Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) leader Asaduddin Owaisi, whose plan to contest some seats in Bihar Assembly election has created a political stir, said he does not want to become a Muslim leader. “I just want to become a soldier to fight for the cause of poor and downtrodden, including Muslims, under the leadership of the youth of those sections,” he said while attending a programme here organized by a news channel on Tuesday. “The BJP and the RSS are my enemy Number 1,” he declared.
Owaisi, however, in a threatening tone, said that he would slap criminal defamation suit against those who hurl baseless allegations on him, including the charge that he has underhand electoral deal with the BJP to help the saffron party by denting into the Muslim votes in Bihar’s Seemanchal region. “I will file cases in Hyderabad and force them to visit Hyderabad repeatedly to appear in the court,” he said.
He also claimed that his party would also field non-Muslim candidates as he did it in Maharashtra and Telengana. “Our motive is to stop the BJP,” he added.
Denying the possibility to join any alliance, Owaisi said his party would contest alone. “I will contest only in Seemanchal. But if the baseless allegations continued I will be forced to amend my decision to go beyond Seemanchal,” he said.
The MIM leader accused the RJD, the JD(U), the Congress and the BJP for the backwardness of the poor and Muslims in Bihar. To a query that his party would prove only a ‘vote katwa’ in election, Owaisi said such allegations had been hurled on BSP leader Kanshi Ram too. “I am fighting against the odds. I am not going to budge. It is true that all secular parties should unite to stop the surge of the BJP. But it is not right for any party to say that only it can stop Modi. I am fighting against him and stopped him in Telengana,” he said.
Taking a dig at RJD’s lalu Prasad and Samajwadi Party’s Mulayam Singh Yadav, he said that they make fiery speeches against Modi in public but invite him to marriage receptions. Owaisi also revealed that in 2005 he without being invited had come to Bihar, camped here for four days and campaigned for the RJD. He regretted that the same party was now branding him as a fundamentalist.