New Delhi: With Delhi elections around the corner, the BJP is trying its level best to convice the Muslim community to caste their vote in favor of them. Executive member of party's Delhi unit Yasir Ali Jilani with his colleague Jamal Haider at M Block of Batla House with a saffron scarf around his neck sets out to work with his panna, or page.
Jilani, 33, who joined BJP after his college at the age of 21 sets, introduces himself as a 'Panna Pramukh' who is assigned a page of the voter list in his assembly constituency. His job entails visiting every voter named on the page at least four times, and convincing him.
Two weeks ago, while addressing the party's 1,599 booth heads and panna pramukhs from 10 assembly constituencies including Jilani's Okhla, Amit Shah had stressed their importance in winning an election. “The reason we lost three or four elections in Delhi is that our tradition of panna pramukhs had disappeared,” the BJP president had said.
“To win an election based on speeches and photos of leaders is not the job of a BJP worker. A BJP's worker's job is to reach out to every person.”
Jilani and his colleagues Haider and Abrar Choudhary share voters across 90 polling booths in their muslim dominated area around Okhla, each of them handling 10 to 15 pages of voter list. The seat was last won by the Congress.
“There was a time when one could not even hand out a BJP pamphlet in the area, but now I can fearlessly wear my scarf and go door to door,” Jilani says. “There still are people who question my loyalty to my religion because I am loyal to the BJP, but it was Vajpayeeji's ideology that impressed me as a student and I have been with the party since.”
According to a report published in a leading English daily, Mafia Begum, 60, a resident of M Block's lane no. 10 complaint that she is not receiving her old age pension to which Jilani replied “Press the button next to the lotus, the lotus of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. We will get you your pension.”
Another resident Younis, 25, had a lot to say against BJP regarding why the central government took the US nuclear deal forward, about the rising prices of medicines, and particularly why the BJP chose Kiran Bedi as its chief ministerial candidate.
Jilani however made an unsuccessful attempt to convince him by describing what Congress government has not even tried to do for the constituency in its rule.
"Your government has done nothing for Muslims either,” Younis tells him. “It cannot control the RSS and the VHP on the ‘love jihad' campaign. Why will I waste my vote on the BJP?”
Many voters, in fact, are put off by Jilani's saffron scarf, though some do buy the promise of development. And from a balcony, two women ask Jilani to shout out his party's plan for them. After that leaves him breathless in a few minutes, they giggle and tell him they don't intend to vote at all.
Niyaz Ahmed Factoo of N block, voter number 931 on Jilani's page, tells him, “We want the roads in our locality improved; it would be impossible to take anyone to hospital in an emergency.” He will consider a party that promises development, he says.
Jilani has targeted at least 40,000 votes for the BJP from the constituency with 1.46 lakh Muslims. “It's not an easy task to get the BJP more Muslims votes, but we will do all we can as panna pramukhs. This time we will get more votes than before,” he says, as he walks up to another door.
