the BJP had become a party which nobody wanted to ally with. Vajpayee’s motive behind iftar parties was not so much to gain Muslim votes but to cater to the alliance of other secular parties,” Ali said.
Vajpayee also understood the symbolism of iftar imagery for international relations, Kidwai noted. “He had an eye on international politics and hoped [these tactics would] help India in countering the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Pakistan in particular, and make up for the oversight or excesses that were committed on the grounds of communal violence.” The OIC has consistently been critical of India’s position on Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is claimed by both New Delhi and Islamabad and partly held by both.
In contrast, Modi won the elections in 2014 – and again in 2019 – with an absolute majority, meaning that unlike Vajpayee, he did not need to pander to allies.
He has never hosted an iftar or attended one. Pranab Mukherjee, India’s president when Modi first came to power, would hold annual iftars. Modi skipped them all. Initially, some of his cabinet ministers would attend, but slowly, they dropped out.
Some political leaders still attend iftar parties – like Delhi’s newly elected chief minister, the BJP’s Rekha Gupta, this month – but such instances are rare.
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After Mukherjee left the president’s office in 2017, President Ram Nath Kovind ended the practice of hosting iftars. “After the president took over office, he decided there would be no religious celebrations or observances in a public building, such as Rashtrapati Bhavan [the official residence of the president], at taxpayer expense,” Kovind’s office told reporters.
Sonia Gandhi and the Congress continued hosting their iftars for a while. The 2015 iftar was held over chicken biryani, fish fingers and paneer lathered with masala, followed by jalebi and phirni.
But since 2018, the Congress stopped hosting iftar parties as well.
That isn’t surprising, Ahmed said. In postcolonial India, the dominant narrative of each era has determined the vocabulary and action of all political actors, he argued.
“During the Congress’s time, inclusiveness and secularism were the dominant discourse of Indian politics,” Ahmed told Al Jazeera. “The dominant political narrative after Modi is driven by Hindu nationalism.”
Parties other than the BJP have “started believing that if they raise the question of Muslims, it will become counterproductive, and they eventually lose [Hindu] votes”, he said.
To Visvanathan, the sociologist, the political iftars, for all of their shortcomings, represented a “joy of difference”. What’s happening now, he said, is the “loss of difference, the celebration of difference”.
“With majoritarianism, things such as this joy are disappearing.”
