Will BJP’s V-P pick be from the minority community

Ever since Jagdeep Dhankhar resigned as Vice-President on July 21, Delhi’s power corridors have been abuzz with talk of, ‘after Dhankar who?’

The speculation gathered pace this Friday when the Election Commission set a September 9 date for the poll to the country’s second highest constitutional office.

That there will be an election is clear after the opposition Congress- led INDIA bloc leaders pledged to put up a united candidate. As for the BJP, it is yet to open formal talks on the subject with coalition partners.

Though the hunt for a nominee is progressing quietly behind the veil of secrecy, two surprise names have figured among the list of probables.

These are Arif Mohammad Khan, the Governor of Bihar and Ghulam Nabi Azad, the former Congress leader who retired from the Rajya Sabha in February 2021 after three decades. Azad, who quit the Congress in 2022, has been charting an independent political course in Jammu and Kashmir, his native state but is yet to register any measure of success.

With the rider that nothing is final in politics nor anything cast in stone, a senior BJP leader told The Tribune that he “would not be surprised” if the party’s VP pick was to be either Khan or Azad.

The source appeared particularly bullish on Azad and did not buy the narrative that the BJP, having burnt its fingers with Dhankhar, a rank outsider who joined the BJP only in 2003, won’t risk it again with an ideological stranger.

To make his point, this leader flagged new tidings in the Sangh parivar, the most significant being yet another public outreach by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat with a group of Muslim scholars in New Delhi.

Some BJP sources also speak of the steady stream of Socialists who have come to inhabit the BJP since the time of Atal Behari Vajpayee and the recent trend of avowed Congress leaders entering the saffron camp, ideology notwithstanding.

These include Amarinder Singh and Sunil Jakhar in Punjab, Jyotiraditya Scindia in MP, Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam, Jitin Prasad and RPN Singh in Uttar Pradesh.

For some time now, the BJP has been practising a policy of political pragmatism, accepting into the party one and all. All the new entrants need to do is to pledge public allegiance to the Modi model.

That’s why a section of the BJP is seemingly willing to consider the possibility that the party’s V-P nominee may be from a minority community. One veteran politician of the party smilingly flagged August, “the month of surprises” in Modi’s politics.

It was during this month that Modi took the decision to abrogate Article 370 on August 5, 2019, and one year later hold the ground breaking ceremony for the construction of the Ram Mandir.

As for Arif Mohammad Khan — he has already endeared himself to the BJP by publicly defending several positions the RSS has taken on matters of faith, including the Muslim faith.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, a Kashmiri from Jammu, calls himself a Hindustani Muslim and has long years of parliamentary experience behind him. He has been the longest serving parliamentary affairs minister of the Congress and Congress-led dispensations and a Rajya Sabha member from 1991 to 2021. The PM is said to have hand-picked him to be part of the multi party delegation’s recent global outreach on Operation Sindoor.

In fact, on the day Azad bid farewell to the Rajya Sabha in February 2021, Modi had famously said, “I will not let you retire.” Azad continues to reside in the South Avenue government bungalow that was allocated to him when he was an MP, a rare gesture on the part of a government which didn’t think twice before asking Chirag Paswan to vacate the Janpath bungalow after his father and late LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan died.

Moreover, with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat seeking to project an all embracing image of the Sangh — he has been asking the Hindus not to go looking for shivlings under every mosque — a Muslim as V-P pick may serve to burnish the BJP’s “sabka saath sabka vishwas” claim.

It’s not as if the BJP has never fielded a Muslim for top constitutional positions in the past. Dr APJ Abdul Kalam became the 11th President of India when Vajpayee was PM.

Some BJP leaders also maintain that a “minority candidate” for the V-P’s post may not mean a Muslim — It could mean a representative from the Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi or Jain communities.

Or the PM may take the position that such a high constitutional office should not be viewed from the prism of a majority-minority binary. Whatever the case may be, we will know soon as the last date for filing nominations for the election is August 21.