No Place for Muslims

The BJP’s fielding of Ghanshyam Lodhi from Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur seat has brought down the curtain on cabinet minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi’s bid to enter Parliament. He was already denied reelection to Rajya Sabha from Jharkhand. Now, the BJP, for the first time since 1990, will have no Muslim face in Parliament. Two other Muslims, Sayed Zafar Islam and M.J. Akbar, have been denied reelection. It also has no Muslim MLA in the community’s strongholds in UP, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam.

—Kaushik Deka with Rohit Parihar, Anilesh S. Mahajan, Kiran D. Tare, Prashant Srivastava and Amitabh Srivastava