Source – livemint.com
Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) has set its sights on the Bihar and Jharkhand assembly elections due next year, after winning the Kishanganj assembly seat in Bihar in the recent by-election.
The Hyderabad-based party lost Maharashtra’s Byculla and Aurangabad Central seats in the state assembly election partly because of its failure to sew a coalition with Prakash Ambedkar-led Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi. However, it won two new seats —Malegaon and Dhule City.
“Right now, we are focussed on building our organizational strength,” Adil Hassan, leader of AIMIM’s youth wing in Bihar, said over the phone. “We had 1.5 lakh members and that may go up to 5 lakh after the Kishanganj bypoll win this month, and our aim is to have 15 lakh members across Bihar by end of December. The voters in Seemanchal and other areas now have faith in Barrister (Owaisi), who has raised various issues of ours in the Parliament. Minority areas in Bihar are the most deprived for decades.”
In Maharashtra, the AIMIM contested 44 assembly seats and managed to win two, getting about 740,000 votes across the state. It was an increase from the 500,000 votes in the 2014 polls, where it contested 24 seats.
In Bihar’s Kishanganj, AIMIM’s Qamrul Hoda won with a margin of more than 10,000 votes over the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Sweety Singh. More interestingly, the Congress lost its deposit, getting just 25,825 votes, indicating a shift among Muslim voters. The seat falls under Seemanchal, one of the most backward areas in the state. If AIMIM manages to make deeper inroads, it might change the state’s political landscape, especially for the Congress, which gets a chunk of votes from Muslim voters.
Hassan did not say how many seats the AIMIM plans to contest in the Bihar state polls next year.
Another AIMIM leader based in Hyderabad, who did not want to be named, said that in the 2015 elections, the party had contested just six of the 24 seats in Seemanchal, and plans to contest more than six seats in the 2020 state polls, adding that a decision will be taken on the final tally later for both Bihar and Jharkhand. “We will be contesting in Jharkhand for the first time, and will also put up tribal candidates,” he added.
The AIMIM would have won a few more votes had its alliance with VBA (an alliance of Ambedkar’s Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh and other caste/community organizations) gone through. The VBA, which managed to get significant deposits in some of the 250-plus seats it contested like Aurangabad Central, however, did not win any seats.
The alliance between the VBA and the AIMIM broke in September, just a month before the Maharashtra assembly elections, as the former offered the AIMIM just eight out of the 288 seats. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the AIMIM had wrested the Aurangabad seat from the Shiv Sena, when the alliance between AIMIM and VBA was still intact. AIMIM’s Maharashtra head Imtiyaz Jaleel won the seat, and is the party’s only other parliamentarian apart from Owaisi.
“The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress would have won some more seats had the VBA and AIMIM not been in the fray. This very much goes much in line with what Owaisi said during the results of the 2019 general elections, that the myth of the Muslim vote bank has been broken. He said that if there is any vote bank, it is the Hindu vote bank (with the BJP),” said political analyst Palwai Raghavendra Reddy.
Reddy added that the results of the Maharashtra state polls and the Bihar bye-poll will only help Owaisi and the AIMIM expand across the country. “He will go ahead with his plans, and it is to be seen how the opposition and Congress will deal with that situation,” he opined.
