Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention at the recently concluded national executive meet of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held in Hyderabad, that the party reach out to the marginalised and “non-elite” sections of minority communities, was not just restricted to the Pasmanda community among Muslims, but also to see ways in which Christian communities in States like Kerala and Goa could be reached out to, especially by the BJP leaders of the northeast.
According to a senior party leader present at the meeting “the big takeaway from the national executive meet was not just about how to expand the party in geographical areas that the BJP had currently meagre presence but also among communities that have considered the party untouchable till now”.
As reported by The Hindu earlier, it was during the BJP's discussion over the party's bypoll wins in Azamgarh and Rampur in Uttar Pradesh (areas with significant minority populations) that the issue came up. "The Prime Minister made an intervention during U.P. unit chief Swatantra Dev Singh's presentation, that there was a need for exploring new social equations within minority communities, the need to look at communities not as monoliths but with different interests and different positions within the social and economic hierarchies of these communities. That issues on which the elites or different ethnicities of a particular communities respond to are different from what the other ethnicities and poor and marginalised within these communities respond to," a senior leader said, explaining the remarks.
