Muslim representation in 17th Lok Sabha has increased by five taking the community’s tally to 27 from 22 in the outgoing Lok Sabha with the BJP getting its lone Muslim face as Saumitra Khan, who won from West Bengal against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress.
Most of the winning candidates are from opposition parties while only one candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which won 303 out of 542 seats across the country, could make it to the Lower House.
Saumitra Khan is the lone BJP MP in the current Lok Sabha while Mahbub Ali Kaiser is the Lok Janshakti Party’s (LJP) winning candidate from Khagaria in Bihar. Both will be representing the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the Lok Sabha.
Muslim representation in the 16th Lok Sabha had dipped to its lowest so far at 22. In 15th Lok Sabha, 33 members of the community were elected. The highest number of Muslim MPs in the Lok Sabha was in 1980 when 49 members of the community were elected.
The BJP had fielded six Muslim candidates. Khan, a former Trinamool Congress member who switched to the BJP ahead of the polls, won from Bishnupur in West Bengal, where the lotus bloomed and the BJP won 18 of the total 42 seats.
Khan defeated Trinamool’s Shyamlal Santra by a margin of 78,047 votes. Khan got 6,57,019 votes in his favour.
The BJP had fielded Mafuja Khatun from Jangipur, a constituency where 61.79 per cent of the population is Muslim. She was third while the winner was Trinamool’s, Khalilur Rahaman. The seat was earlier represented by Congress’s Abhijit Mukherjee, son of former President Pranab Mukherjee. Abhijit was second garnering 2,55,836 votes.
Humayun Kabir was another BJP candidate who contested from Murshidabad, where the community comprises 66 per cent of the population. Kabir got 2,47,809 votes but remained third.
Other Muslim candidates of the party failed to save their deposits. The party had fielded three Muslim candidates in Kashmir. Sofi Yousuf contested from Anantnag and garnered only 10,225 votes. Mohammad Maqbool War got 7,894 votes in Baramula while Sheikh Khalid Jehangir got 4,631 votes in Srinagar.
Most of the elected Muslim candidates belong to the Congress (5) and Trinamool Congress (5), followed by the Samajwadi Party (3), Bahujan Samaj Party (3) and the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (3).
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