All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen president Asaduddin Owaisi’s campaign to find a foothold in Uttar Pradesh is posing a serious challenge to Muslim-Yadav combination of the Samajwadi Party. Owaisi is desperately trying to tap the discontent among the Muslims by accusing the secular parties, particularly Samajwadi Party, of reducing Muslims to “a second-fiddle” role in electoral politics of Uttar Pradesh.
To corner the Samajwadi Party ahead of the 2022 UP assembly elections, Owaisi is not only questioning the record and silence of the non-Bharatiya Janata Party secular parties on issues critical to the community and their security but specifically trying to break the 'M-Y' combination by creating distrust among Muslims towards the SP.
He is doing this by questioning the loyalty of the SP's core support base of the Hindu Yadav community, to which SP chief Akhilesh Yadav belongs. AIMIM leaders also tell the Muslims in private that M-Y stands for “Mostly-Yadav” instead of Muslim-Yadav.
Owaisi is also questioning the political stature of Akhilesh Yadav. In his public meetings he tells the Muslims that Akhilesh Yadav is only the leader of Yadavs while he (Owaisi) is one of their (Muslims) own. This was the common theme in the three public meetings addressed by Owaisi in Ayodhya Sultanpur and Barabanki during his three-day visit to UP which concluded on September 9.
Owaisi is hurting the Samajwadi Party where it hurts most by harping on the share of Yadavs and Muslims in population. He asserted that if 11 per cent Yadavs could elect a chief minister, then why 19 per cent Muslims could not elect 19 MLAs of their own. Owaisi is also countering the perception that his party is helping the BJP by dividing the Muslim votes.
“If a Yadav votes for the BJP, have you ever heard Akhilesh Yadav say that Yadav is a B-team of BJP? Did any Bahujan Samaj Party leader say that a Dalit who voted for Narendra Modi is a B-team,” Owaisi asked.
The AIMIM leader questioned the non-BJP parties, especially the SP and BSP, for not talking about the consolidation of “Hindu vote” behind the BJP's victories as well as poaching of their own core Hindu communities by the BJP. “These parties are only focusing on retaining the Muslim vote and accusing AIMIM of trying to divide it,” he said.
Owaisi referred to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in which the SP and BSP contested together to state that while these parties were getting an undivided Muslim vote, they did not introspect why Hindu communities were choosing the BJP instead of them.
The AIMIM chief launched his campaign from Rudauli town of Ayodhya district .He claimed that the “secular parties” were now even scared of mentioning the Babri Masjid demolition.
Referring to the assembly result in 2017, he claimed that the Yadavs in Rudauli had voted for the BJP’s Yadav candidate and not for the SP’s Muslim candidate, who lost by a bigger margin than in 2012. He made similar claims in Sultanpur and Barabanki.
The AIMIM knows that it cannot win on Muslim vote alone, the issues raised by him with strong rhetoric’s against the silence of the main opposition parties for fear or polarisation will surely ring alarm bells for them.