Asaduddin Owaisi taps the pan-India opportunity to consolidate the Muslim vote bank

Asaduddin Owaisi taps the pan-India opportunity to consolidate the Muslim vote bank.

Asaduddin Owaisi is on a roll. His All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), a party of poor and middle-class Muslims largely based in Hyderabad, is bracing to live up to its name. It outshone Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena in the Maharashtra assembly elections on its debut, winning two seats-urban Byculla and Aurangabad Central-to a lone seat for the latter. It also finished second in three constituencies and third in nine others out of the 24 seats it contested to the 288-member Assembly.

Two seats and 525,000 votes from the Maharashtra sweepstakes later, the AIMIM chief is convinced that "the time has come for Muslims to take the lead and express themselves in a participative democracy and be masters of their own destiny". Read that as a plan for AIMIM to go national.

The party had in the recent past been spreading its wings beyond Hyderabad to other parts of Telangana and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh and even gone on to capture a few seats in municipalities in Nanded, Maharashtra, as well as in Bidar and Basavakalyan in Karnataka. But it is the Maharashtra performance that has propelled the AIMIM president and his younger brother Akbaruddin to try and widen the party's base across the country. On the Owaisis' radar are Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Delhi.

The Owaisis' direct pitch to Maharashtra Muslims was appealing: That at their behest, Telangana has a budget of Rs 1,000 crore for four million Muslims while the 15 million in Maharashtra are allocated half that amount of which, again, only half is spent on them. This dovetailed with the usual emotive issues-the 'masterly inaction' on the Justice V. Srikrishna Commission report on the 1992-93 communal riots in Mumbai;the terror cases foisted on Muslim youths following the Malegaon blasts; 333 Muslims dying in police custody in Maharashtra in a decade; and the community making up 40 per cent of all prisoners in the state.

Asaduddin is now focusing on similar issues of concern to Muslims in other states. His game plan is to bank on the pervasive influence of the social networking websites. "The internet-inspired society browses and thinks differently. Such media fire the imagination of a new generation and more so if they are from an aggrieved minority," he emphasises.

Another facet of the outreach is harping on inequities-inadequate representation in electoral politics and governance and unequal opportunities in education and employment. "The number of Muslim MLAs across states is coming down and their representation in Parliament is poor. I am the only one from the 150 Lok Sabha constituencies in four contiguous states," says Asaduddin, a barrister-at-law from Lincoln's Inn, London.

The AIMIM is growing at a time when Parliament has 23 Muslim MPs, just 4.2 per cent of the strength, whereas the community accounts for 13.4 per cent of the population. Where Asaduddin senses an opportunity is in the disillusionment among Muslims, especially the youth, with the sops-and-doles politics of parties such as the Congress, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party.

The AIMIM chief believes with the ascent of the BJP, his party has an opportunity for a similar rate of growth, though not necessarily in size and electoral numbers. Others are apprehensive. "The Owaisis' rhetoric suffers from the hangover of their pre-Independence roots as a pro-Muslim party in a Muslim-ruled state. They may win an election or two but will in the long term damage the image of the Indian Muslim and destroy the secular fabric," says Abu Asim Azmi, the Samajwadi Party chief in Maharashtra, pointing out that it could lead to greater discrimination and even lead to a veiled apartheid.

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