Not a Minor Player

Why Asaduddin Owaisi of MIM is India’s fastest-growing Muslim political leader

One day, Asaduddin Owaisi is at Javkheda village in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district in a show of solidarity with Dalits after three members of a Dalit family were brutally killed in October. The next day, he addresses a meeting of his two MLAs and supporters in Mumbai. The morning after, he leaves early for Hyderabad to attend another meeting of party workers. Owaisi, a Member of Parliament and president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), is a busy man nowadays, after the Maharashtra polls unexpectedly bagged him two seats in the state’s Legislative Assembly. The MIM is now being talked about as the main claimant—potentially—of Muslim votes in India. To that end, Owaisi is planning electoral forays in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. This is seen as a threat to parties that rely on Muslim support, such as the Congress and the Samajwadi Party.

Owaisi projects himself as the only leader who is serious about issues that affect Muslims. The secular parties, he argues, have only used them as a ‘vote bank’. And if the recent Maharashtra election results are anything to go by, many Muslim voters see merit in this allegation. His ascendance could imply a reduction in the Congress’ overall vote share, and the Grand Old Party’s anxiety on this count is apparent. Every day, some Congress leader or the other accuses Owaisi and his party of being in secret collusion with the BJP and RSS. “With MIM in [the] fray, secular votes will get divided and that will definitely benefit the BJP,” says Congress General Secretary Shakeel Ahmed.

Owaisi is unperturbed by such charges. “The problem is, if I am communal, I need to take a certificate from the BJP; and if I am secular, I need to take a certificate from Congress. Those who accuse me forget that I was very much with them till recently, and only when they let us down, I have moved alone,” he says. The biggest worry for the Congress party is the upcoming Delhi Assembly polls. Of the eight seats the party got in December 2013, five were won by Muslim candidates, and in areas dominated by the community. There are around 10 Assembly constituencies in Delhi where Muslims make up more than a quarter of the electorate. If the MIM fields candidates in Delhi, it might drastically alter the contest for minority votes. “The partymen believe that post Maharashtra, we can go everywhere and perform. But we are not in a hurry,” says Owaisi.

It was in the recent Maharashtra elections that Owaisi’s party made its debut in an electoral arena beyond its home turf of Hyderabad, Telangana. The party put up 24 candidates and managed to win two seats, one in Mumbai and another in Aurangabad. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The MIM finished second in three places and was third in eight. The party was proud that it got almost 1 per cent of the state’s total votes by contesting only 24 of Maharashtra’s 288 seats. “This speaks for the support we are getting from the people,” says Owaisi.

There are several factors contributing to the party’s rise on the national scene. It reflects the growing ambition of Muslims to gain direct political representation in line with their numbers. Muslims constitute around 14 per cent of the country’s population; in states like West Bengal, Kerala and Assam, they are one- fourth of the total or more. But their representation has been declining with every election. In the Lok Sabha elected by the 2004 General Election, there were 34 Muslim members. In 2009, the count went down to 30, and this year, it has fallen to 22, less than 5 per cent of the House strength. “The myth of the Muslim vote bank has been busted after the 2014 General Election,” says Owaisi. “From four states—Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra and Karnataka—which account for around 120 seats in the Lok Sabha, I am the lone Muslim MP.”

The MIM’s growing influence is also a threat to regional parties that depend on a caste-religion matrix of appeal. In Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party succeeded largely by combining Muslims and Yadavs as a vote bank. So did Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, a state where the ruling party, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal-United, preferred to break a 17-year-long alliance with the BJP (over the latter’s choice of Narendra Modi as its PM candidate) as part of a sustained effort to woo Muslim voters. The Trinamool Congress in West Bengal depends on Muslim votes as well.

Owaisi says these regional satraps are losing their halo among Muslims, who, unable to see much material progress in their situation, are getting increasingly disillusioned, identifying them with tokenism like the wearing of skullcaps or holding of iftaar parties during Ramazan. “The Muslim of today has moved beyond it. Like any other youth, they too have ambitions and want answers to several questions related to their community. We encourage them to get the answers through the democratic process,” he says.

The frequency of Hindu-Muslim riots in UP ever since the Akhilesh Yadav- led Samajwadi government took power is also making minority voters look for options. The UP regime, perhaps betraying anxiety, has not been letting Owaisi visit the state. “I was invited by local people once in Azamgarh and next in Allahabad. I was denied permission both times. I am an MP who can speak in Parliament but am not being allowed to speak in a state of this country,” he says.

Few beyond Hyderabad know that the MIM is older than many current political parties, even the BJP. It was banned in 1948 and its leader Qasim Rizvi sent to jail. Rizvi left for Pakistan after his release in 1958 and handed over the party to Abdul Wahid Owaisi, Asaduddin’s grandfather. After Abdul Wahid, his son Salahuddin Owaisi took charge of the party. He became an MLA four times and got elected to the Lok Sabha from Hyderabad in 1984. The MIM has held this seat since then. In 2004, Asaduddin replaced Salahuddin as the party’s Hyderabad candidate, and since then, he has won it thrice. Before the recent Assembly polls, the MIM was not even recognised as a regional party since it did not fulfill the requirement of getting at least 6 per cent votes. It achieved that only in June 2014, after winning seven Assembly seats in Telangana.

The party is principally run by Asaduddin and his younger brother Akbaruddin, an MLA. They are a study in contrast, though; while Asaduddin is the party’s sober face with rational arguments and facts on Muslim marginalisation at his fingertips, Akbaruddin is the poster boy for Muslim radicals who are stirred by emotive issues. The combination works to appeal to all sections of Muslims and that is also a reason for their success. Akbaruddin is known mostly for the hate speeches he has delivered over the past ten years. On 22 December 2012, for example, while addressing a rally in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh, he’d said, “Twenty- five crore Indian Muslims need only 15 minutes without the police to show 100 crore Hindus who is more powerful.” He was arrested and spent 40 days in prison before being released on bail. Akbaruddin refuses to talk about the speech. “I am concentrating more on state affairs of the party,” he says. The matter, his elder brother adds, is subjudice and best left at that. “We are as democratic as anybody else in Indian politics. We are seeking the rights of Muslims and deprived sections through their participation in democracy. You may hate us or blame us, but we are here with a politics that serves the cause of the untouched, deprived and oppressed,” says Asaduddin.

There is a limit to how far the party can go with only Muslim support, so it is trying to appeal to Dalit voters as well. Asaduddin’s visit to Ahmednagar, for example, was part of that strategy. “We are not only a Muslim party. Out of the 24 tickets we gave in Maharashtra, five were to non-Muslims,” he says. This is a formula that will be adopted when the party contests other elections. On whether MIM would join a non-BJP alliance at some point, Asaduddin Owaisi says, “That would depend upon the assurance from these parties of Muslim participation and welfare.”

The MIM’s ideology might be inherently divisive, since it uses identity as a criterion for the focus of its welfare concerns, but it is beginning to yield results for the party. The litmus test, however, will be the Delhi Assembly polls. Should the MIM make a mark, it will be yet another sign that minority electoral politics in India is being rewritten.

Asaduddin OwaisiMIMMuslim leaderpolitics