Asaduddin Owaisi, the Hyderabad MP, derisively called a ‘vote katva’, has emerged as a fresh challenge for the Samajwadi Party, which perceives itself as the party in waiting to form the government in UP in 2022.
Owasi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) won five seats in the recently concluded Bihar Assembly elections.
In Uttar Pradesh, which has 19.3 percent Muslim population, the minority votes have been the core support base of secular parties like Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and Congress. The AIMIM had been making forays into UP since 2015 and had contested the 2017 Assembly elections. The SP, in 2017, had cautioned the Muslims against the AIMIM and described Owaisi as the ‘new Jinnah’ in the making.
In fact, 2017 saw the decimation of the Muslim representation in the state. While the BSP fielded 99 Muslim candidates, only five won. Out of the 57 Muslim candidates of the SP, only seven won. And the Congress saw only two of its 22 Muslim candidates emerging victorious. The entry of Owaisi will further take away the Muslim votes from the ‘secular’ parties, thus rendering the Muslim vote useless in Uttar Pradesh, that so far was considered the swing vote.
A political analyst said, “The Owaisi factor in elections is now real. The ‘Hyderabad ka mohalle ka leader’ (Hyderabad’s small leader) is now being dubbed as a ‘king maker’ and taking him lightly is likely to cost the opposition.”
The Samajwadi Party, however, repeats its stated position and AIMIM is a Bharatiya Janata Party stooge and the sole aim of the Hyderabad-based party is to divide the Muslims votes with the ultimate objective of benefiting the BJP.
A SP leader said wherever the AIMIM had contested elections; it had worked for polarisation of voters on communal lines thus consolidating the Hindu vote behind the BJP.
“AIMIM allied with political chameleons such as Bahujan Samaj Party and Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) in Bihar, who have allied or been soft on the BJP on multiple occasions in the past. This raises doubts on his motives — that his efforts are essentially in opposition to the ‘secular’ parties whose main agenda since 2014 has been to defeat the BJP. By planning to go to West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, Owaisi doesn’t help that perception of threat among anti-BJP parties,” said a SP leader.
Political analysts feel that AIMIM has brought in a new angle to politics of Hindi belt states. Although the South still has parties that exclusively represent and cater to Muslim voters, North Indian parties are essentially divided between a Hindutva party BJP and a pool of ‘secular’ parties. Since the BJP always loses out on the Muslim votes and the ‘secular’ parties gain on them, Owaisi’s entry in the Hindi belt evidently divides the Muslim vote.
