Opinion Why Mamata Banerjee's visit to Furfura Sharif is not merely ‘Muslim appeasement'

Indian Express

22-04-2025

On March 17, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee visited Furfura Sharif, a popular Sufi shrine in the Hooghly district — almost a decade after her last visit — and took part in Dawat-e-Iftar. Notably, this was the first time that Banerjee was acting as the host of the Iftar party, before which she held a meeting with the local religious leaders. Earlier, a small group of Pirzadas — primarily Pirzada Toha Siddique — used to organise and control such events.
However, Siddiqui, who earlier had had a good relationship with the TMC and seemed to act as a political bridge between the party and the Muslim community of the state, gradually lost his relevance — mainly due to two factors. One, the emergence of other Pirzadas from Furfura pir-family and two, the formation of the Indian Secular Front (ISF) as a political party in 2021. Therefore, this Iftar marked a crucial point in the TMC's electoral politics in a state of which Muslims constitute almost 30 per cent.
This politics should be read in three layers. First, the imagination of a visible 'Muslim politics' — a social negotiation with a presumed homogenous community. Second, the politics centring Furfura Sharif, an influential religio-cultural centre, and third, the growing relevance of the ISF, a platform that aims to consolidate Muslim votes.
Many have seen Banerjee's visit as just another attempt at shoring up Muslim support ahead of the 2026 state assembly elections. The Leader of the Opposition in the state's legislative assembly, BJP 's Suvendu Adhikari, was quick to term it another case of 'minority appeasement'. However, this is a very simplistic, reductionist reading of different factors. It reveals only the surface-level understanding of a complex political approach. To delve deeper, we need to understand both Furufura Sharif as a cultural space and the ISF as a political platform.
Why Furfura Sharif matters
In terms of significance, the Furfura Sharif is said to be second only to the Ajmer Sharif. But it's different from other Sufi shrines. The Furfura Sharif Sufi order was founded by the socio-religious reformer, Pir Maulana Shah Sufi Abu Bakr Siddique (1846-1939), popularly known as 'Dadahuzur' among his millions of disciples spread across what is now West Bengal, Assam, Tripura and Bangladesh.
The shrine's legitimacy stems from Dadahuzur's legacy. His descendants constitute the Pir family that acts as custodians and managers of the shrine. The Furfura Sharif order (silsila) is closely knit and embedded in living networks between the Pirs, their disciples, and novices. These disciples connect with the broader community through regular visits to shrines, madrasahs, masjids, and waz-mahfils (preaching events). Given this closeness between the Pirs, Pirzadas, and their disciples, the political 'recommendations' or 'suggestions' made by the former often strongly influence the latter.
Enter the ISF
The ISF was founded by Pirzada Abbas Siddique — who belongs to the Pir family — in 2021. The party contested the state assembly elections the same year, in alliance with the Left Front and the Congress. It also won one seat from the Muslim-dominated Bhangar constituency, making Pirzada Nawsad Siddique — the younger brother of Abbas Siddique — the party's lone MLA, and in fact, the only non-TMC, non-BJP MLA, in the assembly. Subsequently, the ISF contested the rural panchayat elections in 2023, managing to win around 400 seats despite the massive violence that engulfed the elections. Their performance was the strongest in the southern districts of South 24 Parganas, North 24 Parganas, Howrah, Hooghly, and Medinipur, as well as in the central district of Malda.
However, it is the growing popularity of the ISF among Bengali Muslims in Southern Bengal that has eroded Pirzada Toha Siddique's political relevance for the TMC, which seems to be looking for alternative intermediaries within the Furfura Sharif Pir family. Banerjee's visit is significant for this reason as well.
The ISF is slowly becoming a growing headache for the TMC as it has clearly been eating into the TMC's Muslim vote bank in some parts of southern Bengal. Further, an overwhelming majority of Furfura Sharif's disciples are poor agriculturalists and precariously placed informal or migrant workers. The ISF has been targeting and mobilising these vulnerable groups to forge a new working-class Muslim politics — of a kind that can be aligned with the social justice aspirations of other marginalised social groups, including Dalits and Adivasis.
The possibility of such social justice politics gaining further traction among Muslim voters could potentially pose a serious electoral threat to the TMC, whose strategy for securing Muslim votes has, so far, dodged questions of social justice and genuine empowerment. It has relied, instead, on largely symbolic identity-political gestures and assurances of safety against the anti-minority politics of the BJP. Banerjee's visit to Furfura Sharif needs to be seen as an effort to deflect attention from the social justice politics of the ISF.
The BJP and Adhikari might benefit electorally from communalising her Muslim outreach (and the perceived 'Muslim threat' of the ISF), and they may polarise the electorate along religious lines. But this is a calculated risk that Banerjee is willing to take. Not least because she, too, stands to benefit electorally if concerns over Bengali Muslims' safety take centre-stage instead of questions around social justice and empowerment.